Jestery posted:

Best of luck my dude

I've lived tropics all my life and dealing with frost is weird and scary to me

I hope your crassula come back,I really do, it's a wonderful specimen

Professor Shark posted:

My fiance and I are moving and we would like to take a feature of our current house to our new one: a huge maple tree that we both love. I gathered ~30 seeds from the little helicopters on my lawn, but how can I store these things for the winter so that I can plant them in the Spring/ Summer and have them survive?

Professor Shark posted:

It's a Sugar Maple. We don't has access to the property yet, however we will in January. I guess I could just put them in a jar in the fridge until then?

Ok Comboomer posted:

The E. trigona rubra I got for my mom’s Christmas/birthday gift arrived yesterday and I’m struggling really hard not to amputate a branch for myself. What a stunningly gorgeous plant.

That drat Satyr posted:

Well, we finally got our first 'real' freeze here, and now my husband hates me.



It's times like this when you really realize that maybe you actually do have a problem...

Harry Potter on Ice posted:

I think the only problem is you havent built a giant fuckoff plant stand inside for when it freezes because that is a solid little collection

Nosre posted:

Anyone ID this thing? The leaves are super thick and fleshy, pretty neat. Unfortunately my store just had it as "assorted succulents' though

subpar anachronism posted:

subpar anachronism posted:

This is the first time one of my haworthia has flowered! I've only had them a few months so I'm feeling very self-satisfied.

Ok Comboomer posted:

I feel like one of those people who tries to adopt unwanted goldfish and I’m gonna end up with some hideous plant carp.

Like nobody’s gonna think “oh cool tropical plant” they’re gonna be like “why do you have these Christmas plants? Why did you invest so much in them? What is wrong with you?” Right?

Platystemon posted:

If you do something that’s a little weird, you’re a weirdo.

If you do something that’s really weird, you’re an artist.

You can’t go halfway on this. Either grow the most magnificent poinsettia display you can, or don’t bother.

Ok Comboomer posted:

In case y’all didn’t know I have a bit of a Euphorbia/Croton/Euphorbicae collecting thing going—and, naturally, the season has me noticing all these neat poinsettia varietals

On a scale of 1-10 how stupid/ill-advised am I to try to rescue a bunch of poinsettias from post-holiday liquidation? How stupid am I to try to get them to thrive and reflower? (As I understand it you keep them like a standard croton until the fall and then you have to carefully control their light environment or you don’t get the color change and flowering).

Seems like it’s more of a “poinsettias are cheap, disposable, closely associated with the holidays, and getting them to look good after a year is exponentially more trouble than that’s worth/probably requires at least a grow tent or lit closet” issue and less of an outright “poinsettias are impossible and will die on you” issue.

I feel like a big issue for me is size— croton experience (and plant experience in general) tells me that a much bigger plant is going to be a lot hardier and stand a much better chance of looking great next year, but a few 6” or 4” poinsettias at $2 a pop is a much easier pill to swallow than having a bunch of clearance 8” or 10” poinsettias kicking around all year. Will I come to hate them in the summer?

I feel like one of those people who tries to adopt unwanted goldfish and I’m gonna end up with some hideous plant carp.

Like nobody’s gonna think “oh cool tropical plant” they’re gonna be like “why do you have these Christmas plants? Why did you invest so much in them? What is wrong with you?” Right?

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

People grow them in their yard here, but they seem to change colors after christmas? It's a definite old lady plant. My great grandmother had some 6' tall.

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

People grow them in their yard here, but they seem to change colors after christmas? It's a definite old lady plant. My great grandmother had some 6' tall.

Oil of Paris posted:

It also goes without saying that I know plenty great plant pics have been posted in here by much more powerful posters than myself, so just please don’t make me search for them

Edit: I know my man wallet has got some pics to contribute +callout+

Oil of Paris posted:

It also goes without saying that I know plenty great plant pics have been posted in here by much more powerful posters than myself, so just please don’t make me search for them

Edit: I know my man wallet has got some pics to contribute +callout+

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

Since there was some zinnia chat, here's some zinnias:

The plumbago and roses behind them have gotten way out of control. There's some cool double ones in there, but I can't remember what I actually planted.

Volunteers that came up in the backyard in some compost or mulch or something:

My bottlebrush buckeye is really blooming right now too. It's got some little volunteers coming up under it so all my friends are about to get little buckeyes of their own.

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

I've never grown edible ginger, but I grow a bunch of ornamental gingers here in 8b/9a. Very easy to propogate from tubers, or sometimes they start growing baby plants on spent flowers (there is a name for this but I can't remember it). They like some shade, but otherwise are pretty bulletproof. They go bananas in August/September when everything else is too hot and tired to grow and then die back with a frost but come back every year. There a guy out in the country (where it is colder) I know who grows turmeric and ginger for a local health food store.
Gingerz:

amethystbliss posted:

Yay! I'm so happy to have found this thread. I started my first ever gardening project in the fall - a tiny 4x4 raised bed cutting garden. I just kind of dumped a bunch of flower bulbs under some soil and hoped for the best. Now I have the prettiest garden blooming with anemones and ranunculus and I'm hooked.







I have a very dumb newbie question that I can't seem to find the answer to. I live in the Bay Area (zone 10a) where the soil never freezes and the weather is pretty consistent all year round. Do I need to plant on a spring/fall schedule to plant new bulbs? Do seasons even matter somewhere with consistent climate, or can I just plant them whenever and watch everything bloom ~3 months later?

Platystemon posted:

This magnificent specimen of Quercus lobata in Mendocino County is the largest oak on the continent.

Platystemon posted:

The idea that companies will develope fungus‐resistant bananas is fiction, but not for the reason you think.

First let’s talk about banana genetics. The joke about bananas is that they haven’t had sex for ten thousand years. There is a kernel (that’s a pun) of truth to that. Edible cultivars are sterile, almost by definition.

‘Gros Michel’ could not be bred with ‘Cavendish’ to get something that’s resistant to Panama disease.

However, the forebears of edible bananas were not sterile. We can go to the wild relatives of the domestic banana, breed within each species for fungus resistance, cross two species to get a seedless hybrid, and see how it performs. We’re not modifying a known tasty variety to be resistant to fungus; we’re pulling a slot machine handle and hoping to get something that tastes good and grows well.

Sexual reproduction is great, but there is another way. Clones can diverge through mutations. This can be accelerated with the atomic gardening that gave us the ruby red grapefruit (no, really), but it happens through the centuries regardless.

At around the time the (western) Roman Empire was a going concern, someone in the area of the African Great Lakes obtained a single banana plant. In the centuries since, bananas have flourished in the region. There are now some two hundred cultivars. The majority are picked green and prepared somewhat like a potato, steamed and mashed. There are at least a dozen cultivars that are specialised for beer‐making, the banana equivalent of cider apples. Ugandans eat a quarter tonne of bananas per person per year.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sK2MStmxWM

Here is what it looks like to make banana beer the traditional way. It’s more fun.

Despite the great culinary diversity displayed by East African highland bananas (EAHB), they remain extremely close genetically. Threats to the West’s favourite snack the Cavendish get all the press, but an epidemic in East African highland bananas could be this century’s potato famine.

Scientists in Uganda are working on diversifying EAHBs by finding fertile mutants.

quote:

The highest pollination success for the EAHB cultivars was expressed by cultivar “Nakabululu” (34.3%) (Nakabululu clone set) with an average of 1.5 seeds per pollinated bunch

To be clear, a “bunch” of bananas is the entire crop of one plant, not the “hand” they’re broken into at retail. So it’s like finding a needle in a haystack even with the best candidates.



Uganda isn’t the only nation reliant on bananas. Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, China, India, Indonesia, the United States, France (in Guadeloupe), Brazil, and Honduras also have breeding programmes.

So why did I say that companies weren’t going to create fungus‐resistant bananas?

Simple: these are all national efforts.

Let’s ask the big fruit companies what they think about research and development.

David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s senior director for environmental affairs said in 2003, “We supported a breeding program for forty years, but it wasn’t able to develop an alternative to Cavendish. It was very expensive and we got nothing back.” concluding “We concentrate on research into fungicides now.”

Oh dear.

Since then, they’ve backpedaled a little.

quote:

“We never left traditional breeding,” a spokesman for Chiquita told me. “In our core markets, in America and Europe, a genetically modified banana would never be marketable. At the end of the day, we’re interested in continuing to sell bananas.” Jorge Gonzales, Dole’s senior vice-president of agricultural research, said, “Traditional breeding is getting closer. This may be a shot in the dark, but if you don’t take the shot you’ve got absolutely zero chance of hitting the target.”

Chiquita may say they “never left traditional breeding” but they did sell their program to the government of Honduras. It has since had success.

Their first public release was FHIA‐01 ‘Goldfinger’. Some people think this will be the heir to Cavendish.



There are several contenders. FHIA‐17 has ‘Gros Michel’ for a parent.

Another way forward is genetic modification. This is faster than breeding and produces more consistent results, but like the Chiquita guy said, it spooks Western consumers. There is still a way to use modern biotech in a limited way by breeding bananas the old fashioned way, then looking at their genes and seeing how they turned out in important areas. This saves a lot of time over putting seeds in the ground and waiting till they mature.

It was incredibly stupid for the big fruit companies to shutter their breeding programmes.

Ugandans cannot afford to be so precious about their food. They’re genetically modifying bananas to be a better source of vitamin A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUUpi7LHBbc

There is western‐funded opposition to GMOs, but it’s tough to argue against “not going blind”.

Here’s a trial of a fungus‐resistant strain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TvpXKplns

They are using genetic modification to protect the crop they need to survive.

The great threats to the West’s favourite fruit are, in the final sense, ignorance and greed.

Platystemon posted:

Early this year, C‐SPAM had a thread about Donkey Kong 64 and communism that, for a short time, became the banana thread.

This is the main informational post I made there.


To be clear, a “bunch” of bananas is the entire crop of one plant, not the “hand” they’re broken into at retail. So it’s like finding a needle in a haystack even with the best candidates.



Uganda isn’t the only nation reliant on bananas. Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, China, India, Indonesia, the United States, France (in Guadeloupe), Brazil, and Honduras also have breeding programmes.

So why did I say that companies weren’t going to create fungus‐resistant bananas?

Simple: these are all national efforts.

Let’s ask the big fruit companies what they think about research and development.

David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s senior director for environmental affairs said in 2003, “We supported a breeding program for forty years, but it wasn’t able to develop an alternative to Cavendish. It was very expensive and we got nothing back.” concluding “We concentrate on research into fungicides now.”

Oh dear.

Since then, they’ve backpedaled a little.


Chiquita may say they “never left traditional breeding” but they did sell their program to the government of Honduras. It has since had success.

Their first public release was FHIA‐01 ‘Goldfinger’. Some people think this will be the heir to Cavendish.



There are several contenders. FHIA‐17 has ‘Gros Michel’ for a parent.

Another way forward is genetic modification. This is faster than breeding and produces more consistent results, but like the Chiquita guy said, it spooks Western consumers. There is still a way to use modern biotech in a limited way by breeding bananas the old fashioned way, then looking at their genes and seeing how they turned out in important areas. This saves a lot of time over putting seeds in the ground and waiting till they mature.

It was incredibly stupid for the big fruit companies to shutter their breeding programmes.

Ugandans cannot afford to be so precious about their food. They’re genetically modifying bananas to be a better source of vitamin A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUUpi7LHBbc

There is western‐funded opposition to GMOs, but it’s tough to argue against “not going blind”.

Here’s a trial of a fungus‐resistant strain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TvpXKplns

They are using genetic modification to protect the crop they need to survive.

The great threats to the West’s favourite fruit are, in the final sense, ignorance and greed.

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

Punch of links/quotes:
Some gingers:

An incredible tree:

Platystemon posted:

If you do something that’s a little weird, you’re a weirdo.

If you do something that’s really weird, you’re an artist.

You can’t go halfway on this. Either grow the most magnificent poinsettia display you can, or don’t bother.