Australian and New Zealand Gardening: BROMELIADS FOR NOVICES & ADDICTS MARCH 2012, 4 by splinter1804

splinter1804 wrote:
Good morning everyone,

A nice sunny day again yesterday but this morning you would think it’s the middle of winter with a freezing cold South West wind blowing just to make everything unpleasant and make the old bones ache.

Shirley – I don’t think it matters much to Telstra where you live, they still continue to do “band aid jobs” to overcome problems without looking at and fixing the main cause. We don’t live in a rural area, we live right in town, and out the front of our place is a telephone in-ground junction box. You know the oval shaped things that are in the ground with the lid level with the top of the soil. (Incidentally these were all still the old ones which were made from moulded fibro asbestos and have been there for years)

We had the same problem, every time it rained, water leaked into the box and the phones went out. Telstra would come the next day and dry it out and all would be OK until it rained again and the same thing happened all over again. Fortunately one time when a young technician came to fix it and I was talking to him I pointed out a crack in the corner where the water came in (which I had showed to many technicians in the past) As well as drying the box out he sealed it up with silicon which he said would hopefully fix the problem. When I asked him why not just put in a new box, he said as far as Telstra was concerned that was an absolute last possibility as it involved about three different gangs of workers not just a line technician. Fortunately the silicon has done the job and we haven’t had any problems for five years now.

Karen – Sorry I can’t help you with an ID on the first one, and I can definitely say the plants in Pic 4 definitely aren’t Neo Barbarian. The do however look like they may one of the many Lambert’s Pride hybrids, it’s very hard to say as there are so many unnamed hybrids around now that all look alike.

Breeindy – That’s a wonderful example of just how much influence light can have on the colours of coloured leaf brom’s and I would like also to point out that this is why it’s so very difficult to ID a plant from a single picture.

I would never buy a plant from just a single picture unless I know the grower and am familiar with all the variations different light intensities can create in that plant, and if possible get two pic’s, one grown in good light and one in poor light if that’s at all possible.

Wendy – As for your comment about Bill. Muriel Waterman, it’s not a very large grower, about a foot high but not as narrow as most Bill’s similar in habit to those Bill Pyramidalis hybrids I posted pic’s of.

Re. Our swap, that was the box you sent with the two little Orthophytum ‘vagans’ and the two little Ananas ‘Rubra’ pups, but I don’t remember what the other were. I will have it here somewhere on my desk, but the only trick is where to look for it as my desk look s like the victim of an atom bomb attack at present.

Well that’s about it for this morning (Oh I forgot to tell you all that Tash posted on Face Book to say her phone’s finally fixed, so hopefully we’ll her from her again soon)

Something a bit different in the pic’s today two lots of pic's in the form of a quiz..

Pic 1,2,and 3 - A friend of mine was telling me about this strange "creature" she found swimming in the cup of her Neo Rosy Morn. She said it wriggled as it moved through the water and looked like a large "maggot" with a tail. She managed to catch it and put it into a container so she could photograph it (and I'm attaching the pic's below - There is also one pic of it while in the Rosy Morn cup as well but it's not easy to make out, but if you look carefully you can just see the shape in about the middle of the pic (the white thing with the tail disappearing into the flowers)

She said she has seen them before but never photographed them. She put it back in the plant after taking the pic's and after a couple of days it had vanished.

I'm sorry about the small size of the pic's, but that's how they were sent to me and I don't know how to enlarge them. Has anyone here seen them or can identify them please?

Pic's 3 and 4 - These are of a brom I've never seen before. What's unusual is that this brom has five flower spikes all from a single plant. Does anyone know what its name is?

I know the name by I "ain't" saying for a couple of days when everyone's had a chance to answer.


All the best, Nev.