Australian and New Zealand Gardening: BROMELIADS GOING INTO WINTER 2015, 4 by splinter1804

splinter1804 wrote:
Hi everyone – What an afternoon and night yesterday; 95 -100km winds, more trees down in the area and more mess to clean up in our yard. The worst is there’s more of the same forecast for today. What crazy weather we’re having, beautiful warm and sunny one day and freezing cold winds that would blow a dog off his chain the next.

Jean – I have a question, and as you’re the “Roundup Lady”, you’re the one who can probably best answer it. I didn’t use Roundup mainly because I don’t agree with what Monsanto is doing world-wide with their GE of crops, but the product I used was Hortico which also contains Glyphosate, the same active ingredient in Roundup. I recently cut back my neighbours Lantana which was looking over my side fence, and using a small paint brush I painted the cut ends with concentrated Hortico Glyphosate based weedicide, in your experience have you tried this method of application and what success rate did it have?

I like your pictures, especially your triple Brugmansia; certainly something different. Is that one you bred yourself?

Trish – Yes it wasn’t so much that the young bloke couldn’t read running writing, it was the astonished way he said it, as though it was some rare foreign language. Both myself and a friend standing nearby couldn’t believe what we were hearing.

Just to add a bit more to that picture of the Tillandsias growing on the power lines yesterday, I once saw a picture of a similar thing (I think in Mexico) where their equivalent of our electricity provider workers were going along in a truck and spraying them with a weedicide as the weight was getting too much for the wires.

I can’t wait to see the video of the “The Lady Snake Hunter”, sounds like you interrupted the randy little buggers trying to make some babies, Ha! Ha!

You’ve posted pic’s of some nice variegated plants this morning Trish especially Neo ‘Grey Nurse’, another Skotak hybrid using Neo carolinae as the seed parent. I also like the colours in the Ae. 'Rodco Inverta', it’s a beautiful Aechmea, but unfortunately like many other Aechmeas, doesn’t like our cold winters.

They are a couple of nice clones of Neo DeRolf you have there also. I have a couple of different clones but they aren’t as nice as yours and I fear one is reverting back to a plain Neo. johannis. This isn’t surprising as it appears quite a variable plant when you view the pictures of the various clones on the FCBS Photo Index at position 863 and the pictures on the BCR at:
http://registry.bsi.org/?genus=NEOREGELIA&id=3915#3915

That’s about it for today so I’ll finish with today’s pictures which were taken a couple of years ago. Pic’s 1 and 2 are my front gardens, Pic’s 3 and 4 are Aehmeas fasciata and recurvata growing in the old Peppercorn Tree in the back yard and Pic.5 is the area leading into the Frog Pond.

All the best, Nev