Orchids: What's In Your Garden, Part 5, 1 by fredrump

fredrump wrote:
Jim,
you must be closer to the water as your garden looks quite lush after the cold wave. Your screw pine should be fine if mine can survive and grow. My tree will eventually drop all of its current growth which is brown at each frond. Looks a mess and they are falling off already. This happened once before and within a year the tree looked great again. In the meantime it's a constant process of picking up the droppings.

On the matter of cold or freezing of plants - I keep checking for signs of life on the baby trees I had put put. The tababuia is sending growth out of the tree stem itself. So that is fine. The top is dried up and dead but the new branches will form their own crown, eventually.
The poinciana shows nothing on the stem and the top is completely dried up but at ground level I see new growth. So I guess I'll be getting a poinciana bush. The same with the geiger trees. The young cassias look great and domehow ignored the cold while the bigger trees for which I paid $125 are pretty miserable but a few branches do have new growth appearing. It seems that some branches dried up while others are green but at least the trees are not dead.

The palms are a different story. About half of my 65 Christmas palms (Veitchia merrillii or Adonidia merrillii) are dead and brown to the ground. The others still have some green and may survive to grow again. The ones in the open are dead while those under the protection of the cabbage palms seem to hang on to life. We'll see what makes it in a month or two. The arecas look a mess but all of them have green at their bottom and I suspect they will send out brand new shoots pretty soon.

My pudica also look dead as doornails and have mushy tops as do many plumerias. Today I will cut the soft areas and spray the ends with a pruning solution. The baby crotons which are now just little sticks in the ground seem to be alive, at least most of them. I see little green growth buds here and there. Crotons seem to be tough survivors after shedding all their leaves.

Most of my poinsettias are just dried up sticks now. I'll trim them back and hope that new growth will appear one of these days.

My little nursery of cuttings is doing well. Don't know if they have any roots yet but many of the little sticks show growth appearing. So something is keeping them alive.

On a personal note, I'm up at 3am having finished sleeping at 1:30am. Don't know what's going on with my body but I just started taking a high blood pressure pill and had a strong cup of McDonald's latte last night. The combination almost knocked me out. I felt light headed and ready to faint. I got home, sat down and promptly fell asleep in a chair. DW says I was snoring like a pig. At 9pm I then went to bed dead tired. I had delivered 5 cases of grapefruit to a food for the hungry place earlier yesterday and my back was also killing me. So how come caffein knocks me out? Wierd. Anyway, I'm fine now and all finished sleeping. :-) Strange things are happening as you get older. I have a physical coming up and will have to discuss this caffein thing. Even two weeks ago when I had a Cuban cup of coffee and was not on any medicine, I got something like a hot flash and had to go outside and sit in some fresh air. I mean it was wierd. I guess the caffeine makes my system go into overtime and I love a good cup of coffee.

So much for babbling on in the middle of the night. Just hear an animal scream outside. Something must have caught something.

Fred

PS got a rebate check for almost $1500 from my home ins. company yesterday. It's a reward for doing all house openings with hurricane resistant glass. Of course, it'll take me 10 years to recover but in the meantime these doors are much better insulators and very secure. Here are the doors to the patio which are done now.