Australian and New Zealand Gardening: Bromeliads for Novices and Addicts January 2012, 1 by perke_patch

perke_patch wrote:
Colleen I love the family of monkeys in your first pic.

Bree well done on the seedlings. Is this your first tray of seedlings? I couldn't resist the big black seed pods on Nev's recurvata hybrid called "peach parfait" so I harvested some and dried them out for a week or more then put them in coir peat on 12the December. We already have little green plants all over the tray. Boy aechmeas are quick. Almost as quick as the one and only billbergia seeds we put down. We have a quite rare billbergia which after flowering develops a good sized round seed pod. I decided to try to grow them. Apparently I put down 2 dishes of seed. Last week we potted up one tray as the plants were too tall to sit wtih the lid on the dish. We got 48 plants in those little 1 inch square seedling trays. Today when watering I found the 2nd tray just as big so will have to pot them up soon.

I started working through all the pups today. I had the grandson Hayden going round the yard and picking out pots with really big pups. He ended up with so many onthe ute I couldn't work properly so I had to tell him to stop. He then tried to cut pups off for me so I had to tell him to go upstairs to check on Pa for me. He got sidetracked on the computer. I managed to get a few potted and a lot removed and labelled waiting to be potted. That's a start. I like to just potter without Johnny around. Unfortunately his foot is up like a balloon today and very painful to walk on so he had a lazy day watching the cricket.

I posted a heap of pics of vriseas on fb the other night. Yesterday morning we went round taking new pics of all of them again showing how much they have grown and coloured up. I will download now and hopefully get them up on fb too.

Anyhow Jen is picking me up at 7am tomorrow to go to Olive branch sale so I better get some sleep. Ghost is almost finished so better log off and shutdown. Night all.

Pic is tillandsia capitata maron. It started out a completely red plant which then turned yellow in the middle before the yellow bit started rising up out of the middle until it was a capitata flower spike. It is yet to open any little flowers. But I love it so felt the need to share it with you all.

Wendy