Australian and New Zealand Gardening: BROMELIADS IN SUMMER ..2014, 1 by splinter1804

splinter1804 wrote:
Hi everyone – Here it is about 3.00 pm Tuesday and I’ve just come in from outside as it’s 38C. with a hot westerly wind blowing which is making it quite hot and unpleasant.

I started out this morning with the good intentions of finding locations for all the plants I’ve potted up, but as usual my intentions once more got derailed. As I was moving a few plants around to make space I started pulling off a few dead leaves and ended up dead leafing almost two hundred plants.

I also went over to the seedling shade house to see what was developing there and tossed a couple of seedlings that didn’t look up to much, and from then on for the next half hour I found I was culling plants; something I should have done a long time ago. I thought, “now I’ve made a start I might as well do it properly“, and became quite ruthless. I’ve only done about a ten foot bench and already I’ve tossed about twenty large seedlings. They were only in three and four inch pots but already 15”-18” high and because they were top heavy they were all toppling over which consequently led to them growing crooked. The good news is however, I’ve found probably another dozen which are showing a bit of promise and what’s more they now have a bit of space in which to grow; the next thing however will be to re-pot them also, so they have a new lease of life.

As I was dead leafing this morning I also noticed some sort of climber growing through the top of some of the hanging pots in the corner of the shade house. On closer inspection I saw that it was coming in from next door and it was that dreaded “Moth Plant” or “Wild Choko” (One of the nine different Araujia species); I wasn’t very happy to say the least as I’ve not long got rid of it from growing in from the neighbor’s place on the other side and when I looked over the fence I could see it growing rampant all over my neighbor’s disused veggie garden and up through his orange trees.

I know it’s poisonous and classed as a banned and noxious weed and if it’s allowed to seed, it comes up all over the place, so fortunately I’ve found it before it’s fruit is ripe so my son’s coming over tomorrow to help clear it off the roof. My neighbours are a very nice couple and very friendly, but unfortunately know bloody nothing about gardening or weeds so I have to keep a watch on three yards instead on just one. If you don’t know what I’m talking about with this plant, read all about it at: http://keyserver.lucidcentral.org/weeds/data/03030800-0b07-4...

Teresa – Gee we were posting at the same time. I’ve noticed members posting very close together before but never exactly at the same time (12.53pm) I wonder what the odds are for that happening.

Unfortunately I don’t have any fruit trees but I can relate to your old dog eating the plums. My daughter once had a young staffy called “Max” and unbeknown to us he developed a taste for strawberries. After I had wrongly accused everyone in the family of pinching my strawberries, one afternoon my wife called me and said, “Have a look down the yard”; what I saw was Max right in the middle of the strawberries keeping a close watch on the house as he ate them.

It didn’t end there though; as Max got older he also developed a taste for cherry tomatoes which I found out by looking at his droppings one morning. I had always made a point of looking at our dogs droppings before burying them as my vet had once pointed out to me that you can often identify medical problems before they get too serious by looking at an animal’s droppings.

Obviously, you can see if they have been ingesting anything foreign such as eggs. (I knew about this one already as we had a dog that ate eggs when I was a boy) and we found him out by noticing bits of egg shells in his droppings. Also if the stools are black in colour, this can indicate blood somewhere in the upper bowel or stomach, (the reason for the stool being black is due to the action of the stomach acid on the blood as it passed through.

If there is bright red blood, it could indicate bleeding from the lower part of the bowel, or if the motions were loose and watery, it could indicate some sort of a bowel bug, also if they appeared to be surrounded by a slimy type of coating, this indicated some other problem, but I don’t remember exactly what this was. (Obviously if you were to examine the faeces under a microscope and knew exactly what you were looking for you could identify many other problems early also, but that’s getting into vet territory).

Anyway this particular day on my “pooper scooper rounds” I noticed these red things in Max’s droppings and on closer inspection, I found they looked like small pieces of tomato skins, and sure enough, once we started keeping an eye on him, we caught him eating a few cherry tomatoes every time he walked past the bush.

Gee there I go, side-tracked once again. I’ll try and get back on track again and talk some more about brom’s tomorrow morning.

Colleen - Well it's Wednesday morning now and what a difference; 26C. and fine rain. It's nice to get rid of the unexpected heat from yesterday but it's going to muck up my brom plans for today though.

It's good to hear that the boys are enjoying themselves on holiday with uncle John, you should be happy that you're still firmly in their minds and they're phoning to make sure you're OK. I'll bet that if you said you weren't well, they'd be onto uncle John to bring them home again to look after you as I'm sure they very much appreciate everything you do for them even though at that age it's not "cool" to put their feelings into words.

I remember as a kid when Mum and some of the other Mum's where we lived at Dunmore would go pea picking to make a few extra shillings. The farm where they picked them was adjacent to the blue metal quarry and every so often when they would be blasting out blue metal (Basalt) at the quarry, we would have to duck down behind a couple of big boulders as protection from the smaller bits of flying rocks. One of the Mum's sons worked as a shot firer at the quarry and he always sounded the warning siren much longer than normal to give us plenty of warning to take cover. Obviously that was in the good old days before Work Cover N.S.W. and Worksafe Australia.

The rabbit story reminds me of "Buggs" who was my wife's pet rabbit when she was a kid. Buggs was always eating; grass, carrots, bread, veggies, anything at all; you name it and Buggs ate it. Consequently, he just seemed to be getting fatter and fatter every time we looked at him and then one morning there were five rabbit kittens in his hutch with "him?". It was then they realised Buggs wasn't a bloke at all. He was never out of his run so one of the wild rabbits must have done his dreadful deed through the wire netting of the cage, and as they say, "love will always find a way".

Teresa - It seems we've all strayed of the brom topic today, and reading what happened to you at school was similar to myself, with the same subject as the culprit "French".

We still seem to be missing a few of the regulars who no doubt are busy getting ready for the big New Year celebrations, so I'll wish you all a Happy New Year in advance.

At least I'll finish today with something brom. related; Neo. Images taken from the web. No matter what Dave's Garden says in the copyright recognition at the top of these pictures, none of these plants or the pictures are mine. I got them off the web and there was no Copyright or photographer's name to give credit to, so hopefully I won't end the year being in trouble over copyright infringements.

First I'll start with one of Chester Skotak's newer hybrids which is most unusual as it's a combination of brilliant colour and well as being variegated it's spotted at the same time. No parents names were given and it hasn't been registered as yet so I can't provide a name, but it's very easy on the eyes. The second one (Pic.2) is the beautiful Neo. 'Golden Idol' which was bred from Neo.'Hal Ellis' x cruenta 'French form' by Sharon Petersen and registered in 1994. This picture illustrates just what you can achieve when growing these beauties beneath good light. Pic.3 is another new one from Chester Skotak and is a beautiful spotted type in a nice unusual subtle colour combination, certainly something very different . Pic.4 is Neo. 'Queen Kapulani'; this is an unregistered name so I can't provide any other information about it, but if anyone here can shed some light about it's history, please feel free to do so. I'll finish off with one that quite a few of us have in our collections. It's mini Neo. 'Shamrock', and although it's been around since 1988, it's not very often you see one flowered as well as this example.

All the best, Nev.