The House Plants Thread

Mrs. Gravy said:

AngryGerbil I have been considering purchasing beneficial nematodes to help control various more pesky insects and worms. Do you have any experience with those?
In other yay lucky me news - I have a couple of lovely praying mantis hanging around my front gardens and I didn't have to buy them!

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I have not but looking at this

Beneficial nematodes - Biological Pest Control for eliminating grubs and Japanese beetles.

they seem to work the same as the mites in principal. You buy a container of them, apply them immediately, and then wait for them to eat baddies. It's worth a shot! Sounds like they don't mention pots at all. I suspect these are only worthwhile in an actual garden or lawn and not in any potted gardens.

It says to apply them in cool morning or evening temps as UV light can kill them, and to apply them into already moistened soil and then to water them in and keep the soil moist for several weeks thereafter. It says to avoid soaking too much and to just aim for moist or wet. So it's a lot like watering in a new baby lawn, light but frequent watering. Then it says to apply them every 2-3 weeks thereafter until the infestation is gone.

I doubt I can use these in my pots but in my lawn they might be nice to have around. Although they conflict with 2,4-D, it doesn't say anything about dicamba, which is what I use for weed control.

If you try them you should definitely tell us how they worked out!

Mrs. Gravy said:

AngryGerbil ...I was not familiar with dicamba so I researched it. Missouri lawmakers banned the sale of it in July 2017!

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Wow you're right.

Legality
Arkansas and Missouri banned the sale and use of dicamba in July 2017 in response to complaints of crop damage due to drift.[21] Monsanto responded by arguing that not all instances of crop damage had been investigated and a ban was premature.[22]

Banned just 4 months ago! So that means the stuff I have in my shed is all there is left to have, unless I drive over to Illinois.

That usually works the other way around. Usually it is Illinois handing out top-down edicts while Missourians tend to enjoy that sweet sweet libertarian freedom. But I suppose you can't win 'em all.

Maybe I'll try to adjust and try to find some pure 2,4-D and see how that works on my lawn.

In any case it seems that mixing any herbicide with nematodes is a bad idea. It looks like you must choose to do one or the other, and can not do both.

The goal was to capture the Elm in the essence of all four seasons. Fall may be the hardest because the Elm is not all going yellow and the dropping its leaves all at one. It is instead shedding itself in stages. This means that although a lot of Elm leaves have already fallen, when you look up at the thing, it is still mostly green.

This is the first of my fall pics of my Elm.



I hope I can capture it in true 'autumn' style in the coming weeks.

More pics of the potted garden on the front porch. The Sunflower died to some sort of brown leaf rot. I suspect some fungus but I'm not sure. I do not think it was bugs.

Spider plant draping itself over a Purple Passion Vine. Both have done well this year.



There are two plants in the blue vase. One is the Dahlia that I thought was going to die young. It did not die young. Instead it has become one of the best pots I have. The Dahlia is blooming like mad, and it shares that pot with a Zinnia (which I planted on the advice of Mr. Bungle) that has green flowers which can be seen just beneath the Elephant Ear pot on the lower right.



The Elephant Ear itself. This guy took a while to show up, but he is very happy in that pot with many large leaves and I have not fertilized it much on good (Mr. B) advice. It seems to not want much fert and is doing okay on minimal nutrients but a lot of water. One big leaf is dying-off to the left, but this was once on the right and had (I think) contacted whatever brown-rot the Sunflower had... so I cut it off and let the stem die off naturally, which is what you see. Those are some store-bought fall Mums on the right, just to replace the space and color of our lost Sunflower.



Three plants in one. The Caladiums are in the distance, the Dragon Tree is in the mid, and that is the second Dahlia in the foreground. That one is curious compared tot he other one. It is in a much smaller pot, but it shot out and grew MUCH faster than did the other one in the second pic. This one not only grew much faster than the other one, but it grew two main stems instead of just one.



That Dahlia shot out of that pot, but I think ultimately that pot was too small and the other slower-growing but the bigger pot is now producing the healthier plant on the other end.

Finally the Hibiscus Tree:



This is the fullest and greenest and happiest it has looked in thee years. Pruning, fert, and water go a long way.

Had to grab a picture of this dahlia. It has been weak all year but is finally looking strong. The weather is definitely turning so I doubt it'll last long, but it's cool looking for now.



Everyone in the world has mums right now and they all look full and flush and spectacular. Mine look like this:



I am the only person with dead mums in my entire city.

Mrs. Gravy said:

Are any of you utilizing this: Pl@ntNet

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I'm definitely going to try this out. I've imagined Star Trek style tricorders that you could point at a plant and it would identify it instantly and pull up all sorts of info about care, edibility, even the evolutionary history of it. I doubt this site is anywhere near that robust but if it's even half as much then it'll be worth it. Have you used it? How reliable is it?

Here's the final seasonal photo of the massive Elm.

They aren't houseplants, and I would be spamming, but I have a desire to photodump all the images I got from my jungle walk in Costa Rica. They have some neat plants there.

The oddest thing was that I saw literally only one needle or pine tree the whole time I was down there. It was growing out of the side of a rocky road-cut. But that was the one single conifer tree I saw in the entire country! I wish I would have gotten a picture of it just because it was so oddly out of place. It's like this one house around here that has a giant palm tree in the front yard. To keep it through the winter, the guy literally constructs an entire enclosed sort of greenhouse just for this one tree, and he has to do it every year. But the result is a full sized palm tree, planted in the ground, in the middle of Missouri!