I love houseplants. Maybe because I live in MN where we can go 6 months or more without seeing green. My house plants always add a splash of color. I have both flowering and non-flowering plants. My main interests tend to be more tropical plants that flower. Defiantly a challenge in the winter months when the winter air is so dry, but I'm always up for a good challenge. I also love if I can experiment with propagating them. At this moment my collection of plants includes African Violets, Amaryllis, a sad looking Aloe plant, a Peace Lilly, Jade Plants, Devils Ivy and a Majesty Palm tree... yes.. a palm tree. But my interests don't stop with propagating plants I already have, I have a tendency to try starting random seeds (or anything that might grow and produce something), weather or not they will grow in our area, case in point, at the moment I have 3 avocado pits sitting in water. I had sprouted one avocado pit last fall but then accidentally froze it. I have also wanted to try things like peach pits. I'm planning on
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At Christmas time I received 3 amaryllis plants, adding to my collection of house plants that were all suffering greatly from the very dry air in our house. (I'll do another post on the rest of my plants.) I knew nothing about these plants but followed the directions and planted then and boy did they grow fast. I got 3 varieties, Apple Blossom, Red Lion and Minerva The Red Lion had formed a flower sprout while in the box and it ended up drying out and dying but the leaves are huge, the apple Blossom has been slower to grow with no sign of a flower shoot and the leaves haven't looked great from the start, I'm just hoping to get that one through the summer and hope it will bloom next year. On the other hand the Minerva Grew a huge flower stalk and bloomed and was gorgeous. So I started researching the plant and learning as much as I could about it. I love growing new things so when I found out that I could pollinate the flower and grow new plants from the seeds, of course I had to try it. One big disadvantage to growing Amaryllis from seeds is it takes 2 to 3 years for them to mature enough to flower, I think a lot of people don't have that amount of patience, and surprisingly when it comes to plants, I do. So I found a small paint brush and pollinated two of the 5 flowers on my Minerva plant. I'm hoping that next year more then one of them will flower so I can cross pollinate two variates. It has now been about 3 weeks since I pollinated the flowers, the flowers have all dried up and I have two very nice seed pods developing. Now just waiting for the pods to finish developing and then let the seeds dry for a few days before planting them.
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Tri DouglasAnimal lover, flower enthusiast, nature lover, 4-H leader and Young Living Distributor. Archives
April 2019
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