gejala pokok | symptomatic trees

It turned out, the drosera spatulata was infested with aphids. I don’t know when or how it happened, but it did. I also discovered a baby spatulata underneath the mother plant. I didn’t know what to do. All I know is that aphids will die and drown in water. So that’s what I did…

That’s the spatulata seedling.

This is the second time I have to this. I really don’t know how to prevent the aphids from coming near the sundews.  At least now i know how to handle them.:|

Weirdly, someone emailed this to me today….

–

Venus Fly Trap and the Bug
by StevieWonder

Hello flower
Boy, do you look juicy
And you know just what I’m coming to get, right

Don’t eat me
Please don’t eat me
I’m trapped in your love
Save me, don’t hurt me

–

There was a silent intruder on the bryophyllum pot yesterday evening.

When mukaketupat watered it in the morning, it was simply a weird, aggressively-growing pot of pure bryophyllum. When I showed it off to C5 at 4pm, it was still simple a weird, aggressively-growing pot of pure bryophyllum. When tukangkebun came over last night to check out our CPs, it was not longer so pure and simple.

What did we see? Mushrooms!

Where did it come from? How did it manage to grow so fast? Are they aliens? Will they invade all the other plants and spread their spores far and wide? Are there smurfs living in the mushrooms? Can they make magic? What will happen to the bryophyllum now?

Should we panic?(!!!)

In tribute to Louise Gluck, Pulitzer Prize winning poet who uses plants as metaphors, here’s an:

Ode to the Magic Mushroom

Suddenly and without warning you appear
into my life, like the Spice Girls;
Reluctantly I find myself humming
your tunes, seeing
your hues, admiring
your gestures;
I didn’t sow you, or carefully tend to
your needs for survival -
Yet there you are, invading my
peace, my space, my
Emotions.

Oh mushroom, you’re magic,
You almost make me frantic
with weird imagination.

The End

*ahem*

p/s: They have died today (aww…) and no other plants seem to have been invaded. I wonder what else gardening would teach me!

So, our burmanii and ‘red dragon’ venus fly trap were infested by crawling aphids. One of the safest way to deal with it, is to immerse the plant in container overfill with water for at least 24 hours.  So we filled a big pot with distilled water and immersed both the CPs. It was painful…watching them drown. :( 

Almost immediately you see the aphids floated up onto the surface. Loads and loads of them. Quite terrifying, knowing these bugs were in your precious plant. There were small ones, tiny ones and big ones. Sigh…

Here they are again….after 24 hours.

Its true what petiolaris of gardenweb said - they will look like ‘drowned rats’ for a week or so. They look so different now, from when david first gave it to us. He must be so disappointed

Here’s how it looks when we first got it two weeks ago..

Ok enough of that.

Got a pesticide to treat lipstick plant that is infested with mealybugs.

Sprayed it as soon as i got home two nights ago.

And they all bloomed today.

The past two weeks, i’ve been noticing this white waxy web on my lipstick plant. At first it was on one flower, then i started seeing more and more of it. Especially around the bell shape stem. Now it has spread and slowly killing my plant..

I think its mealybugs. It looks a lot like it…

(picture taken from wikipedia)

Yucks! Going to go shopping for pesticides today. May it survive another day.

Some advice from mutant hybrid  of gardenweb on how to get rid of the pests thats been swimming in the sphagnum moss of the venus fly trap that we got.

Posted by mutant_hybrid on Thu, May 10, 07 at 23:34

Hi mukaketupat,Yeah they could be aphids if they are tiny green fat bodied insects that hang out in the center of the plant. If they are tiny white worm like creatures with legs, they are possibly thrips. Gnat larvae also like to live in peat moss. If you are worried about them, use only pesticides that are water based, never soap based. Something with pyrethrines or neem oil extract with pyrethrines would be great. Avoid anything that says potassium salts and acids or natural oils and fats (basically fertilizer). Also never use copper based fungicide on your carnivorous plants, it will harm them. Only use neem oil or sulphur based fungicide.

The red Venus Flytrap is the Red Dragon cultivar. It is exactly the same as a regular Venus Flytrap, just one that is bred to have all red, like a dog is bred to look short and long like a weenie dog. There are many types of cultivars of Venus Flytrap. One called Big Mouth, another called Dente that is all green, and another called Piranha that has short shark like teeth. Mine shows all of the variations at once on different leaves. One trap might show a double tooth, another gets red pigment all over the outside, and another gets short shark teeth. If I wanted to, I could make my own cultivars by continually breeding the qualities I see in my plant with qualities I see in another plant until I get one that is all red or all saw toothed double teeth.

Anyway, good luck with your plants.

Sigh..I’m printing his advice and taking it with me to the hardware store today. Its a lot to remember and better to be safe than sorry.

Who would have thought obsession for plants would turn mukaketupat and myself into friendly, bordering on shameless people. After getting our venus fly trap from strange old Eneos that seems to sell every thing under the sky (including a car service centre in a mall), we got a little hooked on carnivorous plants.

Did some web search to find out more about how to care for our new baby, and found this awesome local site, PetPitcher.com.

Did some web search to find out more about how to care for our new baby, and found this awesome local site, PetPitcher.com.

I know we haven’t stopped raving about it, but it’s such a freaking cool place. Everyone’s not only really generous with info — which is a pretty fantastic nature of ‘forum-ers’ — but also with seeds, seedlings and more!

We contacted the site owner, David, to ask where we could get hold of some sundews, and in a true gesture of solidarity obsession, offered us one of his pots of D. spathulata to us. Yay!

So we called him, got directions, drove to his apartment, I saw a part of Klang Valley that I don’t usually go to, took the lift up……

Wasn’t hard to figure out which place was his. There were creepy-crawly plants greeting us immediately at the grill Pushing aside tendrils, we walked in and gasped at the beautiful, gorgeous terrariums in one corner.

picture from petpitcher website

After greedily gobbling up the sight, he showed us his storeroom that also housed another larger (maybe 6 feet?) terrarium. Whoo0 whee! So many many many many different kinds of carnivorous plants basking snugly under the glow of florescent lights. Mukaketupat brought her camera, so she snapped away. Here’s some of his little beauties.

A partial view of the terrarium

Baby venus’ fly traps in a row. The ‘mother’ is the one right at the back, second from right. Halfway through the tour, I realised that CP (carnivorous plants) enthusiasts do not speak in generics. It’s all genus and species, right down to the hybrids. So if I want to understand this world at all, I have to brush up on my Latin or Greek I think. So yes, Dionaea muscipula all in a row

When he saw us practically drooling all over his D. muscipula, he offered us one! Yippee! Now we have TWO pots of D. muscipula - one green and one red (I promise I’ll figure out the actual sub-species names soon).

Ours sitting happily on our balcony now. Though the new one seem to have some kind of bugs on it, not sure from where. Probably our dusty studio. Doesn’t seem to harm the plant though, but to be safe, getting some pesticides today. Did a whole search on aphids and spider mites from a list of stuff that might harm CPs. Not sure if it is either, but live and learn I guess

One of his Drosera brumannii (species of sundew). We said “yes, please!” when he offered a pot of baby D. brumannii to us. I feel like a greedy, out-of-control, mad woman! *blush* Can’t wait for it to grow layers and be as pretty as his. It’s already growing a fair bit since we got it a couple of nights ago. Mmmmm……… so very very cool!

This one I am SUPER excited about. It’s a byblis, also a kind of CP. Look at the sticky secretions coming out from its hairs! And all the bugs caught on their leaves. And best of all, I have seeds! Thanks to David of Petpitcher again I can’t wait to plant them and wait for germination. Have to learn more about how to cultivate these, but found an article that might help. Not sure if it needs cold stratification etc, but will print out and read. Dammit, wish we had the Savage Garden book! Must go Kinokuniya soon…

I don’t remember the name for this CP, though it might be a bladderwort (Utricularia). It lives in water, and you can’t really see it, but there are tiny traps at the end of the leaves that acts like a vacuum to suck small aquatic animals that unwittingly goes by. Sometimes it sends out shoots of pretty flowers over the surface of the water. And it’s also native to Malaysia

Okay, many species and close peering later (including with a magnifying glass), David showed us his Nepenthes collection. And geez, he’s got a LOT. Mostly hanging near the window, but he’s even got some teeny tiny super cute ones in his terrarium. I almost died.

The pictures didn’t turn out, so we can’t show you. But there are just so many different species (I hope I’m using this word correctly). One with pitchers that look like they are wearing viking helmets, some with fangs on the pitchers, and a cuddly pot of Sarracenia outside one window. Nice

We went and got some more sphagnum moss and looked for perlite - the medium that CPs apparently thrive on. Except the packet we got from Eneos (Uncle Sam from Cameron Highlands) says ‘pelite’. It looks ad feels like what perlite is supposed to be. Hope we don’t mess up by accidentally adding rat poison or something!

Anyway, YAY!

Some handy sites found:

• Carnivorous Plant Care Guide — Bugbitingplants.com
• Some info on Venus Fly Traps and other CPs — pitcherplant.com
• Coastal Carnivores
• How to sow carnivorous plants seeds
• A tutorial on Venus Fly Traps with a whole bunch of FAQs
• International Carnivorous Plants Society (!!!)

got some great advice from heathrjoy & ecrane3 on dave’s garden forum again

first, i was led to this really comprehensive page on ‘damping off‘ (which is going up on garden jargon soon). checked all the signs and symptoms, and it doesn’t look to be the issue.

then i went a little crazy on my web search, and found all kinds of stuff that could happen to sunflowers. it’s a little like reading up on medical websites; suddenly it can seem like you’ve got the symptoms for all kinds of stuff, inevitably going towards cancer. not a good thing to do, trust me. here’s a couple:

• i kisan - sunflower disease management
• sclerotinia in sunflowers
• field problems affecting sunflowers

several agricultural and crop websites later, i gave up, and just decided that i really don’t know what’s the issue.

luckily, ecrane & heathrjoy passed on some actually realistic and usable information. decided to cut back on watering, and bought some chamomile tea — which works as a natural kind of anti-fungal, as does peroxide & cinnamon — boiled a huge pot, and watered them onto the seedlings.

too soon to see if it’s working yet. so far, one of the seedlings has its leaves (cotyledons and true leaves) pretty much chomped off, but the rest seems to be hanging on.

gah….

hope it keeps up the good fight!

one of the less badly affected seedlings.

it has been hot for the past couple of days, and then a sudden short storm last night. took most of my seedlings in, but left 3 out of 4 pots of my sunflower outside. big mistake.

this morning, had a closer look at the seedlings, and i think they’ve got some kind of diseases! almost every true leaf has a blackened tip, with a yellowy patch. what’s going on? what can i do? is it a fungus? is it something else? shit shit shit.

i’m really panicking. hope someone at the gardening forums can help me. only just this morning i was feeling really good about how they survived the transplant.

now this

can’t seem to find anything on the web. maybe they’re black spots? or one of these many, many different kinds of sunflower diseases? or a list of these common houseplant problems?

really hope against hope that someone can help me!

okay… maybe i jinxed my seedlings with over-optimistic post yesterday. today, my sunflowers are flopping over, and i saw at least two of my celosia that completely keeled over. what is going on???

my sunflower seedlings

is it the cat? i caught him trying to eat the sunflowers today, and shouted at him a lot. he hid under the rug the whole day after that. maybe he hurt the stem? maybe it was me? i totally forgot that i wasn’t supposed to touch the stem cause they’re so big. i tried to readjust them, but maybe i made it worse?

help!!

they grew so fast. germinated within a day, yates ‘yellow empress’ variety. i’m really upset. i don’t want them to die. hope someone from the garden forum would be able to help me.

i had to a cluster of the statice seedlings yesterday. it’s a very sad day indeed.

basically saw a bit in the soil near cluster number 1 that was wet and was slightly depressed (physically, not emotionally), and it was kinda glistening and moving. changed the direction and took a much closer look at it, also to check for ‘true’ leaves so that i can start transplanting.

turned out the movement wasn’t water, but a whole bunch of very very fine white coloured wriggly thingy that i can only call worms in my limited vocabulary. still unwilling to kill the seedlings, left them there and did some research. no luck, but there’s this thing called ‘wire worm‘ that kills crops. so to prevent the worms from going to the other clusters, with heart weighing like a big pot of tanah, i took out a chunk of the soil with the seedlings and dumped them.

now it’s just wait and see if the other clusters are okay. if ‘true’ leaves will emerge (basically, the cotyledons are usually a twin leaf that stores nutrients in the seeds, and when they germinate, real/regular/true leaves start to grow and changes function from storage to photosynthesis). and if they can survive the transplanting, which is apparently like what surgery is to humans.

crap.

some foto2 of development:

cluster number 2 of the statice, which is the healthiest so far, and has some ‘true’ leaves coming out in between the cotyledons. this was taken on 6 april, and they haven’t changed much since.

the cluster that i had to kill

but the celasio looks good! they’re like a small little forest but i’m going to have to start ‘thinning’ them soon, which means more murder!

this whole planting thing is bad for my karma i’m sure