which_chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
which_chick) wrote2023-09-28 08:25 am
which_chick) wrote2023-09-28 08:25 am
Entry tags:
Fall yard work
I finally cut the yard now that the rain has stopped for a day or two. Since it's getting to be fall, I also did some fall yard work.
I cleaned out the daylilies (removed dead leaves and stiltgrass and dead stems from when they flowered) and organized my recycling (which I need to get out of the yard but there's some disassembly and stuff that I need to do there before I can take it to the scrap people -- dirty storm window frames and stuff, screws and caulk need to be cleaned off, etc.) and then I...
I pruned the mock orange. It'd gotten kind of leggy and had some dead wood in it that was straggly and unattractive. It was taller than my one-story house. It is now only slightly taller than I am. Things may have gotten a bit out of hand with the pruning. Oh, well. I'll see how it gets on, but it will for darned sure be a lot tidier next year than it was this year.
I also cut the dead wood out of Ispahan, whom some of you will remember from the great rosebush migration of 2022. He's about halfway back to normal now and I expect fine things from him next spring.
I turned on the heat in the book room (where the houseplants mostly live because my cats are jerks and the book room door is kept closed so that the cats can't fuck with the houseplants) so that my orchid would not get cold now that it's... getting cold in these parts. It's 50F (10C) this morning outside with a projected high of 64F (18C) and that's not really warm enough for my orchid. Inside my house, I don't run heat for me until it's quite a bit later in the year OR quite a bit colder. Interior house temps get down to about 55F (13C) before I turn the heat on or build a fire.
The book room is set to 66F (19C) or thereabouts with an electric heater so that the orchid doesn't freeze. I will see how it goes along with this amount of heat. There are fairly tight windows and the added sunlight (does not fall directly on the orchid) should warm things up a bit during the daytime, but night temperatures in the room are 66F for now. We'll see how that goes. I do not have a fancy programmable temperature control for the heater, but perhaps I will look into one if the orchid does not seem happy going forward.
Here is my orchid, which is a phalaenopsis or Moth orchid. I am super-excited about how great the leaves look because it did NOT look this great when I got it in March.
The one yellow leaf is at the bottom of the... leaf stack? and apparently the plant just end-of-lifes some leaves sometimes. The other leaves all look good, so I am not overly worried about this just yet.
Oh, and I got a sickly orchid from my friend Lala because, well, it looked so sad on the windowsill at her house and I thought I could maybe fix it. On unpotting, it was entirely in sphagnum moss and almost all the roots in the pot were rotted AF. (I am not an orchid expert but YouTube has a lot of videos on how to repot orchids and evaluate roots but tbh even an idiot could see the diff between icky dead rotted roots and reasonably functional roots on this orchid. There were, surprisingly, about three decent in-potting-medium roots that had snaked down between the plastic pot jammed full of sphagnum and the outer terracotta pot. Those roots were not rotted.
Here's a picture before I untangled the roots from the moss...
Foliage is wrinkly, air roots are very shriveled, whole thing looks like it hasn't been drinking enough where the roots could function and where it was being watered (in the sphagnum moss) all the roots were rotted and could not do water take-up.
I have repotted it and we'll check back in on it in a few weeks to see if it dies or recovers. It's another Phalaenopsis because that's what Lala's people buy from the grocery store to give her for Mother's Day. (She had a son who died of hypothermia before he turned 21, which is why Lala's son does not much feature here. He's not around anymore except for the gaping hole in her world where he used to be. *sigh*) She doesn't especially love orchids, but they MOSTLY do not die immediately. This one... this one is doing worse than the others, I think because of the sphagnum moss potting situation.
In cleaning out the book room (some of the book room is visible around the edges of the healthy orchid) progress, I took another load of books out this morning. Four buckets and one crate. This, for those of us keeping track, is the fourth load of books out of the book room. I am Making Progress (tm). It is very hard to stay on task and select books-that-must-go without falling into the rabbithole of let me just flip through this one....
I cleaned out the daylilies (removed dead leaves and stiltgrass and dead stems from when they flowered) and organized my recycling (which I need to get out of the yard but there's some disassembly and stuff that I need to do there before I can take it to the scrap people -- dirty storm window frames and stuff, screws and caulk need to be cleaned off, etc.) and then I...
I pruned the mock orange. It'd gotten kind of leggy and had some dead wood in it that was straggly and unattractive. It was taller than my one-story house. It is now only slightly taller than I am. Things may have gotten a bit out of hand with the pruning. Oh, well. I'll see how it gets on, but it will for darned sure be a lot tidier next year than it was this year.
I also cut the dead wood out of Ispahan, whom some of you will remember from the great rosebush migration of 2022. He's about halfway back to normal now and I expect fine things from him next spring.
I turned on the heat in the book room (where the houseplants mostly live because my cats are jerks and the book room door is kept closed so that the cats can't fuck with the houseplants) so that my orchid would not get cold now that it's... getting cold in these parts. It's 50F (10C) this morning outside with a projected high of 64F (18C) and that's not really warm enough for my orchid. Inside my house, I don't run heat for me until it's quite a bit later in the year OR quite a bit colder. Interior house temps get down to about 55F (13C) before I turn the heat on or build a fire.
The book room is set to 66F (19C) or thereabouts with an electric heater so that the orchid doesn't freeze. I will see how it goes along with this amount of heat. There are fairly tight windows and the added sunlight (does not fall directly on the orchid) should warm things up a bit during the daytime, but night temperatures in the room are 66F for now. We'll see how that goes. I do not have a fancy programmable temperature control for the heater, but perhaps I will look into one if the orchid does not seem happy going forward.
Here is my orchid, which is a phalaenopsis or Moth orchid. I am super-excited about how great the leaves look because it did NOT look this great when I got it in March.
The one yellow leaf is at the bottom of the... leaf stack? and apparently the plant just end-of-lifes some leaves sometimes. The other leaves all look good, so I am not overly worried about this just yet.
Oh, and I got a sickly orchid from my friend Lala because, well, it looked so sad on the windowsill at her house and I thought I could maybe fix it. On unpotting, it was entirely in sphagnum moss and almost all the roots in the pot were rotted AF. (I am not an orchid expert but YouTube has a lot of videos on how to repot orchids and evaluate roots but tbh even an idiot could see the diff between icky dead rotted roots and reasonably functional roots on this orchid. There were, surprisingly, about three decent in-potting-medium roots that had snaked down between the plastic pot jammed full of sphagnum and the outer terracotta pot. Those roots were not rotted.
Here's a picture before I untangled the roots from the moss...
Foliage is wrinkly, air roots are very shriveled, whole thing looks like it hasn't been drinking enough where the roots could function and where it was being watered (in the sphagnum moss) all the roots were rotted and could not do water take-up.
I have repotted it and we'll check back in on it in a few weeks to see if it dies or recovers. It's another Phalaenopsis because that's what Lala's people buy from the grocery store to give her for Mother's Day. (She had a son who died of hypothermia before he turned 21, which is why Lala's son does not much feature here. He's not around anymore except for the gaping hole in her world where he used to be. *sigh*) She doesn't especially love orchids, but they MOSTLY do not die immediately. This one... this one is doing worse than the others, I think because of the sphagnum moss potting situation.
In cleaning out the book room (some of the book room is visible around the edges of the healthy orchid) progress, I took another load of books out this morning. Four buckets and one crate. This, for those of us keeping track, is the fourth load of books out of the book room. I am Making Progress (tm). It is very hard to stay on task and select books-that-must-go without falling into the rabbithole of let me just flip through this one....