Correlation/Update

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/01/17/report-climate-change-causes-plants-to-flower-historically-early
So it's not just here....

Pensive Tuesday: The Arctic is Messing With My Lithops

And it's partly my fault....You see, we're having the strangest winter here. It's about 10C warmer than it usually is, and should be, in January. We're getting plenty of fog and a little rain, and it's supposedly the "dry season". Our wet season is summer, when it's hot hot hot. Our dry season is winter, when it's cool and arid. That's the subtropics. That WAS the subtropics.  As we force-feed warming gases to our atmosphere, we start meltin' things. Right now, we're melting the Arctic most of all. I've been up there, and I can tell you, it's getting weird up there.

Arctic Hare, Feeling Weird (MR 2011)

Bizarre, contorted loops in the jet stream are to blame for the unreasonable cold in parts of the world that should be warmer, and the summery warmth here. The Wunderblog has a post on it today:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html
Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in the US thinks that the melting Arctic fuels these bizarre jet stream loops. As they get warmer at the North Pole, we get loopier down here.... So I'm running on the beach without a jacket in January....

And flowers that shouldn't even be in bud yet are nearly finished for the spring!

My Lithops really don't know what to think, and are going dormant, blooming, and showing their new leaf pairs, all at once. Awkward. Even the incredibly tough and resilient Mother of Millions is blooming early.

What a mess! Are the plants in your part of the world a bit out of sync, also??

Blooms, Offsets, Sunsets

We're having beautiful weather. Too beautiful, really. It's much more like the end of spring, sunny, hot and humid, than the middle of winter. My cacti should be entirely dormant now, and using cold nights to grow next years flower buds.

They are...confused.

Mammillaria hahniana

Another Mammilaria

 And yet another Mammillaria is not blooming, but ofsetting like crazy....

Of course, the flowers are beautiful, but this is unsettling to say the least. I feel a Pensive Tuesday post coming on...but for now, just a beautiful sunset over the river for a lovely weekend.

Soap, Pots, and Baby Lithops

I've been feeling a little better, so I'm using my minimal energy to make a few things, and tend some seedlings. I just received some beautiful Italian Lemon essential oil (from Italy), and some exceptionally fragrant lavender eo from a farm in Oregon. I combined them with my honey soap and made some aliens, as we were running low (on both aliens and soap):

Lemon Lavendar Aliens, squeaky clean.

And it was time to make the first PetraPots of 2013. More Tillies mean more pots.... I didn't let these drying greenware pots stand out in the rain, fortunately!

They and a few others are heading for the kiln today.  And of course, I wanted to water the Lithops seedlings; most have their first adult leaf pairs now. Each one is different!

You can see 4 very different types in the closeup. Doesn't mean they are different species of course (the seed packet was simply labeled Lithops), but time will tell. They are each quite attractive.

It's certainly nice to be up and about a bit once more. Lying around coughing was getting plain boring.

Pensive Tuesday: Calling In Sick

These past few weeks have been a real learning opportunity. What am I learning about? Influenza B! We're having a true epidemic here. I haven't been this sick for about 5 years. Yuck. And once the flu is over, there's this 2-week long thing called "Post Influenza Fatigue and Malaise".

I am fatigued and malaised.... I need to take more medicine.

Since my brain is operating on the level of a beached jellyfish, I only have practical, immediate thoughts for Pensive Tuesday. Like...who's going to take care of my 100+ plants until I can get out of bed?

Do you have a plantsitter? Do you have several?

3 Men and a Bunch of Lithops??? I called Tom Selleck, but he was sadly unavailable....

I really do need to get a couple of people trained to take care of these unusual plants. I make candy, so I will bribe them with it.

Mind you, Lithops and other mesembs, and Tillies, can do a Cam Idle and be left pretty much to themselves for at least a week or two. But sometimes, we get called away for longer periods. I really do need to train a couple of plantsitters.... What do you do for plant-sitting?

Marlothistella: A Tufted Mesemb

A tufted mesemb, what does that mean? Well, if you are tufty, you have fingered leaves, usually textured and packed together. Your stems are short, and of course, your leaves are succulent. In the case of Marlothistella, the tufts multiply exponentially!

This is a fast-growing mesemb that can cover large sections of ground. It can handle a lot of variation in the environment, so I think it would work well outdoors, in a rock garden, or anchoring your fragile hillsides for future generations.

Marlothistella uniondalensis, MR 2012

The tufty Marlos are named after the augustly named apothecary and botanist Dr. Hermann Wilhelm Rudolf Marloth (but they just called him "Hermy"), who lived from 1855 to 1931. It grows in only a tiny portion of the Little Karoo of Western Cape Province, South Africa. It likes quartz flats. And sunny spots. And acid soil. When it gets more water, like mine does, the leaves grow more horizontally. During periods of less water, the leaves grow more vertically. They are spotted and slightly fuzzy. I water mine once a week.

New Year's Gardening Resolutions

In The Garden, MR, 2010

For 2013, I've come up with the following resolutions for my gardening (habit) hobby. I'm trying to keep it simple and paint with broad brushstrokes....

1. Concentrate on learning more about the plants I already keep, rather than racing off to find new specimens like I did in 2012!
2. Learn more about botany. Review the basics, and hopefully, take a university-level class.
3. Practice botanical drawing and painting. Try both abstracts, and realistic depictions.

That will do for a year, I think! What are your gardening resolutions for 2013?