Emergency baobab explant

As you recall, on 21 January I set up a ten-cell "hot house" sprouting kit with four baobab seeds and some miscellaneous other stuff, and I put it on my nightstand, under the lamp, being the warmest and lightest part of the house. That's also where I keep Za 7 by day, but by night I move it to the "winter garden" section of the house (you may remember that "the house" is a 480 sq.ft. bachelor suite) so it can get more darkness, lower temperatures, and most importantly, so I don't accidentally bump it in my sleep.

Naturally, the clear plastic dome fogged over with condensation within a day or so, as it's supposed to. And as none of the seeds are fast sprouters, I wasn't planning on looking at it again for about a month. But as I was tidying up in preparation for going to bed (which my dad always tried to make me do as a kid and I didn't, and now I never go to bed without first tidying up at least a little), I thought I caught a glimpse of something green through the fogged-up dome.

Hmmmm...

I opened it up and saw:


A HUGE BAOBAB SPROUT! TRAPPED UNDER THE GREENHOUSE DOME! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Yes, I'm yelling. Because that's pretty much the sense of emergency that I got. So I rushed the whole tray to the kitchen, grabbed one of the 4" green nursery planters that I had filled with pasteurized soil back in November, and started digging a hole. Luckily it was vacant, as the seeds I had previously put in it had gotten eaten by mold or otherwise died. I was pleased to find, however, that there was no mold in the soil, nor was it dry, because I have kept on watering it at the same rate as the other four. Therefore, it was ready to receive any stray baobab that might happen to need an emergency transplant.

Just to be sure, when I lifted up the peat-free sprouting pellet, I checked the bottom, and sure enough:


The root is through the bottom already. In fact, by comparison with archive photos, I would say that this baobab sprouted yesterday, but of course the roots come out first, so this root is several days old. Whatever the case, the root is healthy and white, so it's not too late. And by the way, they're not lying about the "hot house" aspect: the pellet was very warm. Much warmer than ambient temperature, even under the lamp.

I put the pellet back down and dug frantically to make a bigger hole in the planter. I ended up scooping lots of dirt randomly onto my kitchen counter. Who cares about kitchen counters? I have a baobab emergency!!!!! Besides, it's pasteurized soil.

The baobab was re-homed within minutes of my discovery. Phew! That's one great thing about being me: I'm always good in an emergency.


Once the new baobab was safe in a planter, I turned my attention to the other sprouting pellets, most of which had mold. Mold is my arch-nemesis, but one thing I learned from Za 7 is that if the mold is only on the outside of the seed, you can wash it off and the seed is none the worse for it. So I got all the big seeds out and washed them one by one. Dodecatheon doesn't seem to have any mold, and the seeds are too small to handle anyway, so I left it to its fate. Arysaema and Piper are swallowed up in mold and done for. All the others looked fine after a rinse, though none of them are sprouting yet. Which is as it should be eight days after planting.

So there you have it. Somehow, I magically sprouted a baobab in one week flat. Mashallah!

After the fact, when all was quiet again, I checked my records to be sure, and established that this new addition to our little family is A. madagascariensis, which according to tradition, will henceforth be known as Madagascariensis 1.

Bansai!!!

(And yes, I did just stay up until nearly ten on a week night transplanting baobabs and writing long blog posts about it. I can't imagine why I don't have more friends, when I'm so fun-loving.)

What's in my planters?

Photos in this post and the next suck because I forgot my camera was set to shoot 640 x 480, so I can't crop or otherwise edit them.

In my daily obsessing over my plants, I noticed this:


A tiny, barely visible sprout. It's hardly thicker than a hair. Ok, it's actually a good deal thicker than a hair, but it's thinner than a violin E-string. It's very, very thin. You can hardly see it. And as we know by now, tiny sprouts come from tiny seeds.


On the other hand, in this psychedelic piece (I have no idea how I did the colours) you can see a huge sprout in the background, to give you a sense of proportion. That's a morning glory sprout. When you grow the same thing over and over, you get to know what's what by their sprouts. So on that theory, I looked in my photo archive for a similar sprout. The only thing I had in this planter before is pansies, but you never know what other zombies could be in there. All I can say is, this is not a pansy sprout. Besides, the pansies were hybrids, so they shouldn't be able to reseed themselves.

The other possibility is that it could be a jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema something or other). It does make quite small seeds, and I threw a few in that planter on December 6 and never heard from them again. And one thing I've learned with the baobabs and other "hard to germinate" seeds I've been dealing with lately is, seeds can take a long, long time to sprout. Which makes me wonder how many seeds that failed in my overcrowded garden would have succeeded if given time to sprout in nursery planters instead of fighting it out with fast-sprouting seeds.


This, on the other hand, does not look like any seed I've ever planted, and I rather think it's some kind of insect larva. I can't be sure, but just to be on the safe side, I removed it from the planter and flushed it down the toilet. A certain amount of insects is beneficial to plants, but they creep me out horribly and I don't want them hatching in my house. Except wasps. Wasps rock.

Anyway. Inshallah, this sprout will live long enough to be identified.

Baobab Friday

I couldn't write yesterday because the library had a "screen free" challenge to celebrate territorial Literacy Day. The idea was to go a day without using TV, computers or fancy phones. It didn't improve my literacy any, but oh well.

Anyway, here is Za 7 at 44 days:



It's 6 1/4 inches tall and 5 1/4 inches wide. At that age, Za 1 was only 1 1/4 each way, and Digitata 1 was 3" wide and 1 1/2" tall. And Za 1 never had these beautiful adult leaves. It's had 74 mm of water so far this month. It's got six adult leaves, and a few more starting up.

Just keep calm and carry on, little tree.

It's so crazy, it just might work

I may have mentioned that we have a bit of a lawn in front of the building, where every year the landlord does a bit of gardening. However, gardening is completely contrary to his personality, so it doesn't really turn out.

Hmmmmm...

There could be a synergy here, no? I could ask him to let me make a flowerbed. Then I get more room and more sunlight, and he gets a successful flowerbed. Seems like a win-win situation, right?

I'm thinking it would take quite a bit of digging. The ground must be hideously packed, plus it has grass on it, weeds, and all kinds of vileness from years of people misusing it, like urine, gasoline, and motor oil. So not only I'd have to dig it, I don't think I'd even want to reuse the soil. I'd have to fill it back in with store-bought soil and manure. Lots and lots of manure. Maybe I could get Corrections to come out and dig it for me, come to think of it. That would save me hours of back-breaking labour.

For the first year, I think I'd put asters in it. Specifically, the Duchess mix I'm coveting from Veseys. You get about 400 seeds and there are 12 colours. Assuming it's a formula mix, which I'd like to hope, you have to plant something like 73 of them to have a better than 99% chance of getting one of each colour, and 118 to have a better than 99.995% chance. If you space them 12" apart, you would then need an 8' x 8' bed. Or I could get the Matsumoto mix from Stokes, which is a formula blend of 14 colours. And aster seeds are dirt cheap and low-maintenance.

Then I could get two of those 72-cell starter trays and start 144 asters. Three seeds per cell in case some don't sprout makes 432 seeds. Perfect. I can start them April 24 and they'll be 60 days old by last frost. Though maybe they can't live 60 days in the starter trays.

Then, I'd get the three colours of nemophilas, mix them up, and spread them all around three sides of the bed, so they wouldn't be hideously overcrowded like in my window boxes. They're quick and too numerous to transplant, so I'd just direct-seed them. And then maybe some hollyhocks for the back of the bed.

Then in the fall, I could get tulip bulbs, and have a huge bed of tulips come summer 2013. I don't know anyone else in town who has a huge bed of tulips.

Hmmmmm... I think it just might work.

All plants come to those who wait

I received a spring bulb catalog from Veseys.

Again?

I already ordered spring bulbs. From the advance spring bulb catalog. I'm getting a forty-dollar peony, two types of windflowers even though they're not hardy up here, and some very fancy oriental lilies. And toad lilies. Whatever that is.

So I flipped through the spring bulb catalog, secure in the knowledge that I need nothing, because I ordered my advance bulbs. In advance. Neener neener. You can't tempt me with your free shipping offer.

And then...

on page 59...

J.P. Connell.

The rose I want above all roses. I didn't even think Veseys had roses, and of all the hundreds and hundreds of roses, they have only 12 in their catalog. And one of them is my J.P. Connell.

For months and months, I've been looking for a supplier. Many nurseries won't ship to the Northwest Territories, because they don't want to risk the plant dying in transit. Or they will ship, but at an exorbitant price. Or they will ship, but they have a bad reputation. Or they will ship, but they don't carry J.P. Connell. I was starting to think I'd have to drive down to Alberta to get some, and that's a $200 trip at least.

And now Veseys has J.P. Connell, at a reasonable price, with free shipping. No.1 size plant on its own root. And even should it die in transit, it's only $23.

BOOYA!

After that, of course, I had to go through the whole catalog again with a fine-toothed comb, in case they had something else that I always wanted and couldn't find before. (Ok, "always wanted" is an exaggeration. I've been gardening since 2009, and I've been wanting roses since late summer 2011. It's really more "things I've never heard of before but suddenly must have anyway".)

Well, they certainly have some handsome lilies. And peonies. And a... black geranium.

Baaaaaaaaaahahahaha!

As if. My blue geranium was purple. My black lilies are orange. Sure, I'll buy your black geranium. And some snake oil, and ocean-front property in Arizona. After all, I do get free shipping.

You're never bored when you have a garden.

Circular excuses

For weeks, I've been coveting a pack of peat-free sprouting pellets that I saw at the hardware store, but they cost a fortune and I had nothing to sprout. Then I got my new baobab seeds in the mail, but I had nothing in which to sprout them. Actually, I wasn't going to sprout them until March. Then I realized, if I had peat-free sprouting pellets, I'd have a good excuse to sprout baobabs; and if I have baobabs, I have a good excuse to buy peat-free sprouting pellets.

Hmmmm...

Well, it's a rather circular reasoning, but it works for me. Of course the pack I coveted was gone from the store, so I went to the other hardware store, which has more selection and better prices anyway, and there, they had those huge seed-starting trays for people who grow vegetables and genuinely need to sprout things indoors in multiples of 72. Or something. Like anyone would ever need to sprout 72 baobabs at once. Even in their natural habitat, baobabs don't sprout 72 at a time. So that's obviously no good to me.

But then, in a different aisle, where the planters are, there it was: one little tray of just ten pellets. Just one, all by itself. $4.29.

$4.29?

Booya!


See? They call these things "greenhouse kits". It's a cheap plastic tray with divots in it like an egg carton, and in each divot is a peat-free pellet. Because peat takes thousands of years to form and we're destroying the earth's peat bogs for the sake of gardening. We can't even be ecological without destroying the earth. How sad. And then there is a clear plastic dome, to create greenhouse conditions. Plastic, ecologically friendly peat-free pellets, more plastic. Er... What? Well, I suppose they'll tell me the plastic is 100% post-consumer material and is also good for the environment, or something.


You pour water on the pellets and they expand. Ten times faster than the competition, it says on the package. (I'm assuming the printed cardboard packaging is also recycled, or something, right?) Really, that's a selling point? Because someone out there seeds so fast, they can't wait an extra minute for their sprouting pellets to expand?

Anyway. I didn't have ten species I wanted to seed, so I got the following: A. suarenzis, A. digitata, A. grandidieri, A. madagascarensis, Diospyros quiloensis, Coffea canephora, Piper nigrum, Arysthaema triphyllum, and two cells of Dodecatheon clevelandii.


Voila, a baobab forest (and that other stuff) sprouting on my nightstand. Sleep tight, little seeds!

Songs about baobabs

SOUS LES BAOBABS
by Pacifique

Sous les baobabs, j'ai vu des hommes comme toi et moi.
Il y avait dans leur coeur les mêmes peines, les mêmes joies.
Ils voulaient être libres, ne plus jamais voir pleurer leurs enfants.
Sous les baobabs, j'ai vu des hommes tout simplement.

Et dans leurs sourires, j'ai deviné leurs sentiments,
Bien assez pour me dire qu'on n'était pas si différent.
S'il faut qu'on se déchire,
Je voudrais qu'on me dise
Au nom de qui au nom de quoi,
Sous les baobabs, on n'aurait pas les mêmes droits.

Il y a ceux que ça gêne, de regarder la peine,
De tendre la main à ceux qui n'ont rien.
Et ceux qui se rassurent, qui voudraient être sûrs,
Qu'il est trop tard, que nous n'y pouvons rien.
Mais il faudra bien un jour se passer de beaux discours,
S'arrêter de conquérir pour mieux comprendre,
Car nous n'avons qu'une terre pour vivre ensemble,
Tout simplement.

Sous les baobabs, on s'est parlé tout simplement,
Afin d'oublir tout les préjugés, les faux-semblants.
Si on voulait seulement se regarder,
voir les choses autrement,
Alors on pourrait être des hommes tout simplement.

Another nice thing about having your own baobab

I always get songs about baobabs stuck in my head. Which is very strange, because when you think about it, I don't actually know any songs about baobabs.

@##%^ bowling!

I don't bowl. I have no interest whatsoever in anything involving a ball and points. But my current set of coworkers are fairly avid bowlers, and one guy on their Friday night mixed league team keeps not showing up, so they insisted I sub for him. So now I'm apparently their designated sub, and I bowled the last two Fridays already, and now I have new baobab seeds. I was looking forward to turning off the phones after work and spending a quiet evening with my dog and my baobab seeds.

Unfortunately...

As I was paying for my baobab sprouting supplies at the hardware store, my boss saw my work vehicle outside, and came in to tell me So-and-So isn't bowling tonight and could I bowl for him?

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Boohoohoohoohoo...

I don't even like bowling. Not that I dislike bowling, as in knocking down pins with a ball, but I don't like spending three hours at the bowling alley waiting for the smokers on the other team to take their -ing turn. And it's not sporting when a team member brings a whole stash of magazines to entertain herself while waiting to bowl. Why don't I just bring my baobabs to bowling, then? I want to go home and plant baobabs, dagnabit! Baobabs! Don't you understand that baobabs are much more important than bowling?

To be perfectly honest, bowling did not suck. We were playing my favourite team, the one with all the young people from the electronics store. We had fun. I bowled 122 pins over my average and beat my personal best by 24 pins. I even hit two strikes in a row. Still. Baobabs. I could have been planting baobabs.

Also, I don't like going out in the evenings because I miss my dog. We're sad without each other.

And now it's too late at night to be planting baobabs. Curse you, unreliable bowlers! Curse you to heck!

Baobab Friday goes postal

I don't know what passes for exciting when you don't have a baobab in your life, but here at Casa de Baobab, when I find baobab seeds in the mail on Friday morning, it's shaping up to be an exciting weekend.


So here we have Za 7, towering over the memory of its predecessors at 4 3/4". And my new seeds, from left to right: A. madagascariensis, A. suarenzis, A. grandidieri. Booyakasha in da shizzy!

Truth be told, I'm not sure whether I'm going to start trying to sprout them right away, or wait until I get my tax refund and use it to buy a heat mat and grow light. You'd think that would be smart, but then again, Za 7 is kicking arse without any of that fancy stuff. Heat mats and grow lights are bourgeois. These are revolutionary trees. ¡Viva el Cuba libre!

Anyway. I've been giving Za 7 water in the form of 100 mL in its saucer "as needed." Which is to say, when I think it's needed, which may or may not be the case. But since it's thriving, I'm comfortable with my watering choices so far. In the first three weeks of January, it's had the equivalent of 60 mm of water. The average for Toliara is 97, 95 and 88 mm for December, January and February, respectively, so that makes sense. On the other hand, in Toliara this would go with an average temperature of 28 C (82 F), which I'm certainly not providing at home; but then again, Za 7 is sitting under an incandescent lamp and near the heat register, so it's not that cold, either. Whatever. Don't argue with success, right?


And this, obviously, is a close-up of the adult leaves. My sources tell me that leaf shape varies quite a bit among species of baobab. I hadn't noticed that with Za 1 and Digitata 1 because they died so short, but as you can see, Za 7 has a most interesting leaf shape.

When you think about it, isn't it odd that Za 1 only reached 1 1/4" in 59 days, and Digitata 1 reached 3" in 83 days, in summer, whereas Za 7 is 4 3/4" at 37 days in the middle of winter? How is this subarctic winter more suited to baobabs than summer?

Verily I tell you, life is never dull when you have a baobab.

I've been had!!!!

I haven't had much time to blog lately, on account of the non-foster child. (Explanation is on the dog blog.) But since she's currently busy with a consequence, now I can blog. So here is what was in my house when I came home from work last Friday:


What in the world according to Garp?????

It's a flower. My beautiful flesh-eating alien turned into a flower. Boohoohoohoohoo I'm so sad!!!!!! I was really looking forward to having a pet flesh-eating alien to sic on my enemies. (Christians totally have enemies. We have to forgive them; flesh-eating aliens don't.)

Not only is it a flower, it's an orange flower. What I ordered was black lilies. I don't mind getting a flesh-eating alien instead of a lily, but if it's a lily, I want the BLACK lily I paid for. Now I'm annoyed.

For the sake of argument, I'm going to blame this on the lack of daylight. Maybe the other two lilies will be black. They haven't even put out buds yet, which is fine by me. Maybe they'll make black flowers, or maybe next year they'll make black flowers. If they don't produce black flowers three years in a row, I'll give them to someone else.

I hope the black pansies turn out better than this.

Baobab Friday

Tomorrow is Za 7's one-month birthday. It's already 3 1/2 inches tall and 5 inches wide. And it would be taller if it wasn't all squiggly because of the light issue. Truly, a prince among baobabs.

Baobab Friday

No time to write. Za 7 still alive. More later.