How Goes the Greenhouse?

I promised I'd let you know how things go in the greenhouse, as it recovers ever so slowly from the devastation of the November 23, 2013 freeze. This photo's pretty symbolic. In the foreground, a budding Christmas cactus. I bought it in bloom in December, when I desperately needed flowers. It obligingly dropped them all, and all its buds. Oh, thank you. But then after sulking for a couple of months, it made  more buds, and these have carried through beautifully. Flowers.

 In the middle, a little rose-pink Abutilon I ordered from Logee's that makes me very happy. And in the rear, the huge vigorous leaves of a theater-curtain red geranium that was killed to the soil by the freeze, but somehow sent up a shoot. Yep, this photo says a lot about what's gone on in the greenhouse since the event I refer to as the Apocalypse.

Pulling back a bit, here they are in context. And there's the scarlet tanager-red stellar geranium that I was sure I'd lost to the freeze. It came back. The blue lobelias volunteered from seed, after the freeze, in the pot of what was once my huge tangerine orange hibiscus. Now represented by one shoot, on the right margin of this photo. But that shoot has some tiny buds on it.

Fireworks!! Color and life and beauty, once again. So hard-won, so longed-for.

The gardenia my sweet reader "Diana" sent, blooming in ones and twos, perfuming the whole place. We've been fighting red spider mite, and we're winning. The top bud opened today. Sooo intoxicating.

As is my dear Jasminum sambac, "Maid of Orleans," who lived through the freeze, sprouting from dead-looking sticks. Ahhhhhh. She's far better than before.

Chetty takes it all in, sniffing the perfumed air. He likes to help me clean the place, sweeping and scrubbing, and rearrange the plants.

I can't believe that this tiny Ruby Red grapefruit tree is doing what it's doing. Because it set too many (about a dozen), it aborted a handful of fruits,  but the four that stayed on are growing by leaps and bounds. Wow!! I imagine it laden with full-sized grapefruit and smile.  And it burst into bloom again, and made some new leaves! I think it likes me. It smells so sweet. I love this tree!

The big lumpy 25-year-old Mammilaria, perking along. I love this hardy old plant, too. 21 degrees ain't nothing to him. Been there, done that. The desert is a tough place. Your greenhouse is a walk in the park, freezes and all.

I was gone for 12 days and this marvelous flame-crested creature, here listening to a favorite tune from "Mulan" on her Macbook Air while she soaks up the sun, watered all my plants and twiddled the heater dials as conditions required. Not only that, but she enlisted sweet Liam to help her bring every last one of them inside before the temperatures dipped below zero again. "I was sick of worrying about what might happen if the gas went off or I couldn't keep them warm enough. So we brought them all inside." 

You can't buy or even wish for kids like that. You have to make them, raise them so they love all the same things you do. It's partly luck, partly magic, all miracle. We're blessed. 

The seedlings thrived under her care: tomatoes, tomatillos, cucamelons, peppers, and Swiss chard.

The tomatillos burst into bloom!! Well, who wouldn't, with Phoebe loving on you?

The greenhouse is back. And I feel each bud bursting into bloom inside me. The sun's heat races through my veins. 

Come on, Spring. Do it. 

Signs of Life

Monday morning, after receiving sweet encouragement from friends, I snapped out of my stupor and called a local greenhouse (Scot's, in Vienna, WV) and asked if they had any tropicals. Anything with color or fragrance. Jo said she'd check. She called me back later in the day and said they had some hibiscus, a red mandevilla and what looked like jasmine. My heart leapt. This place had always had jasmines before. I need jasmines. I told Jo she'd know me when I came in: the woman with the puffy eyes.

 I went down that afternoon, stopping at Angel's Greenhouse on the way, where I saw a LOT of poinsettias.

Which helped, even though poinsettias have never been amongst my favorite plants. I guess it's the mass market approach that turns me off. That, and the milky sap, the floppy leaves, the fact that those are colorful bracts and not flowers. The way people just throw them out when Christmas is over. Uffda. None of that appeals to me. I build relationships with plants. Disposable plants: not what I'm about.

 I should give them another chance. He sure grows some beautiful plants.

I got to Scot's right before they closed and there were some pretty sorry-looking plants there; a big sad frowsy double pink hibiscus ( no thanks. I lack both the charity and the space); a frostbitten red mandevilla vine that would just be a giant bugfarm for me, and some unlabeled viney shrubs that had to be jasmines. Jasminum sambac! a good thing, because mine apparently died in the frost. This one wasn't much, having been exposed to cold and drought, but it was definitely alive. And it was $4.50. I trimmed it up and installed it.

 I found an unlabeled J. nitidum, or Royal Jasmine, which I've never grown but which I was able to recognize as a jasmine by its growth habit. It showed signs of having tried to bloom, and been nipped by cold. Let's give it a whirl. I placed it in the bony arms of my Nightblooming Jessamine Cestrum nocturnum, where it would conceal them until green shoots began to show. If they do.

My Jasminum officinale, which was four feet tall and curling over on the ceiling of the greenhouse, has a single live shoot coming out of its frost-blasted base. Yes, it does. So I may have three kinds of jasmine blooming someday.

I was flabbergasted to find a small tropical bonsai of Ficus salicifolia (Wonderboom or Willow-leaved Fig, native to KwaZulu Natal), which will serve as a lovely understudy for my almost certainly dead old bonsai specimen. Sigh. When I cut it back, the leaves were black, and no white sap flowed. Not good.

The baby: Five bucks, sold to the lady with puffy eyes.

I should add here that my beloved temperate bonsais (the maples and cypresses) are FINE, having been stowed away in their pit for the winter awhile ago. So are the orchids. They live in the bedroom.

 There is one living leaf on my once-glorious orange hibiscus. That's it, right at soil level. That tells me something's still going on inside. Woody-stemmed plants tend to survive freezing pretty well. So let's wait on any donations of hibiscus. This single orange is the hibiscus I want, and if I have to wait a year for it to bloom again, well, I'm waiting anyway. I want her back. She's the one.

My attempts to grow citrus have in the past been plagued by armies of scale insects. I initially turned up my nose at this tiny Ruby Red grapefruit tree. And then I looked at the flower buds clustered, and I remembered standing in an orange grove in Vero Beach when I was about 11, inhaling that heady perfume, and seeing my first swallow-tailed kite float over, and I tucked the pot under my arm. Does it get much better than breathing citrus flower perfume and suddenly seeing a bird you thought would always be only a picture in a book?  Five bucks. I bought it for the memories, and as much for its highly optimistic label as for its flowers. I mean, there's a recipe for tilapia with grapefruit sauce right on the label. Oh, bring on that harvest of Ohio-grown ruby red grapefruit! I'll be picking next week, I'm sure.

Reality check: I'll be happy if the flowers just open. I'll be REALLY happy if the flowers open. Oh, how I miss my fragrances. Don't even need a swallow-tailed kite. Just scent.

  It was as if it was meant to be, these last survivors hanging on, marked down to 50% off and losing leaves daily, waiting for a bereft Horticulture Chimp to come in and gather them in her long hairy arms and take them to a much better place. Thankful.

When I got home with my little haul of rescued hopefuls, there was a bunch of poinsettias in the middle of the kitchen floor. Re-enter my barely-suppressed contempt for poinsettias. But when your daughter fixes her baby blues on you and asks if you'd like to support whatever it is they're hawking poinsettias for, you swallow hard and cheerfully order five.

And much as I inwardly recoil at putting big floppy red poinsettias in my snobby little plant paradise, they help. They help considerably.

It's not beautiful yet, but it's definitely better.

Thank you to everyone who has offered support, helpful suggestions, and condolences. It is ridiculous that I did not have a temperature alarm installed in this greenhouse, small and commercially worthless as it is. Fixing that now.  A special thanks to Tim, Timmeh, Weezy, Charles, Shila and Donna for Post-Greenhouse-Apocalypse Help that Helps. I am deeply thankful for my friends who swoop in when things get gnarly.

I have located a little hole in the outside wall where our Internet cable comes into the house. It is our portal to the big wide wonderful world of Google and katydid coprophagy videos. To this small hole, you owe everything that appears on this blog. Through that little hole in the wall I'm going to thread a long cord connected to the phone jack in the downstairs bedroom. That phone cord will run into the greenhouse, and there I will plug it into a THP201 Freeze Temperature Alarm.

The next time the gas freezes in the line, and you know it will, the THP20l will DIAL OUR PHONE and tell us to get a robe on and start the backup electric heater, which is sitting there now on Frost Alert setting. 

And no more jasmines will die.

This is how we learn. One can only be thankful.