[ Lost in the Landscape ]

random updates

Update #1: The gopher chron­i­cles (Orig­i­nal post: Cook­ing for Ver­min)

It’s been three weeks since I tried to ward off gophers by using extra-hot chili pow­der. Peo­ple want to know if it works.

The con­clu­sion: There’s no sign of obvi­ous dam­age from pocket gophers in the treated area. The plants are grow­ing and bloom­ing nor­mally. That might sound like suc­cess, but there hasn’t been any gopher dam­age any­where else in the gar­den, either. So it’s incon­clu­sive at this point. But I’ll post as the sea­son goes on. I really really want this to work.

Update #2: Life post-hacking (Orig­i­nal post: I was hacked)

After I real­ized that my blog was hacked I cleaned out what looked like the prob­lem code. But two days later the Word­Press Pharma Hack was back. I did more dras­tic cleanup after that, and it looks like that took care of the problem.

Even after cleanup, because it takes days to weeks for Google to catch up and rein­dex every­thing on a site, searches for my blog showed many titles for my posts as promis­ing ways to buy var­i­ous drugs with­out pre­scrip­tion. Even as recently as Wednes­day, last week, the num­ber one blog key­word was “Pre­scrip­tion.” For a gar­den blog it’s pathetic to have that word ahead of the next four on the list: “gar­den,” “plants,” “blog” or “land­scape.” But the tide turned on Thurs­day, and the good words con­tinue to rise as the hacker words sink.

Update #3: Aloe, good-bye (Orig­i­nal post: Exotic plant, exotic pest)

It’s been almost a year since I men­tioned that my spec­i­men Aloe bar­berae (aka A. baine­sii) was in seri­ous decline. Aloe mites had attacked the plant and I was blam­ing its fate on them. The plant con­tin­ued to decline to the point that it had just a few grow­ing tips that kept get­ting smaller and smaller. Some­thing was very wrong and we cut the plant back to a stump one to two months later, leav­ing three small pups that were spring­ing from the low­est two feet of the plant.

Since then even those lit­tle pups have failed to thrive. Signs of mites have been few, so I’m begin­ning to think that some other cause is respon­si­ble for the prob­lems. Hypoth­e­sis #1 at the moment: pocket gophers eat­ing the roots. My main rea­son for think­ing this is that there’s another A. bar­berae just a few feet away that looks robust, with none of the signs of ill­ness the big plant was show­ing. I’ll keep my hope up for that plant.

In the mean­time, aloes being aloes, I fig­ured that all the lit­tle branch tips I cut off might root eas­ily. I treated all the chunks with miti­cide, stuck them in pot­ting mix and kept them just-moist. All three took.

Quite frankly I’m not sure there’s room in the front for two giant aloes I had there in the first place–placing the two orig­i­nal plants so close was a mis­take. So I gave two of the rooted plants to peo­ple in my office who were eager to grow this ter­rific plant. I still have one rooted plant, along with a half dozen more unrooted branch tips sit­ting on my green­house floor that are still green, almost a year later. I might end up with an impres­sive aloe in a pot if I can’t find a place for it. And if I root the remain­ing branch tips I could have a half-dozen more giveaways.

The orig­i­nal plant looks doomed, but pieces of the orig­i­nal clone live on. In the life and death world of gar­dens that’s almost a happy ending.

Update #4: Crest-fallen (Orig­i­nal post: Mutant Prim­rose)

In case you’re won­derng what hap­pened to the mutant Hooker’s evening prim­rose from a May 12 post­ing, it looks like the weight of the extra tis­sue on the crested grow­ing tip was more than the stem could keep aloft. Within a week of the orig­i­nal photo, the stem flopped to the ground, where it has stayed, still alive, but not thriving…

Update #5: A dif­fer­ent out­come for a crested growth (Orig­i­nal post: Defor­mity or Bio­log­i­cal Won­der?)

My last progress report is on this mutant crested growth of a Euphor­bia lam­bii. Since I posted on it in June of 2009, the plant seems to have incor­po­rated the crest into its con­tin­ued growth pat­terns, unlike on what was going on with the prim­rose above. Still, you can tell that the growth pat­tern isn’t quite what nor­mal plants go through. Still inter­est­ing, two years later…

July 15 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe bainesii • Aloe barberae • aloe mite • blogging • crested plants • Eriogonum grande var rubescens • Euphorbia lambii • Oenothera elata • pocket gophers • Wordpress Pharma Hack | 8 Comments »

exotic plant, exotic pest

I’m heart­bro­ken that one of the two big tree aloe in the front yard is under attack by aloe mites, the scourge of many aloe grow­ers. The suc­cu­lent expert at one of my local nurs­eries just shook his head when I asked for any­thing that would make the mites go away. Of course I ran to the web for advice. Dis­cus­sions splat­tered all over the charts, from guard­edly opti­mistic to “throw the thing in the trash.” I started to uncover sev­eral ref­er­ences to the syn­drome that the aloe gall mites gen­er­ate as “aloe cancer.”

The best dis­cus­sion I encoun­tered I’ve seen so far is at Xeric­World forums, where the whole range of opin­ions gets expressed by a num­ber of experts. The thread has lots of pho­tos of infected plants and of the mites them­selves. Grow­ers expressed suc­cess with insec­ti­cides (even though mites aren’t insects). Oth­ers had zero results even with ded­i­cated miti­cides. Most peo­ple rec­om­mend plant-surgery, and one per­son treated affected areas with bleach.

Sun­bird Aloes, a com­mer­cial firm in South Africa, the land of aloes, rec­om­mends a com­pletely dif­fer­ent treat­ment: formalde­hyde applied to the gall.

There’s also an infor­ma­tive page hosted by Michael J. Green hosted at the Gates Cac­tus & Suc­cu­lent Soci­ety [ here ]. The author here points out that the gall is pro­duced by the plant in reac­tion to a chem­i­cal pro­duced by the mites, a com­pound sim­i­lar to 2–4-d, one of the main ingre­di­ents in the infa­mous Viet­nam War her­bi­cide Agent Orange.

Most of the treat­ments are intended for spot treat­ments when only part of the plant is infested. But my poor plant has a major infes­ta­tion all over its main trunk, and that’s been affect­ing the growths far­ther up. It’s been in grad­ual decline for sev­eral years, but it’s going down­hill quickly. At first I thought it was gophers eat­ing the roots, or the renters next door stop­ping water­ing of their lawn and the aloe roots that extend under it. But I’ve finally fig­ured out the awful truth. Even the plant seems to real­ize its dis­tress since it’s start­ing to shoot new growths from near the base of the trunk.

I step back and try to be philo­soph­i­cal and maybe even mar­vel in my grief that such tiny, nearly microsopic crea­tures can take down such a large plant. It’s all a part of the cycle of life that we cel­e­brate with the sea­sons and the changes plants go through. Only with some­thing tree-sized I was hop­ing for some­thing that would out­live me, not a twenty-year rela­tion­ship that would end in tragedy.

If any of you have had luck with some­thing let me know! In the mean­time I’m try­ing a few treat­ments. As much as I try to avoid chem­i­cal nas­ti­ness in the gar­den, I’m des­per­ate. I’m remov­ing the galls and swab­bing the infected area with a 50% bleach solu­tion. I’ve applied the sys­temic insec­ti­cide imi­da­clo­prid at the roots, hop­ing that the insec­ti­cide won’t affect the ben­e­fi­cial bugs feed­ing on the plants nearby. Then I tried to spray just the affected plant–a big 12–16 footer–as best as I could with Bayer 3-in-1, which in addi­tion to imi­da­clo­prid con­tains the miti­cide tau-fluvalinate. I don’t know that these treat­ments will do any­thing other than relieve me of guilt that I didn’t try what I could to save the plant.

Wish me luck.

July 26 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe bainesii • Aloe barberae • aloe mite • aloes | 12 Comments »

peak february bloom

The storm was pass­ing, and the after­noon light was per­fect. The suc­cu­lents bloom­ing in the front yard never looked bet­ter. I had to get the cam­era for this one!

In bloom are Aloe arborescens (orange-red) and a cras­sula species or rel­a­tive (yel­low). To the right, not in bloom but still dra­matic, are two clones of a tree aloe (Aloe bar­berae). The low filler plant to the right is the Cal­i­for­nia native coy­ote bush (Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris pilu­laris ‘Pigeon Point’). I don’t nor­mally love the neighbor’s big pointy juniper in the back­ground, but I think it com­pletes this pic­ture nicely.

February 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe arborescens • Aloe barberae • aloes • crassula • in bloom • succulents | 6 Comments »