State of the plants, or how not to care for your vines.

Right now I have three living plants in my possession. That is the least amount of plants I’ve had in my entire adult life. I feel quite sad about that, but I’m sure I will make up for it once we get settled into our new place and I have a handle on the lighting situation.

In the meantime, I’m trying to give my remaining plants a little extra TLC. The only outdoor  plant I have left from when we first moved in here two years ago is my pink plant. She went through some rough times this winter and was quite neglected. Amazingly she’s bounced right back to the point that we call her the Resurrection Plant.

My peace lily is the one I’ve had the longest- well over 10 years. She is going through a transitional time right now so she looks lopsided and a little sad. But there is a whole lot of new growth popping up, so in a couple of months she should be back to normal. And hopefully producing blooms again.

And yes, she lives on my shoe rack. Lilies are very toxic to cats. Miss Kitty has never shown any interest in chewing my plants, but I keep this one barricaded on all sides in case she gets the munchies. It’s not super aesthetically pleasing, but it gives me peace of mind.

Now for the saddest plant of all, my poor vine. I took her off the bookshelf this week to give her a trim and this is what I found.

A hot mess of dead brown vines twisted around the pot. At our last place, she had a whole staircase to climb, but we live on one floor here. When we moved in I twisted all the vines around and set her on a bookshelf. Then I did absolutely no maintenance other than watering. Clearly that was a bad idea.

I started carefully untwisting everything and separating the dead bits from the healthy bits. Then I cut away all the brown vines. Weirdly many of them still had a few green leaves clinging to life at the ends.

After a quick google search, I realized I needed to do more trimming. I made cuts to the longer vines and stuck some of them back in the dirt. Hopefully they’ll take root. I took a couple more cuttings and put them in water to see if they’ll root that way.

My vines look so much happier now! And I have a much better understanding of what they need to stay that way.

Here are a couple of the sources I used to figure out how to fix things.

How to Prune an Indoor Vine from eHow
How to Prune an Indoor Vine from SFGate
Pruning Houseplants from Green Connection

As for future planty plans, I’m really looking forward to our move when I can start collecting  green things again. Basically I want All The Plants. Our new place is supposed to have great plant shelves built in. I can’t wait to fill them up. And of course our balcony will be over-run with whatever I can manage to get growing outside. I’m a little giddy just thinking about it. Crazy Plant Lady Lives!

New camera!!!!

I am now the proud co-owner of a Nikon 3100!!!

I’m super excited to get some better pictures. I’ve been wanting a DSLR pretty much since I started scrapbooking in 2009. When we went to St. Augustine with my FIL, Jason fell in love with his dad’s Nikon. So of course all of a sudden we totally needed one too.

Costco is having a great deal on the 3100 package this month, so if anyone is in need of a camera, go check it out. It came with two lenses, a case, and a couple of instructional DVD’s. We also got a tripod. We’re now working on a pretty extensive wish list of accessories and lenses. If anyone has a recommendation for a remote, we’d love to hear it.

I haven’t gotten to play around with it a ton, but Jason has taken some fantastic pictures. And hopefully this will help me be less discouraged with blogging my recipes.

So far we’ve taken photos of ducks.

And trees.

The faster shutter speed is soooo nice for catching birds in flight.

We tried to shoot the full moon with mixed results.

Jason got some cool photos of our balcony garden.

And this guy.

And of course we have to take pictures of every meal we eat. Cause that’s how we roll….

I’m excited to learn more about photography. But weirdly I still use instagram for so many more of my pictures. Whatever works 🙂

Also Jason is getting back to his blog. Check it out here.

Tropical Storm Isaac

All last week we kept an eye on the weather. We thought we probably wouldn’t be in the direct line of fire, but we knew we would get some bad weather. I was getting used to bad weather. We had been having lightning storms almost every day that week.

We wanted to be prepared for the worst, so we spent Saturday getting ready. Jason found extra candles and flashlights. I checked the supplies we had on hand and made a list. I double checked a few Hurricane Preparedness sites, especially how long food is safe to eat after the power goes out.

We went to the store for our regular Saturday shop and to get a few extra gallons of water. It was packed, because of course everyone was losing their everlovin’ minds. We got the essentials- water, cat food, beer, and Fritos. We got home and settled in to watch the second season of Sherlock.

Jason called to check on our friends Antoine and Heidi. Heidi’s dad passed away last week and we wanted to make sure they were ready for the storm. They hadn’t been shopping, so he said we’d pick up some water and stuff and bring it to them. We had a nice evening talking, watching TV, and playing video games. It was a nice distraction from worrying.

The next morning we watched the Weather Channel and ate a lot of junk food. It started raining heavily and we went out to take pictures.

Jason moved all the plants into a corner out of the wind.

Miss Kitty was unimpressed by the whole thing.

Jason and I are storm spotters, so I did a lot of tweeting and posting to FB to keep people updated on the storm.

We went through several squalls throughout the day. “A little wind, a little rain” as Jason says. It actually wasn’t that bad during the day. We spent a lot of time outside on our patio or front porch.

When it got too bad, we would head back in and watch more Sherlock and play video games.

We thought we had seen the worst of it. The radars were showing that most of the storms had passed us. I did the speed scrap at SDD. Towards the end of the SS it started storming and this time there was a lot of lightning.

There had been sporadic tornado watches throughout the day, one possible tornado had even come as close as Lake Worth. They issued a blanket tornado watch until the next morning.

We started getting ready for bed around midnight and the storm was still going strong. Then the power went out. It was on and off throughout the night. It came back on for the last time just in time for Jason to get coffee before heading to work.

All in all, for us it wasn’t a very bad storm. It was nerve-wracking, especially with all the lightning towards the end.  But no damage to our house, everyone was safe, and the power was only out for a couple of hours. Very grateful for that.

*These are a mixture of pictures taken by Jason and me and put up on instagram. Jason took some pretty awesome photos with our other camera. I’ll post those once I get them shrunk down and web-ready.

Garden update

I started my little balcony garden back in May. I would love to say it has flourished and that it has provided hours of enjoyment and fresh herbs. That is not exactly the case.

Before-
After-
I decided to move my Wandering Jew and the pink plant outside. (I can’t remember the name and unfortunately threw away it’s tag).

I’ve lost a few of my herbs. The cilantro didn’t last long. I don’t even think I harvested anything off of it. The basil did better. I got several good snips off it, but eventually it succumbed to my black thumb. I am really terrible at growing basil.

But I am persistent. We found this HUGE basil plant at a farmer’s market for only $5!! And I’m happy to say that it’s doing quite well so far.

I’ve also gotten quite a few good clippings from my mint. I recently repotted it, and I’m hoping it will take over my big planter. I hear that they spread out a lot, so you have to plant them in their own pot.

My other plants are doing great. I’m pleasantly surprised that my flowers have lasted so long. They’re still putting out little buds, which add a nice bit of color.

I think all my indoor plants might be jealous because I’m only talking about the outside ones. Maybe I’ll do a post on them soon. But in the meantime, I’m pretty excited that my balcony plants are doing so well.

High Five for Friday #6

Hello Friday! I’m so glad you’re here. We have some fun stuff planned for this weekend and I can’t wait to get started.

But first, weekly gratitude post. I really like doing these. It helps me get my head straight sometimes and realize that I’m surrounded by awesomeness in my daily life. Will be linking up with Lauren from From My Grey Desk.

1. Growing things. I LOVE my little balcony container garden. Crossing my fingers that I can keep them alive,

2. Jason is feeling better. After a couple of weeks with an intracostal strain, Jason is finally on the mend.

3. (i)NSD. InterNational Scrapbooking Day was last weekend. Oh, how I shopped! I’m still organizing it all, but will do a post on that soon.

4. My blog. It’s been 3 months since I started writing here in my tiny corner of the interwebs. This will be my 44th post. I’m pretty psyched about it. I have lots of plans and schemes.

5. Missus Smarty Pants. I am fashion challenged. I admit that freely. And after years of wearing mostly scrubs, it’s really strange to suddenly need an “outfit” for every day of the week. I’m so over the yoga pants an t-shirt look I’ve been sporting for months now. MSP has been a great help to me in the past, and I’m looking forward to joining again in the near future. In the meantime I’m listening to her podcasts.

Honorable mention:

Cinco de Mayo, washing our car together, talks with Melissa, Barack Obama, any night when Miss Kitty lets us get a full night’s sleep, and The Lovely Bones (finished last week)