Tropicals & Tender Perennials: October Flowers, 1 by plantladylin

plantladylin wrote:
Christina: That is a lovely bloom! All the best on your move and getting settled into a new place. Hope you are able to come back to Dave's Garden in the near future.

Doug: Thanks! Our house is very small so it's nice to have the pool area and decks for all of my plants. In a few years when my husband retires we will be downsizing (probably a townhouse) and I won't have as much space for plants, but we hope to do a little traveling here and there, so there won't be much time to play with a lot of plants anyway! I won't miss the yard work 9 months of the year, that's for sure!

Treelover: I agree, what works for one person and their climate conditions (whether indoors or out) can be so different from someone else in another area of the world. I live in an area of high humidity most of the year and my plants stay outside all year round, with the exception of orchids and a couple of hoyas that I bring in for a few weeks if we are predicted to have extremely low temps. I used to have a problem with over watering all of my plants. For years I used the bagged potting soil, adding no amendments (it was extremely heavy and held a lot of water.) Since I changed to my own recipe which is chunky and lighter, I don't have the problem with root rot anymore. I just had to learn what conditions my plants preferred to keep them alive.

This will be a first bloom on my H. pubicalyx 'Royal Hawaiian Purple' from a cutting in a DL order Spring 2008.