PBS Forum

@David Pilling Well Cat pictures never fail...

@Uli No scent is definitely a plus in an arum. Personally I've tried to get Arum palaestinum

to flower for several years, no succes yet. Yes, I did fertilize it, which is definitely atypical for me..

First 2 pics are a comparison of Amana edulis

(left) and Amana anhuiensis (right), which actually seem almost identical to me besides intensity and definition of the outside pattern and (invisible in the picture) the growth of up to 3 buds from one bulb in the edulis. Edulis is new for me, anhuiensis slowly does clump up.

Third pic is Crocus fleischeri

which seems to have a slug problem in this very wet spring.

Fourth pic is my still most expensive Galanthus: The Wizard. But I'm already surfing around the common sites and I'm batteling the urge of getting one of the apricots, which again would double the invest... Of course I could blame Galanthus Viridapice (pic 5) for this, as cheap as it was, started the slippery slope. I'm actually thinking about donating it to the EX to infect others...

Uli, that's a very beautiful color. considering the parents, is this another dark Arum that doesn't smell bad?

Meanwhile I enjoy a few warm days with my Sternbergia candida

Height:	0-20 cm (0-7.9 inch)
Flower Colors:	white
Flower Season:	late winter to early spring

growing outside in Germany - I was really concerned, but the buds tolerated more than a week with sub zero average and night temperatures down to -7°C unharmed. They may need some more warmth to fully open up as wide as Carlos' specimen.... Second pic is galanthus 'green fingers', slowly clumping up.

Last one is Måns criticizing my tree cutting skills. he may have a point here...

As I mentioned before, January isn't my most floriferous time, but we're slowly moving forward again, as we're about a week out of the icy cellar before.

Daily travelling from the shelter to the sunny front door stairs are Whiteheadia bifolia

- or Massonia bifolia

as Kew classifies it currently - the battle between lumpers and splitters around Masonia isn't over, as Desertia (unaccepted) and Namophila (accepted) float around... Another traveller is Pterostylis truncata (the epithet with a grain of salt as I'm not 100% sure yet - confirmation or other opinions welcome). I adore these little aliens - put them in any science fiction set and everyone will instantly believe they are not from this planet.

The outside world slowly wakes up and gives more color - Cyclamen coum

obviously has survived the slug attack in December and the freezing period a week ago, and Crocus antalyensioides

is among the first greetings in yellow. Opening up still is hard as the sun only barely touches the ground - low angle and close buildings are always a problem in winter, but things change fast now. A few Snowdrops are out, cheap ones and expensives alike, but need a day of warmth or two more until reaching a presentable state.

Most people know Winter is a pain for me - all the worrying what suffering may lurk around the next swing of the weather... So I got a VERY good weather site, analyzing several models and the control runs, pointing out what can be, could be, and usually being not bad in picking up the correct trends. Only trouble is, the site owner is a flaming fan of winter - can't be too cold for him, the "clean crisp -20°C air" type, and gets whiny about any vegetation day. A good indicator is that he's comparing everything to the averages from CLINO period 1961-1990, so everything seems too hot these days while I'm still suffering. But his analysis of what's to come is the best on the market.

So all I need is an AI, capable of German language, to rewrite his hopes to fears and his fear to hopes - do you know any?

OK, now move that cold air east until it hits the atlantic ocean. that will trigger the atlantic trough (that's what LEO spits out for "Tiefdruckrinne", no Idea if that's a thing), and that will drive the cold out of central Europe. That was one hell of a week - frozen hell, I mean...

Seems everyone wants to have the cold air anywhere as long as it's far away. I vote for Russia, they a) are used to it and b) don't deserve it better these days...

As someone cultivating Ferraria considerably too cold and too wet in the harsher parts of winter, I've never seen "rust" on them, as in localized dryish discoloration and fungal growth - I'm battling more of a botrytis-type of fungus - things wilt and get  mushy.

CG100 is right, 3 weeks are not much for Iridoideae, I'd probably get nervous after 5-6 weeks. I guess a bit warmer would be better. Deno lists Ferraria crispa as 70D ( = about 20°C and dark) and not depending on day/night changes, which fits my own experience, so make sure the seeds are covered well.

Personally, I wouldn't cut seeds unless they don't swell up after 1-2 nights of soaking - I'm aware that many people like the feeling they can actively help the seeds, but more often than not the damage is bigger than the benefit.

Interesting - one should think we'd have very different climates, yet I have what I got as Massonia pustulata

in flower as well - though I have an example of a strange kind of symbiosis: a slug cutting holes into Massonia leaves for weeds to pass through... Mine seems to have lighter pollen than yours, though...

Out in the garden the weeks of rain have taken their toll, I have Colchicum serpentinum

and Cyclamen coum

ruined by slugs - only a singular Crocus protected by some cacti (which again suffer from the rain) is in flower, and I'm not even sure of the species - possibly a melantherus I planted a few years ago which never had flowered? But my sure ID Crocus melantherus

from Janis Ruksans flowered almost 2 months ago...

Meanwhile the capsules of Cardiocrinum giganteum

have opened up, but the conditions were so shaky this year that I wouldn't want to guarantee fertile seeds here... And while the blue sky looks nice on the picture, it also means cold nights - I had to return everything to the shelter again... could we PLEASE fast forward to spring?

Well, I'll agree that the cheaper lamps are questionable in some respects, then, on the other hand I do think I see better results in both winter survival for my winter growing bulbs and plant quality in indoor starting of things like tomatoes.

And while the non full spectrum lights may be well adapted for photosynthesis and prevention of legginess they may fail in some other processes: Three pictures of Digitalis canariensis attached: first is a plant grown under red/blue LEDs instantly photographed after bringing it to daylight. Second pic is a week of natural light later, and third is how the colors should be if all development of color happened under natural lighting... I bet other levels of secondary plant substances like aroma, vitamins etc are also affected by "less important" parts of the spectrum.

Quote from: CG100 on December 23, 2023, 01:34:38 AMDo the same with 30cm.

Well, actually all mechanical technicians and engineers i know and work with think in milimeters, anyway, and do not flinch at all when going down to µm. From an engineers view, an inch is almost a kilometer. The only smaller imperial length unit I ever encountered is mil, which is used for wall thickness for catalysts, and guess what, it's 1/1000 of an inch, so it's almost a breach of imperialism, so to speak.

Oh boy. the trouble is, again, that 0°C, 10°C or 20°C describe discrete states a system can be in, not a distance between them. the "coincidence" that the distance between 0°C and 10°C are 10 K is there "by design" to not have complications in the form of strange factors like in the imperial units. Think of 10°C as of a point in a landscape. London, Sheffield and Edinburgh are roughly on one line, and while Edinburgh is roughly 2.3 times further away from London than Sheffield, would you ever try to say Edinburgh is 1.3 Sheffield from Sheffield?

 And don't torture me with imperial tools. IF you'd at least stay in one "unit" it would be fine, lets say in multiples of 1/16 ", but already sorting the tools from 3/8, 7/16, 1/2, 9/16, 5/8, 11/16, 3/4, 13/16, 7/8 to 15/16 gives one a headache...

1024 bytes, on the other hand, is useful - just think of it as $400. At least in early days of computing it was highly useful and relevant for addressing and timing to think in memory pages ranging from $00 to $FF, a.k.a the address space that can be indexed using 8 bit as pointer. At the end of the day it may still be after all the optimization and branch prediction and what not of modern processors and compilers is done.

OK, I admit that came as a shock reading that English Wikipedia allows °C as unit for temperature differences. I have NEVER seen that in any serious text about thermodynamics and would rather give up my Dipl. Ing. academic title than ever use it like that. But given how the English speaking world clings to completely unusable imperial units, what can you expect?

That's not a mix. The Celsius scale can be used to describe distinct temperatures, but if you want to talk about differences (every *unit* below -5°C) one needs to use Kelvin. Engineers tend to be as pedantic about such things as others are about orthography... Hi Mary Sue

To me it's really my gardener's passion what defines my feelings about the seasons - while I feel the pressure from summer heat and do lose plants to it (Tropaeolum speciosum

died away the first summer and the Pleiones are suffering), as long as we're not getting irrigation bans (for now a hypothetical threat), frost will always be the more traumatic event. Colleagues at work dread cold times because my mood will drop with every Kelvin below -5°C at night and every day with an average below 0°C.

And it is about time... too bad the minimum of the insolation is only the turning point of the temperature gradient, meaning the speed of things getting colder is slowing down. Thanks to the thermal inertia of the athmosphere it will take about another 6 weeks until we're past the coldest point.. Winter. Not a fan.