So, I don’t know if any of you are in the market for some nice plants to spruce up your home or office, but there’s this blog about houseplants I read (I know, thrilling, right?) called Plants Are The Strangest People, and it’s actually a fun read with a lot of botanical and historical research and a lot of pop cultures references and snarkiness and comic footnotes that I highly recommend.
Point being, he has a sale every year of all his baby plants (he has over a thousand plants in his little ranch house) at very, very reasonable prices, and for the second year in a row I just got a bunch of plants from him in the mail and am really happy with them. I got nine plants, two cuttings, and some seeds for under $40, and they all arrived completely intact and healthy. Apparently there hasn’t been much interest in the sale this year, and he’s pretty down about it, so if you are looking to indulge your green thumb, please check out this link first before you go give money to Home Depot for their poorly cared for buggy plants or some silly shit like that.
I wonder what the customs rules are on mailing plants? I was about to say I’d middle man it for ya, but I bet they wouldn’t do well going all the way to Oz.
I got this one plant from him I’m really excited about, Pereskia aculeata var. godseffiana. He described it as “It’s a mustard yellow and hot pink, thorny vine that aspires to be 30 feet long and grows incredibly fast. What’s not to like?”
So, I get it and it’s just so weird that I look up some more info on it, turns out that vine is actually a CACTUS, it’s native to “Tropical America”, and also known as “leaf cactus” or “Barbados Gooseberry”, because it does, in fact, make yummy little berries.
In South Africa it’s an invasive species which straight up CHOKES OUT TREES:
“This plant is a declared weed in South Africa where it does extensive damage to forest areas by smothering indigenous trees. Infestations occur in some KwaZulu-Natal forests and are embedded in the canopy and difficult to remove. The plant has a tendency to form large, impenetrable clumps and the spines on the stems make control of large infestations difficult. The plants can regrow from leaves or pieces of stem. One specimen that had infested a tree had its stems cut at the base, but after four years the ‘dry’ stems of the Pereskia that fell from the tree still set root and regrew.”
I’m looking to get into fish too, actually. I have a betta in a little 2 gallon aquarium now, with a little otocinclus catfish and a ghost shrimp to eat the algae. I’m looking to move them into something bigger that I can put more little friends in with them. The deal was I could have fish if I let the wife get rats. So we’ve got a couple rats now too.
So, I don’t know if any of you are in the market for some nice plants to spruce up your home or office, but there’s this blog about houseplants I read (I know, thrilling, right?) called Plants Are The Strangest People, and it’s actually a fun read with a lot of botanical and historical research and a lot of pop cultures references and snarkiness and comic footnotes that I highly recommend.
Point being, he has a sale every year of all his baby plants (he has over a thousand plants in his little ranch house) at very, very reasonable prices, and for the second year in a row I just got a bunch of plants from him in the mail and am really happy with them. I got nine plants, two cuttings, and some seeds for under $40, and they all arrived completely intact and healthy. Apparently there hasn’t been much interest in the sale this year, and he’s pretty down about it, so if you are looking to indulge your green thumb, please check out this link first before you go give money to Home Depot for their poorly cared for buggy plants or some silly shit like that.
cool man. i’ll pass this over to my mom. i bet she’ll grab some stuff. she’s got some wild/cool plants. she’s got one plant on her wall that is growing out of a piece of wood.
