May 2010 Archives

With many of my potted brugmansia seedlings frozen back to ground level, I had to take a wait and see approach to see which ones would live on and sprout back.  After cutting the frozen plants back to the ground, the soil surface was now exposed to bright sunlight and an influx of weed seeds from a neighboring field.  Normally I would apply some pre-emergent weed preventative on the surface, but I was afraid that may interfere with the plants ability to sprout back from the roots.  I tried to stay on top of my weeding so any newly sprouted weeds would not have a chance to get established, but unfortunately my real job got in the way.  As a result, I ended with some very healthy patches of weeds this spring.

The weeds were definitely gaining the upper hand and were growing faster than the brugs.  It was time for action!  .   

As soon as I had an open weekend, I brought in a worker and we went to work.  After two twelve hour days, the end was finally in sight.  Pictured below is the result of our labor, one of the three, five foot tall piles of weeds we generated.

Now my older brugmansia seedlings have room to breath and grow.  A few weeks ago they received a nice dose of fertilizer and they are rebounding nicely.  Some are even forming buds, no doubt to reward me for the special care.  :)

This group of seedlings was in bloom last fall.  Now, thanks to our severe winter, they are at a fraction of their original size,  They have some growing to do before they start surprising me with blooms.  This was the last group of gallon size seedlings I have growing directly on the ground.  Starting last spring most of my seedlings are growing on ground cloth.

The work never ends...

Seeing how I'm sort of playing catch-up here I thought I would share a few photos from the post-freeze clean-up.  To recap, the winter of 2009 was said to be the worst ever here in Central Florida.  I had planned to build a large shade house last fall to protect my brugs, but was not able to do so.  I relied on frost cloth, plastic sheeting, and an endless supply of water to protect my brugs.  The damage was great and I estimate that I lost about 30% of my plants.

Here's a photo from early spring after I had cut back many of my larger brugmansia seedlings to the ground.


I was excited to see many of the plants sprouting new growth shortly after I did my pruning.  Before the month-long clean-up process was over i ended up with several large piles of dead brug cuttings like the one below. 


I also learned to be very careful when handling large quantities of brugmansia branches.  When I was cleaning up this mess the temps were near 80 so I opted to work shirtless and in shorts....BIG MISTAKE! At the time many of the branches were still oozing out sap and of course I got completely coated with the stuff.  By the end of the day I was not feeling well and it took me almost a week to feel normal again.  I handle brugs all the time and have never had this happen before, even when I spend a day taking fresh cutting to propagate.  I'm sure it was just the result of me be glazed over by all the sap.

Rather than burn the piles as I have done in the past, I'm letting them decompose to avoid potential dangers from clouds of burning brugmansia smoke.

I will have my shadehouse and greenhouse built by this fall so i hope to never see piles of dead brugs like this again!

As you can see by the photo below, this new seedling has already earned a thumbs up!

This bloom is from a cross I made involving Jamie's Monkey Business x America.  It bloomed for the first time last December and at that time the blooms were more orange.  The first set of blooms also had dropped skirts instead of the stuffed skirts I'm seeing now.  This does not surprise me because often it takes several bloom cycles for a new double to either get its act together or not.  Sometimes they never improve and you have to decide to keep or pitch.

Before I take photos of a bloom I always take a picture of the label.  Several people have asked me how I label seedlings seeing how I'm growing out lots and lots of seedlings right now. Usually if I have less than ten seedlings from a cross I will hand label the seedlings when they are moved up to gallon size pots.  If I have more than that, I will run tags through a laser printer, assigning each seedling a unique ID.  I also print the date the seedling was moved up to the larger pot.  Here's what the tag for this featured seedling looks like:


Seedling #11 just had a mini flush of 7-8 blooms and I dusted all seven with pollen.  I'm hoping at least a couple crosses will take in this heat.


The blooms have sort of a velvety texture and are holding up exceptionally well in our 90+ heat.   Although I lost about half of the seedlings from the cross in the freeze, I still have a bunch more that have yet to bloom.  I'm looking forward to seeing what surprises the other seedlings may have in store for me.

No I didn't give up blogging, I just had to focus my energy on a couple of other web projects this spring.  While both are still a work in progress, I now have time to get back up to speed with things here.  Also motivating me to post is that the brugs that survived the freeze are rebounding nicely.  I have had a bunch of blooms appear this past month and have been able to get a couple dozen seed pods to set with hopefully more to come.  I made over 50 additional crosses since last week, but with afternoon temps hovering around 90, I'm not sure how many will take.

Anyways, I'm excited to be back!