PBS Forum

Kites I would have thought would work, but................

Maybe 6-8-10 years ago bird-shaped kites that had a very fast and random flight pattern - a very clever, but presumably simple design, as most clever things are - were very popular over crops that are (wood) pigeon magnets. I don't recall seeing one for quite some while, near certainly not since before C19, and perhaps they only persisted for a year, maybe two?

I haven't heard a gas gun for umpteen years either (although I seem to recall mutterings of banning them due to noise nuisance).

If anything is effective and cost-effective, it tends to hang around.

Over the years, what to hang in gardens/vegetable plots has changed.......

The most ancient of "guaranteed to work" were probably the foil cases/trays used for shop-bought pies and the like. The next idea was probably empty PET bottles, followed by PET bottles with some water in them (not much). The idea of using CDs has been around for ages (remember all those freebie AOL junk mail CDs?).

It is all fantasy. If it works at all, it doesn't for very long.

The other idea was to bury bottles  so that their tops were just proud of the ground - the sound from the wind blowing across the tops would frighten/discourage various things.

I presume that people are pining for the gamekeepers' gibbet? Equally as effective.

I knew a bhuddist who thought the same and used one of the mint oils liberally as they could not kill anything.

Until they opened some chest drawers and found clothes, blankets etc. in tatters.

Mint flowers are always very popular with insects......................

Quote from: David Pilling on June 20, 2024, 05:30:55 PMDo plants like banana water? Gardening experts weigh in

I used to work with a Nigerian who had lots of fingers in various Nigerian pies..............one was a soap factory. 
They made soft soap (usually used as shaving soap amongst other uses, and the potassium salt, rather than sodium salt, of fatty acids), using banana skin ash.

"Blue curls" is just a name attached in the horticutural trade. Are they all the same cultivar or clone across the whole world? Unlikely. They are everywhere in Europe, so there are many, many, many thousands of plants in trade.

A. fragrans - I have not waded through the taxonomic treacle to discover current opinion, but Drimia and Ornithogalum are/have been other genera used for the plant.
It is offered by SA seed merchants and their websites may offer more information.
So far as I recall, I have never seen any description that indicates that the flowers are scented, despite the name.

If you like scented flowers in Albucas - polyphylla (winter-growing) is fabulous, and shawii and humilis are very, very good too.
A 4+ inch pot of polyphylla in flower will scent an entire greenhouse of 10+ cubic metres/yards.
All 3 are small-growing, polyphylla offsets very freely and shawii is very easy from seed. Humilis offsets reasonably freely.
Shawii foliage smells slightly of pine/turpentine if held close to your nose; also very pleasant.

I assume that Eire still operates peat (turf)-fired power stations?

The limitation to peat alternatives in horticulture is that they all compost/rot, so are unsuitable for use as any significant proportion of a potting compost that is destined to be in a pot for more than a few months (depending on how damp the compost is in very large part).

One of the longer-lived alternatives is coir - I have been using it for something like 30 years. If it is kept very damp or wet (and warm) that can compost-down to a black sludge within a year but can last several years if the pot is growing someting that is kept "dry".

Has anyone any idea what growers of the commoner carnivorous plants - the ones that naturally grow in bogs - are using? The problem is that the pots need to stay permanently at least very damp. I suppose they could go to entirely aggregate potting media.

Babianas go dormant late spring, so delivery seems right.

All bulbs are best in soil or compost.
In a pot, fill to around 20-40cm of the top with gritty compost, settle the bulbs a few mm into this, top the pot up with grit.
Leave until September before giving them their first water.

I was still at school when plant communication got reasonable coverage (so pre 1977).

They fixed lie detectors (basically conductivity sensors) to a single plant and a selection of people, some of who had been asked to rip a plant to pieces, well away from the study plant. The people were asked individually to stand close to the study plant and all that had destroyed a plant got a response, and one person who had not also elicited a response.

After some investigation, the "odd one out" was found to have cut his lawn earlier that day.

Or so the article claimed.

More recently, a TV programme showed broadly similar experiments with trees in woodland.

I have one bulb in flower, one in bud at the moment, grown as rubrocyanea from Silverhill seed. I'll wait for the second to open so that I can compare before commenting about them.

Iridaceae, Strelitzia42, Goldblatt and Manning, gives detailed descriptions and how to tell rubrocyanea and regia apart. I'll copy this here when I have a moment. Unfortunately, the book has a pic' only of rubrocyanea.

Apologies - B. rubrocyanea was where I was thinking....

So far as I am aware, various sources don't mention much if anything by way of variation in the species, so maybe some hybrid influence???

Most Albuca with spiral leaves that are at all common in cultivation have threadlike leaves but how twisted they are is influenced by cultivation conditions - how much water, how much sun. In fact, you can find comment about pretty much all contorted foliage species of bulbs in general, being similarly affected.

How about Fusifilum, or Trachyandra, or any of the other genera that get amalgamated and split from Albuca regularly?

Quote from: Too Many Plants! on April 02, 2024, 02:03:48 PMI believe this is my first flowering for these Albuca Namaquensis.

A. namaquensis has threadlike leaves and usually only a rather small number of flowers per pedicel.

Pic's 4072 and 4073 - B. purpureacyanea (spelling very likely wrong), or a hybrid that strongly favours that species.

The production and selling of seed as certain cultivars is probably less of a problem in many bulbs as growth from seed is often slow or very slow, although crossing of plants to produce seed in the search for new garden-worthy cultivars and hybrids, is obviously still very important.
Garden-produced seed in particular, being sold named as the parent (even assuming the parent is what it is thought to be), is often mightily misleading in many plants, not least herbaceous species - 3 years after sowing - "hmmmmmmmm, that should have a red flower, not orange".

In the case of tete a tete, it is sterile, so changes have occured through vegetative propagation.

I would echo Martin's comment about longevity of cultivars/hybrids.

To take a very simple, common example - Narcisuss tete a tete, a complicated hybrid containing a lot of N. cyclamineus.

I first came across this plant around 20-25 years ago, (although it was bred in the 1940's), when it was/became an expensive and desirable curiosity, still sold in small numbers only, as dry bulbs or potted and in flower, not by the (10's)kg as they are today.

All of those plants back then had a wonderful scent and were very small. Neither applies to what is sold as the plant today (or at least so in the UK).

Quote from: David Pilling on March 20, 2024, 05:26:40 PMPoland's 'Heart of the Garden' crowned Tree of the Year

Of all plants, trees must be by far the most difficult to appreciate in photographs. There are a couple of this beech and one makes it look of no major consequence, the other is very different.

There are some fabulous beeches in the UK, not all of them huge. Some are very gnarled and stunted as a consequence of where they grow.