Paramongaia first flowering & Hipp. aulicum images
Lee Poulsen (Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:46:25 PST)

I am very pleased. A couple of my bulbs have gotten pretty large and
have produced a number of offsets, but never flowered before now. I
think most of this recent success is due to all the excellent
information you guys out there have been writing with respect to plant
feeding, soil mixtures, and care during dormancy--mostly after being
provoked into writing by TOWs. I think I'm *finally* getting many of my
plants into good soil mixtures with good feeding and proper water and
dormancy treatment. And they're noticeably responding better. Maybe one
of these years I'll even get the kind of growth and flowering that Bill
Dijk seems to get with everything he grows.

BTW, I saved some pollen from this Paramongaia so I can fertilize the
one whose bud is just now climbing up on the other plant. Do I put the
pollen in the refrigerator or the freezer?

Climate info:
We have definitely been Zone 10 the last 5 or 6 years around my area.
You can't see them in my photos, but I grow a number of tomato plants
every year and I keep my pots around them, so they are my indicator
plants. Last winter the plants closest to the garage wall were ripening
fruit all the way into February. Some time in January most of the
tomato plants died one night, so I assume it got down to 32° F [O° C]
for a few hours, but there was no wind. So far this year, none of the
tomato plants have died, although a couple of weeks ago it dropped down
into the upper 30s F [2-4° C] for a few nights. I keep *all* my
winter-growers out in the open exposed to the rain and cold and sun all
winter. (I don't have any other place to keep them.) So far, in the
past 6-7 years I haven't lost any of them to cold nor seen any kind of
freeze damage, even when the tomato plants have turned to mush. Since
I've been down here (12 years) the coldest temperature I've seen is 29°
F [-2° C]. The average rainfall in this area is about 17-18 inches
[43-46 cm], (only 15 inches [38 cm] in downtown Los Angeles--126 year
average). But some years (El Niño years) we've gotten double that
amount. It tends to come down in 1-2 day storms with 1-3 inches
[2.5-7.5 cm] of rain followed by several days of sunshine, mostly in
January and February, but starting off in October or November and
tapering off by April and sometimes a little in May.

--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena area, California, USDA Zone 9-10

On Jan 13, 2004, at 4:39 AM, Cynthia Mueller wrote: