Plant Rescue

One of the joys of feline ownership is, of course, that they'll chew on the plants and you can't have anything that's poisonous to them in the house.

This wasn't a huge problem when I got Gypsy. I was living in La Crosse and had close to twenty plants. There were jokes about the mammal:plant ratio. To give you an idea, I refer you to the following evidence:


(there were two more shelves to that structure behind Gypsy)


(There were two more bookcases with plants on them to the right--this is actually supposed to be a picture of the cat under blanket)


(I had a really healthy boston fern than had to be left behind at the last minute. I was sad. The Incredibly Patient Mother has promised me a new one--I'd grown that one from a frond she'd given me before. Fortunately the parent plant is ENORMOUS)


(The apartment faced south. My philodendron plants were huge. I have a nine inch span.)

I moved with a couple of plants, most of which did not survive the transition to the fairly dark cave I live in right now--Chez Hedgehog being a garden apartment. And Gypsy, with a far smaller amount of snacking options, started actually doing damage to the plants.

I finally brought to work the last plant that I had at home.



This sad little spider plant has a story. I was given it's parent plant by the aunt of a good friend in New York. The Lobster and I were at Aunt Liz's for a holiday, Thanksgiving maybe or Easter. She gave me one of her spider plants to take home. It moved with me from New York to Chicago and then to La Crosse, sprouting countless babies, many of which I planted and shared.  The parent plant was finally starting to look a little rough and the root ball was huge.  Faced with needing to downsize quite a lot, I opted to include it in the huge batch of plants that I gave to a young man who had just moved up to La Crosse and was facing the winter ahead with some trepidation--I'd posted them for free on Craiglist. He took at least a half dozen of my plants, a couple other people had come by and picked up free plants as well.

I kept this spider plant deliberately, one of the healthiest and more mature of the babies. As you can see, Gypsy had turned it into lunch/dinner/in between meals snacks.

It came to work about a week and a half ago and went up in the West facing window of my cube. And here's how it looks after a week:



So far I see two new leaves (one on the left and one on the stem) and in general it looks a whole lot perkier. Amazing how sunlight and lack of felines can help.

And now that I've written you a nice long blog post about my spider plant, we'll see if any of you come back soon for actual yarn content.

Oh--one more picture--if you weren't sure that yes, I can actually grow plants here, the IPM brought me a Tradescantia frond (a clipping off of AudioGirl's, which has since died and gone to plant heaven). Here's how it's looking: