My Maranta leuconeura, which was purchased at Linder's Garden Center in January, has been growing vigorously and has been an enjoyable plant to watch. I knew that I wanted this plant after reading this post at Plantsarethestrangestpeople where it was stated that this plant was a somewhat difficult plant to grow. It is currently blooming and has very delicate and intricate pink and purple flowers. Each blossom does not really seem to stay around for long, but the plant itself keeps sending up flowers, so I must be doing something right and hopefully the plant is not putting too much stress on itself to produce the flowers. Through some research, I found that these plants "may 'die' back for a period after blooming. Keep up regular care of plant and it will start to grow again" 1, so I will have to continue taking care of the plant.
The plant gets a few hours of window-filtered sunlight, as well as about eight to ten hours of incandescent light from the ceiling light fixtures. I try to maintain the humidity somewhere around 40-50 percent for the plants that I have clustered on top of an old entertainment center. Keeping them together like this seems to help keep the humidity up a little higher than it would have been if the plants were separate. I do enjoy how the leaves of the plant curl up to conserve humidity, and often when I look at the plant the leaves are in a different position from the last time I looked.
Remember my post about the impending Adenium Obesum blossoms? Well, unfortunately the plant was attacked by some vicious spider mites that went right to the easiest part of the plant for them to eat, the flower blossoms.
Since I had to hold the plant at a certain angle to see the web, I noticed it too late to be able to salvage the flower buds. It has been sprayed with Safer's Insecticidal Soap and there is currently no trace of the spider mites, but I will have to continue monitoring it closely to make sure they do not return. The plant itself appears to have survived the spraying too, although it lost one leaf in the process. I guess I will have to wait for a while to see if the plant will bloom again. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Work, a short vacation, and getting ready for spring have reduced the amount of time we have had to write posts in this blog, but hopefully we will be able to post more frequently now that we will have more time to take pictures of the flowers as well as to research.
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Photo Credits: All me
