Florida caladiums

This box is eight pounds of caladium bulbs. That's sort of a lot for a single balcony. Three species comprise the basis of the garden. There are five giant white ones, twenty-five mixed white with red veins, and twenty-five that are red with green edges and white flecks. Everything else will be blended with these leafy plants in large pots.

I'm going to gouge their little eyes out.

I saw it on a YouTube video. Not really gouge their eyes out, rather, shave off their bumps. The gardener guy in the video said that stimulates more leaves to grow. I don't know what I'm doing. I copied the video and the plants do grow a lot of leaves. 

Even if it was an obvious incipient bud that was ready to grow into a leaf, I cut it right off. Because that's what the guy in the video did.

Their gooey scabs dry in a day and they can be planted. 

But nothing will happen until the temperature stays 65℉ through the night and the dirt is warm to the touch. For these plants come from the Amazon.

I had no idea until tonight that every part of these plants is poisonous. 

And cut leaves will last a few weeks in water.

Colossal Moonlight

Florida Fantasy

Red Flash

Maybe I'll put some dark ones with large white ones and with the mixed white ones spread around to make it look like they married and had kids. 

We gardner types learn to take setbacks in stride.

I take solace in something a Nebraska wheat farmer told me. Deano. If you met Deano at a party you might take him for a New Yorker.  Deano told me a simple light rain at the wrong time, say, a few days after seeding, can dampen the powdery soil just so, that the surface forms a light crust that the hybrid Spring wheat cannot penetrate so it bends and folds like an accordion as it grows and dies under the soil so that the whole field or multiple field sections must be re-seeded immediately costing over fifty thousand dollars. One little thing like that, boom, fifty thousand dollars.

So compared to that I cannot feel so bad about the overnight storm killing all my first round of plants costing me eighty dollars, I think, boom, just like that. One storm, one night and one day, and the next day and next week we're back to Spring time temperatures. It's part of the deal. It comes with the territory. I must simply bite it and repeat the order and move on.

Funny though, the only plant that survived is the one that I gave away.