Cymbidium in Bloom

The first of my standard size cymbidiums is finally blooming. The buds started to open a couple of days ago. The one pictured below only has one spike with seven buds. I don’t have name tags for any of my cymbidiums so I don’t know what cultivar this one is.  I wasn’t very consistent with watering and fertilizing this past season, but amazingly, several of my cymbidiums are in bud. I brought one in several weeks too early and that one had six spikes. Unfortunately, the temperature change made almost all of the buds to drop. Last week I placed it back outside to try and salvage what’s left. It looks like one spike will actually make it.

Time to Frag

My 55-gallon reef tank is getting crowded! The coral that has grown the most is the frogspawn, which is one of my favorites. I love its neon green tentacles with white tips and the way it sways in the current. I currently have a picture of it as my iPhone wallpaper. What started as a small frag of five heads a little over two years ago is now a colony of at least 25 heads. It must have even more heads not visible from the front of the tank. I broke off a few heads of the coral last year because it was encroaching on a nearby rock with yellow colonial polyps and zoas. I didn’t do it in time as the zoas had disappeared and the yellow colonial polyps were retreating. That frag is now doing well and up to eight heads. I ordered frag plugs online and they should be delivered later this week. I am armed with superglue gel but just realized I need bone cutters if I’m going to get serious about fragging. When I made my first frag, there was enough room for me to just use my hands to pull them apart. I think I might be able to getaway with using wire cutters. Other corals that I want to trim are the pink bird nest and yellow Fiji leather. Once I’ve fragged these corals and the frags have healed I plan on trying to recoup a little bit of money, but if that doesn’t work then I’ll share them with budding hobbyists.

Taking Down the Christmas Tree

When is the right time to take down the Christmas tree?  Is there a right time?  I saw a few bare trees on the sidewalk the day after Christmas.  And then there were even more on the curb the day after New Year’s.  Today is the ninth day of Christmas and January 6th is the the 12th day of Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany.  I like putting ours up on the day after Thanksgiving and then taking it down after January 6th.  But I was curious what rules or recommendations were out there.  I don’t remember ever learning about them during my Catholic schooling.  I did a Google search and found different practices.  One is putting up the tree on Christmas Eve and then taking it down after the twelfth night.  Other start dates are December 6, or the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and December 1st in Australia.  An end date was February 2nd which is Candlemas.  It’s the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.  I never heard of this feast being referred to as Candlemas.  I remember from elementary school that a classmate’s family kept theirs up until the Superbowl.  I also found online that one person suggested January 10th with no other explanation than that was the right time.  Another suggested taking the tree down as soon as the needles start falling off en masse.  Whether Christmas is a Christian holiday to you or a secular one, I guess the right time to take the Christmas tree down is when you make it.  I like having ours up as long as possible, especially now that we are using an artificial one.  When do you take yours down?

Reef Tank Update

It’s been awhile since my last post on my reef tank. It sure is getting crowded in there! The frogspawn has grown a lot and I need to start fragging it. The colony is almost football size. The pom pom xenia, Kenya trees and red macro algae are continuing to spread all over the tank. I wish the palys, zoas and acans would. The yellow Fiji leather had grown quite a bit as well. Just about everything has. I lost the green bird nest most likely because I switched to Marineland’s Reef Capable LEDs during the summer. The light was not enough to sustain the SPS so to avoid losing any other hard coral the CFs went back on. Roger also updated the plumbing. He’d been wanting to replace the soft tubing with PVC, but when the sixline wrasse jumped into the overflow there was no other way to get him out except for dismantling the plumbing. So the sixline was saved and the plumbing is now sturdy and leak free. Here’s a video of the current inhabitants. Taken with my iPhone and edited with iMovie.

Sage Advice for the New Year

A new year brings hope for change and the obligatory resolution. I’m all for growth and self-improvement but like many out there I’ve never been able to keep my resolution through to the end of the year. I mean well but maybe now after years of resolution-making I need to get realistic. I need to start small and there’s likely a chance I’ll be successful.

So what should I do this year? I thought about a photo-a-day project or writing blog posts daily. That’s a bit too ambitious and once a month would be too infrequent. So maybe once a week would be doable. I could certainly handle posting at least once a week. So here’s to my 2012 resolution. Good luck to me!

So this diptych is of two different sages from the backyard. On the left is pineapple sage and on the right is Mexican sage. I’m lucky to live in a mild climate where things are blooming on New Year’s Day. Both pics were taken with my iPhone 4S and the olloclip macro lens. I then used the PicFrame app to create the diptych.