This was my old office. It’s a long narrow room with 2 big windows. I’d been thinking for a while that I could make it a sewing room as I have several small sewing projects I need to do and a LOT of mending. There’s not much room these days in my bedroom for this.
I had a lot of plants in my office. I moved some of them downstairs a couple weeks ago. The hanging plants had to stay, as right now I have no place to hang them downstairs. They hadn’t exactly been abandoned, but out of sight, out of mind….
So they weren’t looking so good and needed a lot of attention. I figured I’d do that while there was more room to work, and just a floor to clean up afterwards.
The 2 plants needing the most attention were an Attar of Rose geranium and a green wandering jew. They had both gotten extremely leggy with lots of dead leaves along the stems.
I did the geranium first as it sort of blocked access to the jew. It was easily 4’ long and looked awful. I mercilessly cut off all the leggy stems and trimmed them back to their foliage.
These are the cuttings I saved. I put them in a jar of water and that’s where they will stay until they die off. Geranium does not live for more than a year in water, unlike other plants. I have a Moses in the Cradle that’s been in water for nearly 20 years.
Next I tackled the wandering jew. It had a bad case of scale in addition to being leggy. There wasn’t a lot left of it when I got done, so no photo. I set it in the bathtub and thoroughly sprayed it with a mix of oil, dish soap and water to kill the scale. These are the cuttings I saved from it.
The snake plant in the back of these 2 jars of cuttings (now in pretty sleeves) I managed to dump on the floor while trying to shake out dead leaves from the jew. So it came downstairs and got new soil. Now I have to find homes for these 3 plants.
The other hanging plants are a jar of cuttings (top) from a plant I have downstairs and have never formally identified. The bottom one is an ivy that I haven’t managed to kill in several years. I am usually successful, but not lately. (You can see the remains of the jew next to these.)
This amaryllis has been on top of my stereo in the office for many years. It’s not flowered after the first time. It had grown such long foliage it tipped over the other day. So I brought it downstairs, found a heavy cache pot for it and now it will live in this south window in the living room.
By the time I got all this done, and cleaned up my mess, it had gotten warm enough to go outside to the gardens. So not much progress making a sewing room, but most of the plants are happier.