Artisan's Blog

This column is for the novice growers interested in dipping their toes in the deep fascinating ocean that is Haworthia. By haworthia, I am referring to the "window" haworthia.  For many years the term Haworthia was associated with common hard leaved haworthia, like H. attenuata "Zebra plant". Those plants are now considered to be their own genus "Haworthiopsis," and are no longer considered haworthia (for more, see my previous blog "What is and what isn't a Haworthia"). The "window" haworthia are slower and more challenging than their Haworthiopsis cousins.  "Are Haworthia difficult to grow?" I get asked this question a lot. The answer I...

As a child I remember loving this weird old 1950s science fiction movie "Fiend Without a Face". It was about oval shaped creatures that attached themselves to peoples' necks and sucked out their life force. Mealybugs are the fiends without a face of plants. They suck out the plant's life force. In this blog post I will try and demystify these fiends without faces and give people information for dealing with this annoying pest.  Mealybugs 101 What exactly are Mealybugs? Mealybugs, also called "mealies" for short, are insects belonging to the family Pseudococcidae. They feed on plant juices. They have a straw-like mouth-part...

This is my third science related blog post which is intended to give plant hobbyists a deeper appreciation of the precise nature of how their plants grow as well as a base of knowledge from which to better comprehend phenomena such as variegation and cresting. This post will focus on leaf variegation.  In my first blog post, "Secret life of plants 1: the Meristem", we learned that plants have dome clusters of embryonic stem cells (merstems) at their growing points that give rise to the different structures that make up a plant - leaves, stems, flowers, roots etc. These structures all develop from the edges of the mersitem domes...

This is my second science related blog post which is intended to give plant hobbyists a deeper appreciation of the precise nature of how their plants grow as well as a base of knowledge from which to better comprehend phenomena such as variegation and cresting. After my last blog post -  Secret life of plants 1: the Meristem - I expected the this next one would focus on variegation. But I realized that to really be able to grasp variegation and, in particular, the origin and inheritance of variegation, one needs of have a fundamental understanding of the role chlorophyll plays in plant life. So please join...