I've Been Having Such a Blast!

Sunday was one of those dreamy Chamber of Commerce days. The weather's been beautiful, and on the weekend the traffic was light. People going to work get frustrated because so many traffic lights are still out, and you have to drive around debris piles and electric company trucks, and all this gives you a long and tiring commute.

And on Monday, the kids went back to school. More traffic. But the relief of normalcy, and of getting kids out from underfoot, was quite nice to local parents. You need to do icky hurricane recovery things and you want to shield your kids from too much of this, but if you don't do it the kids' lives are impacted by the continuing disruption. With them around to keep entertained you have little time for cleanup and those FEMA things anyway. School reopening is good. Even though they had to kick out a lot of hurricane refugees to do it - schools are popular shelters.

I've collected loads of plumeria to root, around a couple thousand pieces, and around the same amount of "air plants." These are bromeliads, usually tillandsias, that were blown down by the storm and destined for the plant debris chippers.

Plants that grow on other plants are epiphytes. I LOVE epiphytes. Most orchids are epis, and staghorn ferns, night-blooming cereus, Spanish moss.

Meaning, if I have a couple thousand bromeliads alone - not to mention, several hundred pounds of two species of cereus - I need wood. Wood to mount the plants on.

So I go about in the Saturn and pick it up from the debris piles.

I take pictures and talk to people. Sometimes I find shelving units just right for my plant operation, and take those home too. I have a perfect piece of shadecloth now, which I'll need for tender rootings. There are lots of people like me doing this, and it's really not an embarrassing thing to do down here, not like other places. We often set the "good stuff" aside, hoping someone will come get it. 99% of the homeowners I talk to are so grateful to see there's a future for plants they had to throw away, it's very sweet. It makes all of us feel better, not just me.

The wood I'm collecting is mostly live oak (any species, like laurel or water oak), cypress (bald or pond), and pine (slash, longleaf, loblolly). These are the host trees these plants choose, so I know they'll do well.

There's a lot of art that goes into good mountings, and the more beautiful I can make them, the more good homes I'll find for them.

So I've also been throwing in a few loads of beautiful wood that may not be the best host, but if I can give the plant good medium under it, like sphagnum moss, it may work well. I picked up two carloads of sisal (Bridal Veil) because of the great beauty of the wood.

Yesterday evening, helping myself to a particularly fine stack of oak, I started talking to the people next door: the homeowner and two chainsaw guys, those landscaping types we have down here by the jillions.

The homeowner is in the Ft. Lauderdale Garden Club so we had Stuff to Discuss. One was, she has a tree with neat fissured bark that hosted several chunks of staghorn fern. I didn't know what the tree was, and she forgot the name, but the landscapers told me, Naseberry. Yes! just as I suspected from the homeowner's description, a chicle tree, sapodilla. The original chewing gum source. And since she told me the staghorn ferns grew there volunteer, and wild orchids and bromeliads and all such, I can see this is a fabulous host plant.

And she told the chainsawers to trim some limbs.

This morning, I go back there. Such fun!

Soon the debris piles will be gone. No more collecting available. Then I'll take a deep breath and figure out how to quickly mount several thousand epiphytes.