Latest News from Tree Quality

How to Keep House Plants Alive

Always use distilled water to keep house plants alive. Tap water contains chemicals like fluoride which can be toxic to plants. Add a teaspoon of fertilizer such as Miracle Grow to a gallon jug of distilled water and keep at room temperature. Give your plants supplemental light, either a grow light or leaving the room lights on for 12 hours. Most of our houseplants came from the tropics and need 12 hours of direct light every day. Winter light is not enough, even in a sunny window.

Make sure your pots have drainage holes. Allow the soil to dry out between watering, like a sponge. If you notice fungus gnats flying about, cover the top of the soil with 1-inch horticulture sand or finely crushed rock. These products are available at many pet stores. This prevents the adult gnats from returning to the soil to lay eggs. Avoid placing plants by a heat register. Place your plants in groupings; it’s like they know they’re all hanging out and increase their humidity together. Remember, there are no bad plants, only bad, uninformed owners.

Prayer plant (Maranta leuconeura), Boston fern and Christmas cactus, hanging out in the kitchen.

For more information on keeping potted plants alive

Master of Disguise

In 2013, during a quiet walk in a forest in Chile, botanist Ernesto Gianoli came across a common shrub, a plant he had seen for the umpteenth time in his career. But this day, something unusual caught his eye. A botanist in the forest is like a collector at a flea market: senses on the alert, looking for something that everyone else has missed. Looking closely, Gianoli noticed the leaves did not belong to the shrub in question but to a climber that was growing around it. The climber was a Boquila trifolioata, but its leaves were strikingly similar to those of the shrub it was climbing. What he found left him speechless: on every shrub or tree around which it grew, the B. trifolioata mimicked the leaves of the “host” every time and with great skill. B. trifolioata can change its size, shape, color, orientation, and even the vein patterns to match the surrounding foliage. It can even mimic more than one plant at a time. B. trifolioata doesn’t even have to touch the plant to copy its foliage. No other examples of mimicry in plants or animals involve near simultaneous changing of the shape, size and color of the organism’s body.

Observing the phenomenon, however, is only the beginning of the story. Some of the most important questions raised by the B. trifolioata behavior are how and why. The why is fairly straight-forward. These special abilities probably evolved as a means of self-preservation. Why not copy another plants leaves’ in the hope that the herbivores will be fooled and leave you alone?

What is more a mystery is how B. trifolioata does it. A solution has come forward that maybe the vine has some sort of visual capacity. It has been shown that plants are able to perceive images in the cells of their epidermis. The epidermis of a plant is convex like a lens and could conceivably convey the images of surrounding plants to the underlying cellular layer. Our understanding of plant ecology has confirmed that plants are capable of processing information about their neighbors, both above and below ground.

The Boquila Vines are perhaps the most mysterious members of the plant kingdom. They can completely change their appearance to mimic their hosts.

Plants live in a secret world. Sometimes plants challenge our assumptions that they are unthinking holdovers from a simpler, pre-human evolutionary past. If we open our minds and look closely enough, maybe plants hold the key to a future we have yet to imagine.

For more information on the Boquila

Turkey Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

¼ c butter (½ stick)

¼ c four

2 c onion, chopped

1 ½ tsp curry powder

4 c chicken broth

2 c russet potatoes, peeled, diced

1 c carrots, thinly sliced

1 c celery sliced

½ c chopped fresh Italian parsley

1 tsp sage

3 c cubed cooked turkey

2 c half and half

1 10oz package frozen spinach, thawed

and drained

2 tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

Instructions

Melt butter in large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onions and sauté until translucent, about 10 minutes. Stir in flour and curry powder and cook on medium heat for 5 minutes. Add broth, potatoes, carrots, celery, parsley and sage and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer ½ hour, or until vegetables are cooked. Add turkey, milk and spinach. Cover and continue simmering until heated through, about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Thanks for Reading

Happiest of Holidays

and Happy Planting!

Faith

Faith Appelquist

President & Founder