Fungi from Yuggoth?
My two beautiful rose bushes, Eris (the golden/red rose with yellow-backed petals) and Shub-Niggurath (the one with gorgeous cerise flowers), are doing splendidly. I found I had to use fungicidal/insecticidal spray on them, because a) this can be a wet climate, one in which fungus flourishes, and lack of fungicide means a dead hothouse rose, which both bushes are; and b) aphids, which sneer at everything but ladybugs. I have tried purchasing unit after unit of live ladybugs and loosing them on my roses. Sure enough, the ladybugs quickly scarf up all the aphids on my roses -- then hightail it off to somewhere else to produce more ladybugs, leaving my roses defenseless for the nest invasion of aphids, which happens constantly. As these are not wild roses native to this area -- in fact, I don't know whether there is such a thing as a native wild rose -- and were born and raised in a nursery, they just don't have the sort of immune responses that a wild rose growing up in the area it was native to would. So I have to provide it. Anyway, they're doing great. Insects (except for ants and aphids, which somehow make it up to the 6th floor where I live in spite of everything) tend to avoid my balcony, because I also have numerous geranium plants, which exude lots of pyrethrum, which insects hate, because it kills them. Except for ants and aphids, which were probably invented by the Devil himself. But anyway.
Be that as it may, I made an interesting discovery a couple of days ago. Apparently I'd been watering Eris, whose pot is right next to that of Shub-Niggurath, a little too much. She now inhabits a nice wide plastic tub filled with the best kind of soil matrix and all that, but it doesn't drain like the containments they recommend for potted plants. That means water stays in the soil for quite a while, even in the Summer heat. Evidence: all sorts of mushrooms springing up in her soil. There were no mushrooms, however, in Shub-Niggurath's pot. Is this an invasion of Fungi from Yuggoth, masterminded by Shub-Niggurath to deal with a perceived rival, or just an accident because I was stupid and watered Eris too much? Only time will tell . . .
Be that as it may, I made an interesting discovery a couple of days ago. Apparently I'd been watering Eris, whose pot is right next to that of Shub-Niggurath, a little too much. She now inhabits a nice wide plastic tub filled with the best kind of soil matrix and all that, but it doesn't drain like the containments they recommend for potted plants. That means water stays in the soil for quite a while, even in the Summer heat. Evidence: all sorts of mushrooms springing up in her soil. There were no mushrooms, however, in Shub-Niggurath's pot. Is this an invasion of Fungi from Yuggoth, masterminded by Shub-Niggurath to deal with a perceived rival, or just an accident because I was stupid and watered Eris too much? Only time will tell . . .