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Snow Outdoors, Plants Indoors

By Eulalia Benejam Cobb

I promised myself I wouldn\’t write about the weather today, but since it\’s reaching epic proportions, I\’m sharing a photo of what it looked like this afternoon just outside the front door right after, A) the plow guy came through with a huge bucket loader and pushed the back the walls of snow so that, B) he could come back with the regular plow and clear the driveway.

The minute he left it started snowing again.  The wind picked up and it got markedly colder.  I made Lexi stay inside since there was ice under the snow and the footing was slippery.

Inside the house, all is calm, all is bright.  The zonal geranium is putting out blooms of a red such as I don\’t recall ever seeing in nature–but then I don\’t recall seeing anything much other than white in nature.

Despite the nursery\’s directions, I decided to treat the miniature orchid on the kitchen windowsill like a regular houseplant–namely give it plenty of light, let it get good and dry between waterings, and mist it daily during wood-stove season.  Today it rewarded me by finally opening one of its teensy greenish-white blooms.  My experiment with regular-sized orchids last winter ended tragically with the flowers being decapitated by Wolfie\’s tail, so I\’m especially pleased by this little plant\’s survival.
  
I\’m told that the nearest Walmart has big blooming pots of orchids for a laughable $12, and I\’m sorely tempted to get a couple (maybe I could duct-tape Wolfie\’s tail to his hind leg?).  But the store is almost an hour away from here–which is a good thing–and the roads are iffy.  

Besides, the Amaryllis leaves are shooting up out of the bulb at the rate of a couple of inches/day, the flower buds will appear any minute, and orchids will probably feel superfluous then. 

6 Responses

  1. While we still have one cat left we cannot have plants in the house (except the one huge hand-me-down)cactus.Love the photo. I didn't realize how much snow you folks had!

  2. I managed for years to have both plants AND a cat by keeping a sacrificial spider plant(you know, the ones that make \”babies\”) for the cat. You cannot kill a spider plant, and cats love them so much that they leave the other plants alone.

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