

Divesting Myself of My Plants

By Hans Hillewaert CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
I'm moving to a colder place, so I have to get rid of most of my tropicals. Not all of them, because I would die without some plants in my house, but the ones that grow outdoors at least. I let go of some today, and it broke my heart to part with some of them, but they're going to a good home. A very nice older lady and gentleman came, and like me, they like the small plants. I love growing things from one cutting into a huge plant. In fact, I'm taking cuttings of most of the plants I'm selling that will grow indoors, because I just can't bear to part with them entirely.

When I moved here, my house in North Port hadn't been auctioned off yet, so I went over and dug up some of the remaining plants. One that I was shocked to find any left of was my Heliconia rostrata, or hanging lobster claw. I dug the tiny piece up and put it in a pot, and it has almost died a few times, because it kept falling over. But I kept it alive, and today, I let the nice lady and gentleman have it. I'm sure it will be happy under their pine trees, at least I hope so.

I recently had my old laptop die, and lost my external hard drive, so a lot of my pictures of my blooming plants actually in bloom are gone. That makes it sort of hard to sell some of them, because people want to know what they look like when they are in bloom. Right now, I'm looking for pictures of all of them on Wikimedia Commons so I can put those with the ad. I did that with my queen's tears bromeliad, and sold it for $20 out of bloom.

So far, I've made $40 on plants and traded one for a nice wooden wine box, so closer to $45. I made around $300 selling plants when I left North Port, and ended up giving hundreds of dollars worth away so they wouldn't just sit there and die. I don't have room for much propagation here, but a lot of the plants I brought here have grown so much, I can easily take cuttings and start a nice 6" pot without anyone even noticing. Still, I don't want to keep too many, but a few little pots of this or that will be a nice addition to the apartment, and help keep the air cleaner.

My plants are like my babies. I'm always sad when they have to go, but then I get more and I'm happy again. This time, I'm going for something smaller -- like miniature African violets.  I'm sure in another few years I'll have so many of those, I'll be having another sale.