Update on our house plants and the first apple blossom

The last few days the weather turned a bit cold, and therefore I didn’t spend much time hugging my little veggie garden seedlings. As you can imagine, I missed this a lot and I’m happy that the sun is now back again so that I don’t have to hold myself back any longer. I did manage to refocus during those days on house plants, they needed some attention as well, some of them even started to bloom. I also took some apple blossom of one of our apple trees (the one that gives not so tasty apples) to brighten up our kitchen table (see above). I placed them in a hand felted vase by Kim.

My favourite house plant is the sparmannia africana (I believe that’s the english name as well?) or kamerlinde in dutch. We have had this plant for 8 years I think. Not specifically this plant. I think this one is 5 or 6 years old. It’s huge. It’s taller than me, probably it’s around 1m80. Many people wouldn’t bother migrating such a plant to a new country. But we both enjoy the plant a lot. It’s a very easy and flexible plant which shows you how it feels by the way it holds it’s leafs. It needs a lot of water and if it’s dry, it doesn’t die on you right away, but just hangs it’s leafs a bit. We then know that we need to water it. And then once or twice a year the whole plant fills up with these beautiful flowers. The best looking flowers of the world. Really, they are. Believe me!

I do need to make a cutling now again. Normally these plants aren’t kept for so long, because they turn into small trees. I think ours is still very handable, but we might need to repot it and I’m afraid that it might die during that, so I need to make an extra back-up cutling before that time. Propagation is very easy with these plants.

The fig plant is also still doing well. It already has an extra leaf and I can see a mini branch coming up on the other side. I will place it outside from May on, to harden it off as it will be an outdoor plant/tree on the long run.
I also have two new houseplants that were send to me all the way from Bulgaria by Klara. I pinned the plant a long time ago on Pinterest, asking if somebody knew the name of the plant. Klara replied and said it was called: Pilea peperomioides (they also call it elephant ear in Bulgaria apparently). She send me a message telling me that she could send me a cutling. Woohoo! I was so happy as I never saw this plant in the shops. Besides that I love having plants with a story in our house and now these two have a story.  

After they arrived, like the above image in a package, I kept them for a few weeks in water, just to root them a bit more. Now they are planted out in little pots. I have to figure out though if they need a lot of sun or not. They don’t look extremely happy now and they are in a pretty dark place in our house. They are very easy plants according to Klara though, so I have high hopes.

I should tell you that Klara is an artist, a great painter. I have met her twice in real life. She once came to a meeting in Macedonia and I once visited Bulgaria, where she and her friend (and her model) gave me a great tour around the best or most interesting shops in Sofia. I really enjoyed that tour although I was quite tired and not in my element at that time. They organised a great day that day! Now, Klara not only paints regular paintings, she has specialised herself in textile paintings as well. Her silk scarves are amazing and they could be a great addition to your spring and summer look. I’ve added one of her scarves below. You can find more products here.