An update on Alberto Albino ... he has a new, variegated sibling!
Alberto, having been reduced to a tiny, fuzzy knob of tissue after I messed him up with sugar-watering directly to his soil bed (turned it into a hard sugar cube and he did not do well), has recently been back in regular seed starting mix, and looks like he is making another attempt at a root/stem shoot:
Go, Alberto, Go!
His new baby sister, Sugar Baby, caught my attention from the seedling nursery when she suddenly developed creamy stripes on her leaves and ... *eeks!* ... started failing (her leaf tips were collapsing and shriveling). So, I brought her inside and got her into the incubator that I had readied for Alberto. He's still happily tucked back in and snoozing in the dirt, so she gets to try out the new crib. Here she is at week one on the sugar IV
I was worried at first that her leaves would not grow fast enough to keep pace with the needed snips every-other-day to get fresh leaf ends into the drink...but she is putting all her energy into that new shoot extending up at the top and keeping pace. I also made one of the waterings to her dirt-bed with a 10% hydrogen peroxide/90% water mix, to keep a tiny spot of green fuzz from growing on top of the dirt (a possible side effect from her sugar diet in the shade?). Here she is today, still going strong. If it turns out she can or should get back into regular sunny nursery conditions, I'll wean her off the sugar-IV:
I'm already searching for a new set of "incubator" containers ... just in case Alberto pokes his head out of the seed starter pot sometime soon to join his baby sister.
