No Dogs here!

Surprisingly, this update does not have any pictures of dogs, any references to dogs (beyond this initial paragraph), and therefore does not focus on dogs (good thing, because it would be hard to do an update on dogs if I couldn't do the fore mentioned things!). This one is all about my plumeria trees/sticks.

I bought these sticks while I still lived in Hawaii. Previously, while my sister and her family were visiting, we found this guy at the swap meet who sold plumeria sticks. I call them sticks because they are seriously just sticks cut off of a plumeria tree. The ends are sealed, and totally hearty. Mark, my brother in law, and I bought some sticks and I stuck mine in a pot and put it on the lanai. (After they sat on my dining room table for 3 weeks while I went on vacation) Literally, that is all I did. A few months later, it grew some leaves, and then we moved to Sierra Vista, so I gave the stick in the pot to a friend of ours who was staying in Hawaii. But since I had found out that it was pretty easy to grow plumeria, and they are easily one of my favorite flowers (I love the white ones with a little yellow in the center...reminds me of the kids I hope to have one day...hehehe!), I went back to the stick guy at the Swap meet, and bought more from him. Here's the crazy thing...I gave him money and the address I was staying at in Arizona, and he said he would send the sticks to me (so I could avoid all the bother with agriculture inspections...he was allowed to send them via U.S. mail). So, I easily could have just given the guy money and never seen the sticks. But he was a great old local guy, and I did get the sticks. I put them in a pot with some dirt and lava rock, and watered it when I remembered, and then it started to sprout some leaves. I continued with this exhausting regimen, and it continued to thrive. Then, I made a seemingly disastrous mistake. I moved the pot outside. Prior, it had been living in the guest room by the window, but it was starting to spread out too much, so I decided it move it outside. Then, once I got it out there, I panicked that it was too dry for a plumeria, so I watered like twice a day. Then they started to turn brown. So I stopped watering them so much, and moved them to a shadier spot. And today, I saw that one of the sticks was blooming! I don't know if the sticks' leaves will stop turning brown, but at least I got one flower out of the sticks. So, here are my pictures of my plumeria sticks:


Here is the actual plant. I bought four sticks from the swap meet guy, and all of them are growing leaves. Since my favorites are the white with yellow, I'm hoping one of the sticks will be that variety. Swap meet guy also gave me I think a rainbow one and obviously a pink/red one. He said those were the easiest to grow. You can see some of the brown spots on the leaves, but some leaves are still doing fine, so I'm hopeful.


Here is my first flower. She's pinkish/reddish with a hint of orange...Maybe this is the rainbow stick. He labeled them when he sent them, but I couldn't read his writing or decipher his code. Oh well...

Here's another picture of Flower #1.

In this picture, you can see the other flower buds behind Flower #1. Hopefully they will start blossoming, too!

Here is a better picture of the buds. There are quite a few of them!

So the moral of this story is that even with minimal care, I see to be able to keep a plumeria stick alive long enough to get one flower.