Thanks everyone for the input. It sounds like the consensus is the S. masoniana is the correct species name, but that whether S. 'Congo' = S. 'Mason's Congo' is unclear, as is the issue of whether this is one of the very large growing varieties/clones. Someone please correct me if I got any of this wrong. Obviously it needed a new pot. I'm not sure if this was wise or not, but I gave it nine new pots. I should have paid more attention during the process as to exactly how many plants it appeared to be. It was clearly more than one plant, put together in the pot. That is what I expected. I assume the rhizome piece (lower left) might eventually form a new plant. This has been lying dry for a couple days. I'll add soil and follow its progress as well. I'm essentially going to leave these alone for a few months and see what happens. I gave a couple larger pots, but I don't have room for a lot of big pots. I haven't watered them yet, and I assume I should approach watering cautiously, particularly while it's cool. My growing area is highly protected and so far is frost-free, even during the freezes which hit California in January. Based on very limited local damage it's clear that I'm actually in zone 10, probably 10a. I'm fairly near the Bay and also at the base of the hills, which creates an interesting microclimate. So I'm going to keep the plants outside, once the current period of 50s/30s passes. It should be mostly 60s/70s and 40s at night for the next couple months, warming up mostly to the 70s/50s in the summer. I assume this is a favorable climate for these guys. Half of my small growing area is rain protected, and I'll put them there. It might be fun to stick one in the ground, but my space is limited (and it's probably not wise to do that while it's still the rainy season).

Worms will eat what you feed them. Try to remember that in the wild they tend to be small so that they can survive on less food. When some animal walks by and drops the "motherload" on their location, they will gather at the location for a feast. Proximity to other worms triggers breeding and a central food source will result in new worms. They will gain size rapidly so as to store energy in their body and they will make use of the excess food to produce more offspring. When the large pieces of food get used up, the fat worms won't be able to sustain their size and will begin to starve. They are now too big to fit in the small gaps of soil to hide or find bits of decaying matter below. They will starve to death and because of this, they will reproduce for the rest of their lives. The resulting offspring will not have excess food, so they will remain small so that they can maneuver through the topsoil and eat dead roots/leaves and whatever else they can find while waiting for the next cow pie or whatever. Worms can go their whole lives without getting to the assumed normal adult worm size though they will have every other aspect of an adult worm and be ready to grow large when the conditions are right for that. So what this amounts to is that if you suspect you have 2# of worms, you can give 2# of food per day or per week or per month if you wish. Worms use death as a survival mechanism and as long as they have enough time to pull off a few rounds of emergency breeding, they are harder to accidentally kill than most people think. The growth of a worm is a one way trip though. They can get big and fat when conditions are right, but the only way for an individual worm to shrink to a less hungry size is to breed and get out of the way for its offspring. As long as the bin is not too dry, you can theoretically do some amazing worm tricks by feeding way too much and then stopping feeding for long periods. I try to give my worms everything I possibly can without buying anything specifically to feed them or diverting something to them that could be used for something better. For example, if I don't want to eat bread loaf ends I'll feed them to my dog but I get over 2# of free junk newspapers per month that I use as worm bedding. Colored cardboard and newspaper is supposedly not harmful like it used to be in the olden days because it's understood that it generally gets landfilled and leaching into ground water is verbotten* within the current time period... also, in the '70s legislation* was put in place to prevent anything that may be mouthed by a reasonably parented child from containing harmful compounds. If newspaper and cereal boxes don't say "keep out of reach of children" it's likely that they don't contain lead or other toxic compounds and I put them in the bin. *I'm speaking specifically about the USA. Most countries have environmental protections that meet or exceed US standards. Some countries may not have standards, or items that can be standardized, or may not enforce their standards.

Well I don't want to discourage people from trying :) Try and decide which pieces look related, then try and decide which one of those came first. Some are related, some aren't. Also look at construction. Do any of the pieces look like the idea preceded the ability to make it work well? For example, this is the Salvador Dali "Mae West" sofa (1937)--a surrealist piece that looks like lips from the front: It seems pretty successful, in a deco way, until you see the Salvador Dali-inspired Bocca or Marilyn Monroe Sofa (1971) which also looks sofa like from the side, lip-like from the front. The technology (fiberglass, foam, etc.) had changed enough to make a lighter, more (sur)realistic version of the lips sofa. (I sorta prefer the Mae West simply because it also looks like a conventional deco sofa.)

Hello all, thank you! Cawaps, I've got a sample of the Formica Grass, and IRL it looks nice with the tile, but only nice. What I'm hoping is that something will really wow me. I would settle for even being somewhat wowed, haha. I wonder if stainless would work, as Jterrilyn suggested? In and of itself it's too cold a color, but maybe if it's surrounded by yellow it would warm up? Does anyone have pictures of stainless counters in warm-colored kitchens? We have stainless right now and functionally speaking it's excellent, particularly with the nautical edges, but I'm so SO not into grey. The only place I like grey is on cats. Or maybe dogs. That's about it. Of course, our stainless looks as grey as possible because our cabinets are grey and the walls are putty-colored. (The whole abomination is due to Tasteless Previous Owners with No Common Sense... see rants on other threads.) Black or charcoal grey I'm fine with, but not dull cloudy-day medium grey. Lavender, the black counters in Mama Goose's kitchen look great. Our first thought for counters was soapstone, but then we got a quote and I realized that my brain refuses to process any sentence that contains both the word "countertop" and the words "six thousand dollars." They just do not compute. :-) It's not about being able to afford it, it's about refusing to pay that much. The ghosts of my grandparents rise up and remind me that they grew up in the Great Depression, and then they say, "It's a COUNTERTOP. It's just a COUNTERTOP! You could lay BARE PLANKS across the cabinets and it'd work just fine! Do you realize what else you could do with $6000 etc. etc. etc." So that's what we're dealing with here... :-) And Lavender, I'm a total sucker for jadeite and also for carnival glass. Colors! Give me colors! Love 'em!