I love the strings of lights atop the window curtains. *Very* pretty room and should cheer your friend while she is not feeling well.

A room of their own! Ha! When my houseplants finish their inward trek, they'll be lucky if they get a seat near a window - winter is sort of like rush hour on the subway in my house. Plants standing shoulder to shoulder leaning towards the light.

It's a beautiful room - a very peaceful place to sit in.

Claire

Beautiful room. I too have a sunroom, not as dressed up as yours -one day though. Anyway, I recently brought in my plants and now have an infestation of white flys (I had bought "Good Soil" from a local nursery to pot my elephant ear in and the soil was contaiminated with them). I have put up the yellow sticky traps and have been spraying my plants with neem oil. Any sugestions that might help?

1.)Claire sez: A room of their own! Ha! When my houseplants finish their inward trek, they'll be lucky if they get a seat near a window - winter is sort of like rush hour on the subway in my house. Plants standing shoulder to shoulder leaning towards the light.
It's a beautiful room - a very peaceful place to sit in.
Claire

Well, Claire, you have a few more years of gardening up north to account for the Grand Central situation. My depth in northern (read: winterizing) gardening is less than two winters. But I am quite fond of enjoying my plants all year. The first time I lost my lovely May Night salvias due to the dry heat. And when it got really cold, we went south and nobody was here to look after them. This year, we are fortunate to have friends staying who usually live aboard their sailboat. That is something you cannot do up here during the winter, unless you want to be a popsicle.

Down south I don't have to winterize MUCH, but we are planning to take an old cement block garage/workshop which lost its entire roof several hurricanes ago, put a polycarbonate roof on it, install an Endless Pool in one end and house my tropical-like plants in the other, along with a tiny dining table for all-weather enjoyment. HE thinks there will be a workshop in this space, but that will NOT happen. He already has a storage shed for his ugly piles of stuff. With the economic crunch, this plan will not happen immediately, needless to say. But I am already using the space in a crude fashion. I'm thinking of buying a roll-around basketball goal, use it as a center pole and putting a large nylon parachute over that, then tying sandbags around the parachute perimeter and throwing them across the top of the walls. This will not be perfect, but perhaps it will keep all my ferns and tender plants alive through the winter months down south. I won' have to bank bales of hay around them like hubby did several seasons back to keep 2 hens and a rooster alive up here.

2) cynthial_2006 sez: I recently brought in my plants and now have an infestation of white flys (I had bought "Good Soil" from a local nursery to pot my elephant ear in and the soil was contaiminated with them). I have put up the yellow sticky traps and have been spraying my plants with neem oil. Any sugestions that might help?

Cynthia, Mr. Jones at Jones Farm here in Chelmsford told me to take all my plants which had spent the summer outdoors and spray (actually he said SOAK) them with this oil and let it dry before I brought the plants indoors. I did that pretty much as he described, and so far have found only one cutworm on my beloved geranium babies.

I have no idea how to deal with white flies. I used traps in the kitchen to deal with the flour moths--disgusting the way they can grow inside sealed packages of grain products. One thing I use, which is safe around my parrots, and dogs, is a product called CAMICIDE. It is a pyrethrin insecticide. When you have parrots, you don't want ants, seed moths, roaches, etc. And you don't want residual poisoning. I'm not sure if Camicide is safe on plants or soil, I know it is not poisonous to animals after it dries. However, I don't put it where they can eat it. For a real gardening product to do the job, I'd ask this question as a topic all on its own. It will be a quick way to get your perfect answer.

I'm rooting around trying to find my photos of when I moved a minivan full of houseplants from NYC to MA in 2004, and kept them in a portable greenhouse until it got too cold.

Re white fly: I've never had them, but one way to rid the soil of eggs is to put the whole pot in a bucket of water for a few hours, then let it drain. Drowns them. This was recommended to me as a non-chemical way to treat all houseplants when they come in for the winter. I did it one year, but haven't bothered since then, because I didn't have problems with insects, except for some mealy bugs on a hoya late in the season. Well, there was the field cricket that came in last year and chirped away in the house for a few months. I think it ate any residual mealy bugs because the hoya was clean this spring.

Claire