Further Reading

When it comes to plants, one size never fits all. Here are some of the website sources that we found useful. Remember these are starting points. More information is better than less so keep reading.

If you are new to plants, you are probably wishing someone wrote down a sensible, bullshit-free, experience-based, scientifically sound manual to avoid vegetable death. Well. Someone did and it is in this link, written by Al Tapla.

Adenium
For adenium, the best source of information that I have ever found so far is Tropica Nursery--it is wonderfully coherent and informative.  But as a beginner, I also needed hand-holding and I found it at the AdeniumForum at www.gardenweb.com. There are seriously experienced and generous people there who never get tired of answering newbie questions. Clearly, it is way better to scan the forum archives first because, as I found out starting from zero experience, almost everything I wanted to know was already discussed at length somewhere in previous posts. There is a search box, use it.

My favorite thread was this. It covered everything I needed to know about growing adenium from seeds and other things besides. But this is the link that got me thinking about getting into the whole seed operation in the first place. This thread has pictures of how the plant develops from seed to fatbottom within a year. In plantspeak, that is practically instant gratification.

If you want to know more about lighting, start with this link. Not many casual plant people will want to read pages and pages of articles about lumens, lux, PAR watts, atbp to find out what is best for their needs. But if you have reached the point where you are providing artificial lighting for your indoor plants in the winter, you might as well figure the stuff out, neh.

Failure to germinate, also known as damping-off, is well-covered by this article here.

Haworthia
There is a considerable number of knowledgeable sources online but the one I find myself going back to is the blog called All You Want to Know About Haworthias and Gasterias. His care instructions are all of one page long, succinct and straight to the point. Plus this dude has photographs of haworthias in their native habitat. Going there is apparently a thing.

But if you want ultra-specific answers to your ultra-specific questions, off you go to the Succulent and Cacti forum. There are other fora online, to be sure, but this was the first one I found and I just haven't bothered traipsing around anywhere else.

You must also check out the Haworthia Society, especially this section on conservation because we should always wonder if our seemingly harmless hobbies are indeed harmless.

Mesembs
There are tons of websites about that horrible family, Aizoaceae. but Lithops Stories is one of our favorites. You will lose hours just browsing through those pictures. 

The most useful source of information if you are just starting, however, is still Steven Hammer's seminal compendium, "The New Mastering the Art of Growing Mesembs". This work has gone from site to site until they disappeared and now, the only surviving copy online is in that Iceland server.  

 

Hasta la vista.


More links:
International Union on Conservation of Nature
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
Convention on the International Trade on Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
CITES Appendix I, II and III
Red List of South African Plants
Endangered Species of the Philippines

Useful Information
Propagating Succulents