Deadly Alive

While I cannot do any outdoor gardening yet, I am still astonished at how well some of my indoor plants are doing! My apartment is fairly warm and dry (at least compared to other ones in the city here), with moderate natural light coming from a large living room window over my balcony, which seems to be favoring tropical and desert plants right now!

I've been wondering for while what this plant (right) is for a while now...I got it as a small (almost) seedling with about 3 leaves and only about a foot tall a year or two ago, and now it's doing very well, about 3 feet tall! As far as I can tell it is a variety of Dieffenbachia, or "dumb cane", which is a tropical plant that loves wet ground, semi-warm air, and moderate lighting (perfect for my place!), which would explain why it's flourishing. At one point it started losing its bottom leaves, but I repotted it into a container with better drainage, and off it went!

What I also discovered online was - this plant is highly poisonous! Geez! Luckily I've stopped my cat from chewing on it before he made a habit of it, but good to know! Here are a few tips if you would also like your dumb cane to do better: http://www.guide-to-houseplants.com/dumb-cane.html

And surprisingly enough, I actually have another plant that is flourishing on my living room window sill and is also poisonous:

Yep, the aloe plant! While is juice soothes burns, it is supposedly poisonous to injest. I say supposedly because although I don't want to test it out, my cat has indeed eaten this plant (when I was gone once) almost completely down to its roots - I really thought it was gone, but I continued to water it and hope for the best - look at it just today! Starting to outgrow its pot (again!) and growing lots of new sprouts!

Aloe has always seemed fairly easy to grow, and especially loves sitting here on the window sill because it gets lots of light and is directly over the heater - a built-in desert climate.

And luckily my cat is still around to tell about it, maybe he didn't eat enough to be lethal....needless-to-say, the plant is blocked off from a certain orange-furred predator....