Want a bit of summertime color around your house or apartment, but don’t have the time or inclination to care for roses or other flowering plants? The coleus may be right for you!
Coleus (Coleus scutellarioides) is a member of the mint family native to southeast Asia down through Queensland, Australia. As with most mints, coleus have mostly square stems with the leaves on the opposite sides of the stem from each other. Unlike most ornamentals grown in North America, coleus are cultivated for their foliage, not their flowers. While in nature the plant is varying shades of green, a century of propagation has developed some eye-popping color variants.
Dragon Heart
I had been aware of the plant for some time as subcommandante of the local Black Thumb Society. Frustrated by years of killing plants whether they needed it or not, I endeavored to find something that was so hardy that even I couldn’t arrange for its demise. These last few years, I’ve been buying from the local college’s Environmental Horticulture Graduate Student Association (motto: You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think), which has a sale every March to raise funds for educational conferences and scholarships. All the photos in this article are plants from this year’s sale, save the “Gator Glory” at the end.
Colorblaze REDiculous
In the above photo, you’ll see a little yellowish coleus peeking out from the main plant. That’s one that I somehow successfully overwintered. This doesn’t happen often, even in Florida. Being native to tropical and subtropical climes, your coleus is almost certainly going to be an annual. It’ll die once temperatures get into the forties. Unless you’re a south Florida, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico Glib, be prepared to plant these every spring and enjoy just for a summer. Don’t worry, you don’t have to live in the south to enjoy this plant.
Coleus was a popular bedding plant during the Victorian era, then fell out of favor, and is now making a comeback due, in no small part, to its versatility. It grows in the ground just as easily as in a pot. I put mine in pots primarily because I can move them around to change the eye-attracting colorful parts of my yard and walkways. Potting the plants also gives me more control over sun exposure, moisture levels, and soil nutrients.
La Rambla
Getting these into your garden, porch, or walkway is simple. Simply buy a pot (preferably with pre-drilled drainage holes in the bottom), some potting soil, and your coleus from your local nursery or big-box home improvement garden center. Put the potting soil in the pot, place the coleus in a hole in the soil, and water it immediately thereafter. Coleus in the wild are shade lovers, but most recent varietals are tolerant of full sun. I try to put mine where they’ll get morning sun and mottled sunlight or afternoon shade. Water a couple of times per week, depending on local conditions and sun exposure. That’s it.
Coleosaurus
Coleus will typically reach a height of about two feet, with a similar diameter. After a few months of growth, you might notice a vertical stem with small blue or purple flowers. Pinch this off where the stem joins the rest of the plant to encourage fuller growth of the leaves.
Gator Glory
This is an example of a fully-grown plant. The above coleus was my pride and joy two summers ago. It trailed down from the top of its pot nearly to the ground, spanning three feet from top to bottom and was nearly as wide. It got morning sun and was protected from the midday heat by the two oaks that it was under.
Main Street River Walk
So there you have it: a colorful addition to your home that will give you something nice to look at all summer and requires only the bare minimum of care. Coleus will thrive as soon as soil temperatures get above 60F. If curious, you can check your plant hardiness zone here. Warm days are just around the corner — get to planting!
So, every one, needs a Coleus-SEE UM!
(That is for Shpip!)
I’ll eventually do a post sans wordplay, just to show that I’m not a one-trick peony.
That will probably crocus with the shock.
It’s all pun and games until Swiss comes by and leaves you a narrowed gaze.
That’s just another perennial.
Yeah, sure, that’ll make every thing rosy.
Swiss tries, but he’s not very effective in rooting this stuff out.
These puns are mint!
Keep up with these puns annual be sorry.
I like the Coleosaurus. Will these grow in Southern Michigan? I’m going to put some hostas in the shade by my garage and could try a couple of these as well.
A link in the article has coleus advice from U. of Minnesota, so I can’t see why they wouldn’t grow in southern Michigan. Late May to October, probably.
Mrs. TOK likes to plant mint around the house, to ward off bees and other insects. Being from the mint family, I wonder if coleus has the same effect?
When I let the flower stalk grow (the flowers themselves are tiny), they actually attract pollinators. I’ve never seen any repellent effect from the non-flowered Coleus.
Mint is trying to take over the beds around my house. Fortunately it hasn’t kept the bees away from the flowering plants and it smells good when I pull it up.
When my mint plant flowers the bees are all over it.
After an epic years-long battle to get rid of a mint plant that had taken over my flowerbeds in Wisconsin, I will only plant them in pots. And put the pots on a hard surface, not the ground, as I also learned they will send runners out the bottom of the pot to continue their drive for world domination. They are seriously “invasive” and very hard to get rid of or control.
That said, I’ve almost always had a potted mint going.
Have you tried any of the ‘flavor’ hybrids? I loved the chocolate mint, with lemon mint a close second,
Fun factoid, possibly an old wives tale: spearmint or peppermint (or both?) repel mice, which is why rural Midwest barns always have mint growing around the foundation.
Well, that and the ineradicalability of mint.
Mosquitoes too, I hear.
We’ve planted chocolate mint, it’s a neat plant. I like chewing a leaf or two. Tastes great, and fresh breath!
I have one section of my garden box that is for mint and of course, I have to beat back the horde into the other sections. However, mint and green onion love growing together.
A guy who used to work for me put down some basil in southern Illinois, and it took over his entire yard.
He would bring in freezer bags full of it. Smelled heavenly.
Pretty. I’ve seen them before. Never knew their name.
I recently planted a bunch of rhubarb I got for free from a crazy old coot in the woods of Podunkville. My first mistake was bringing more than one bucket. He just kept filling up bucket after bucket. I was able to give 2 buckets away.
I’ve also planted asparagus, onions, and raspberries.
I’m working on putting “poles in holes” around the garden. Three poles planted last night. I need to get a fence up before the deer get a free lunch.
Rhubarb, once established, will never die. My grandmother asked me to remove some from her gardens so for the next several years I chased renegade plants.
Maybe some sort of radiation event could do it. But I doubt it.
One of the previous owners of the house I own now thought it would be a good idea to use English Ivy as ground cover in a heavily shaded patch under a massive oak tree.
I strongly dislike that person.
Mom’s distant neighbor has similar. I haven’t heard any rats rustling in the ivy for a while though.
When I was a kid, I cut up some potatoes that had started to sprout and planted them in the garden. For the next decade my dad was complaining about the potatoes shooting up in random spots where he was trying to grow other vegetables.
My wife threw sweet potato scraps into the woods behind our house. She noticed some popping up this year.
My neighbor planted an early variety of tiny tomatoes in his garden one year (maybe 1975?). That was the only thing that ever came up from that end of the garden for the next few years.
You can always give away rhubarb to people you don’t like, too.
My gf started asparagus from seed last year.
Don’t do that.
You can’t harvest until year 3.
I love rhubarb. Don’t have any growing nor does anyone I know, so I have to buy it.
Strawberry season is just around the corner too.
Putting “poles in holes” is how I tried to spend my 20s.
It was also the name of our HS polka band.
You’re lucky, you can get away for a twenty. Here it’s $50 for local, $100 for an import.
Neat!
Since CO has like three colors, these could be a nice addition.
Thanks, Shpip!
Yeah, I’ll have to look into these. I suspect they will need a fair amount of shade in AZ, but there’s a few places where they might be just the thing. Thanks, Shpip!
Still battling the aphid infestation here.
I can’t wait till the plants go outside and we can unleash the ladybug army on them.
I just put two of my prairie fire pepper plants outside as a test. Four more are in pots still inside. I’m hoping they have enough time to fruit.
My mint has aphids; better turn it over and hose it off. Catnip’s happy and so are the cats.
My garden this year has a healthy army of ladybugs. Our wetter than usual winter and cooler than normal spring has really given my garden a good year so far.
We close in 3 weeks then we start with the indoor and outdoor decorating. I’ll keep this in mind.
Lesson learned from the last place – I’ll never plant real mint (peppermint / spearmint) outside of a container again.
Or horseradish
I’ve heard similar horror stories about hops. But I don’t care. At some point, when I get the lawn and such taken care of, some hop bines are going in.
Then some barely and you are ready to survive the collapse.
ready to survive the collapse.
Just barely.
Yesterday I found a small little nest of something in a small apple tree. I scraped it off and squinted carefully through my thick glasses, Lo and behold little wiggling things about 1/4 inch long were inside. Baby army worms! I crushed and buried them. I haven’t sprayed the tress yet, just starting to get leaves.
You have to salt the earth to get rid of it.
I seriously wonder how most of the continent wasn’t covered with it.
We have cat mint out by our mailbox, but wouldn’t mind adding some coleus elsewhere. Wish it was a perennial in Iowa. At least the cat mint survives our winter.
Coleus is a mint?? When I was a kid, one of my sisters grew spearmint along the side of the garage, and the stuff had to be mowed back so it wouldn’t take over the whole back yard.
This coleus stuff might actually be something I can’t kill! 😃
Mrs. Time and Mrs. MIL planted several of these in flower pots on the porches last weekend. They look great.
I’m growing lots of grass around the new garage. The nearly no-stop rain last week really helped to get the seed going. I have to keep up with watering at a increasingly higher volume to encourage deep rooting. I want to get the grass established with some deep roots before the summer, if not the weeds will take over.
They also planted me a bunch of Mucho Nacho jalapenos. I plan on pickling and fermenting the resulting peppers.
“I’m growing lots of grass around the new garage.”
IYKWIMAITYD.
I caught a couple of kids trying to walk from the park across my new field. Let’s just say I didn’t react well.
RC. I don’t know what you are talking about. It’s a Kentucky blue grass mixed with another variant. I call it the cannonball.
The deer and rabbits are pretty sure those look quite tasty.
OT: The Thursday night post is still in pending, I am slightly concerned. If there is an issue and it cannot be seen let me know.
All is fine! Remain calm!
I think it’s there now.
Mojeaux:
OT, but I thought of you when I saw this comic (SFW).
Cancel RJ, and I’ll stop Firsting here.
It’s a tempting offer, but I like RJ.
Beautiful! Maybe I’ll get a few for the patio
Relevant: https://twitter.com/SallyMayweather/status/1656439027606642688
Soil is an anti-depressant.
@shpip, u haz mail
Check this crazy bitch out.
https://www.facebook.com/iowansforinformedconsent/videos/well-just-get-rid-of-all-the-whites-in-the-untied-states-is-dr-carol-bakers-solu/1697679050356263/
https://www.immunizationadvocates.org/experts/carol-j-baker
And nothing else happens.
I guess she thinks gingers are whites?
^aren’t
If we got rid of the white liberal women about 90% of our problems would disappear as well.
They are AWFL.
They want to force you not persuade you.
The entirety of the fascist American system in a nutshell.
People want to buy solvent based concrete sealers. I can’t sell them.
They use businesses to enact the laws they know the consumer would revolt against (as well as using those businesses for tax collection).
I’ve heard this said for years, but they’re not trying very hard to hide it anymore: Their policies aren’t popular, so they need to lie and force people to comply.
That’s exactly how they do it. “We’re not banning incandescent lights. We’re just setting the standards such that they can’t be sold.” “Nobody is coming for your gas stove. We’ll just create standards that make it impossible to sell new gas stoves.”
Questions arose about the cost and implementation of various climate policies, and while Miller said the administration does not have a grand total, she emphasized that the cost to not address climate change would be more severe.
Citation needed.
We have no idea what this would cost, but we know that would cost more.
What kind of moron nods along with that.
But what about the tied ones?
Only white people think for themselves and are skeptical of authority? It sounds like that is what she is saying.
Another easy plant is chives. We have two pots of chives that we’ve had for over 10 years. They’re the first thing to sprout in the spring and they come back year after year.
At least around here, daisies are a fairly safe bet. Some got into a patch of ground here, and they keep coming back every year.
Have you tried herbicides?
Nah. Daisies don’t bother me, and they’re better than the weeds. Sunday I hope to at least kill and cover the (long dormant) raised bed garden to prep it for being rehabbed for planting next year.
There was a house previously on the land where I had my house built. I often find feral garden plants. Roses in the woods, lilacs everywhere (non-blooming due to a lack of sun), a single chrysanthemum, ornamental mints and lillis of the valley, and thriving clusters of hostas. None of it looks necessarily good though, except for the Lillies of the valley which make a nice border around part of my woods.
You know what’s better than roses in your woods?
Wait, that’s not how the joke goes.
Lilies of the valley have to be the winner for the best smelling flower.
Heh.
Some late-night texts with @TuckerCarlson, wherein he says he is indeed running for president, then says he is just kidding about that, then says he is “fundamentally a dick.” Story here…
Tucker is “fundamentally a dick” and he just admitted it outright in the open. This is dangerous to our democracy. ///CNN
I need Tucker v Trump v DeSantis in my life.
He’s the dick we need for these times.
Team America: World Police (10/10) Movie CLIP – Dicks, Pussies and Assholes (2004)
Sounds gay.
Epic troll.
The court made a ruling on the California Pork Regulation suit.
The ruling is a jumbled mess of concurrances in part and dissents in part with three written opions with clusters of agreements and dissents that split perpendicular to the normal ideological divide.
Long story short, the bad law stays in place.
Good, Californians are free to continue to be idiots.
Bad, Californians are free to Force companies in other states to follow their stupidity.
Are pork sellers forced by law to sell in California?
See the above discussion on this, as well. Private businesses are all too willing to play ball with government. They stay in markets like California. They quietly comply with bullshit regulation after regulation. They allow government to enact fees and backdoor taxes on consumers.
At the very least, I’d like to see some businesses piss and moan and make political statements on this. When a customer is paying more because of government policy, make that shit explicit on the receipts.
The biggest market in the country. It’s easy for a start up to stay of CA. But for an established business, leaving the market could kill the company.
So, you pay the graft to stay in business.
And you don’t bitch about it in public, because someone on the regulatory side will drive you out of business.
The Mafia was more honest.
Having a two tier system where out of state companies are exempt from local laws but local companies aren’t is asinine.
It is the only way in which the fity laboratories of democracies philosophy can function. Otherwise, the most fascistic wins.
I had colitis once. It was pretty colorful.
I read that as coitus, when I saw colorful I thought OMG…
Last week someone mentioned the Silo series by Hugh Howey.
It looked interesting and I started reading them.
While I had trouble understanding Thurma’s actual plan, the books themselves were really good.
I didn’t really care for the 2 short stories at the end, but I would recommend the main three books.
Has anyone seen the Apple TV series?
If it’s good, I might get Apple TV just for long enough to watch it.
LOL!
Funny snek.
Lol. Well done.
I was kinda hoping for a good king cobra pic though…
In that thread: Scary fake cat
Hahaha!
Pretty cruel, though. Kitties gonna make that motherfucker pay.
Peers: Hey OBE, we hate lugging up a full sized monitor and keyboard so we can connect to the output of these systems
OBE: Here is a mobile platform I built up for you all…battery pack, 15″ flat screen USB-C monitor (got needed cables to pull VGA video) and a silicon keyboard.
Nice little setup that fits in a case and we can use it to give us a second monitor or connect to a system fairly easily
Obviously remoting into them would be the more ideal way, but we FedGov and do things the hard way.
I thought we were gonna put it all in the cloud so we could look at it anywhere?
Uh…some of it I would like to keep in a close loop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTDENzpW7tw
I expect nothing less Tundra!
Ok, I admit it. I watched Tropic Thunder, so I know better. You never go full tard. But I read ENB’s take on the CNN town hall turned debate and so help me. I went all in.
This herd mentality of the press, this drive to be gatekeepers for the masses, deciding what we see, hear and think… It is an abomination. And no libertarian would ever countenance it, let alone participate.
So when she went with the “should we platform Trump?” Narrative in the morning links, I spewed forth a rant worthy of the guy with the shopping cart panhandling at your exit.
https://reason.com/2023/05/11/cnn-gave-trump-a-megaphone-and-he-used-it-exactly-as-youd-expect/#comment-10058528
.
You’d think if they think he is a buffoon, you’d want to give him a loud megaphone so you can hear what you think is his craziness…but what do I know.
I made exactly that point.
In 2016 they coordinated with the DNC and all of the top media organizations to push Trump (and a couple of other favored opponents) to the front. But it was clear they liked Trump the most. They were sure herself would easily win.
The way you defeat stupid, ignorant or evil is by letting it speak. This is well known. So instead of arguing, if they want to win, they should pull a Joe Rogan. If he really is a racist, misogynistic demon, letting him talk at length with someone who just esplores his views would fully expose him.
As it is? They are practically guaranteeing a primary win with all the persecution.
I tried to crosspost here, but WordPress is too smart for that.
On the “Biden made bank” front, I have seen a bunch of tweets in the last 24 hours claiming that AOC is now worth $30 million…. On a salary netting a couple hundred grand a year. “She makes $1.5 million per year from various investments”
Bartender to multimillionaire… But no graft involved…..
Wait – wasn’t she just promoting a bill prohibiting congresspeople from trading stocks?
That’s some cynical shit.
Read the full thread above. Her financial statement from 2022 shows she’s a broke as 90% of Americans. A couple of checking accounts and a 401K.
Dead thread. wrong place to reply.