Monthly Archives: June 2010

Zebra Cactus or Zebra Plant – Haworthia fasciata

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Sun: Medium Light

Water: Water well when moderately dry

Soil: Prefers well drained soil

Fertilize: monthly during growing season with a weak solution

Native to: South Africa

Notes:
Got mine at Steins several years ago. Not entirely sure mine are fasciata or attenuata. Haworthia fasciata doesn’t like direct sunlight, as I have recently found by accident. I thinned out the plants above it in the window and now it’s turning red! The leaves are becoming brittle and some of them are drying out. It likes bright light, just keep it out of the direct sun.

Other Resources:

  • All you want to know about Haworthias and Gasterias

    • Plants and finding information online

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    Ugh. Finding information about plants online is a nightmare. Badly designed sites, simply unusable sites, poorly organized information… you’d think even just in the attempt to make the information useful to themselves all those pages would be highly usable (if not well designed, cuz, not everyone can afford a designer of course).

    Well, I’m trying to make my plant info easy to use, easy to find, and easy to follow. If you have any trouble using my site, please, tell me. Sure, it’s optimized for my own use, but I’m putting this information out there as much to make the information easy to use finally as anything else. If there’s something plant-related you’re looking for and you just can’t find it, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help.

    What is “BPI Certified”?

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    Something I’m seeing on some so-called “green alternatives” products is a little seal with the words “BPI Certified”. I’d never heard of it before so I decided to find out what BPI is and why I should care if something is certified by them. It looks like this:

    BPI Compostable Logo

    First thing I discovered is that if you go looking for “BPI Certified” in google, you’re going to come up with a bunch of construction hits. Apparently people can become “BPI Certified” in the construction industry (I didn’t dig deep enough to find out what it actually certifies because it’s not what I’m researching today).

    Well, that’s not it. So I tried other keywords and eventually found my way to the Biodegradable Products Institute. Their logo matches the seal I was seeing so this must be what I’m looking for. BPI is, in plain English, a group of manufacturers, academics and government groups who promote biodegradable materials. Continue reading →

    Living Lightly

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    I am part of consumerist western culture.

    Oh, I’m not blindly so. I eat local where possible (very hard to do during a Wisconsin winter) to cut down on pollution from transporting food and to help local farmers. I avoid the worst of the individually pre-packaged over-processed foods to cut down on packaging that just goes in the landfill (and because that crap is really bad for you and doesn’t taste very good anyway!). I walk around turning out the lights when they’re not needed. I recycle what the local government will pick up.

    But I’m part of it nonetheless. I’m a little too sedentary (with the decline in health that comes with that), a little too quick to jump to the easy route, and my footprint on the planet is a few sizes too large.

    In other words, I’m not too far ahead of the average American when it comes to my negative impact on the world. Continue reading →