kindness

Nearly 12 year old thread… Originally started because PD shared some seed with me. None of mine made it unfortunately. It’s great to see others have had success and are now managing flowering and seed collection from home grown plants. Wonderful!

My caapi has bounced back nicely. I’m in the process of taking picture a day to do a time lapse video - but that’s gonna take a while. Attached is it yesterday. Amazingly even though it lost nearly every leaf the green aphids are still maintaining their little Ayahuasca home. I have been brushing them off by hand which squashes them when there are leaves with little population outbreaks. I don’t really want to spray it with chems although am not so opposed to an organic contact pesticide like pyrethrin…. Anyhow. Glad I didn’t completely stuff up. Nearly time to take some cuttings as insurance!

My caapi cutting was going great. She’s about a year old, lives indoors, is in a large pot, (although has outgrown the one she’s in and needs potting on), is around 2.5m high with heaps of side branching etc… it was very healthy apart from an ongoing battle with green aphids. I kept it well watered, although may have let it dry out a bit one hot day recently. I had been occasionally treating the aphids with a mild solution of dish washing detergent and water then sometimes blasting the leaves with a water sprayer to physically remove the aphids from the growing tips and back of leaves etc. This was quite effective till I got some new dish washing liquid… it was an anti-bacterial concentrate one and following a few successive days of spraying for aphids the vine has dropped nearly ALL its leaves Have I killed my wonderful plant that I love so much? Will it reshoot? Does anyone else agree it was the dishwashing liquid that’s burned the leaves or maybe I let it get too dry on one of the hot days we had? I’m really leaning toward the liquid though.. Anyhow, I’ve given the remaining leaves and vine in general a couple of big plain water mistings/drenches to get rid of any remaining liquid that was on the plant. I will re pot in the next few days also into a larger pot and hopefully she springs back into life. I was so happy with my indoor caapi! I really hope I haven’t killed it. I’m really hoping the massive leave drop is one of the plants mechanisms for dealing with stresses and not the end of days for the poor thing. kind regards to all

Maybe trying to mimic the areas where it has become a bugger to eradicate… link is to South Oz fact sheet for ‘African rue’. https://data.environment.sa.gov.au/Content/Publications/pests_rue.pdf

Repotted the vine in a lovely big new pot with some sweet sweet soil. She’s settled in nicely over the last few days. It’s got loads of new growth sprouting from nodes all over the place. Looks like it’s going to be just fine :) I’ll post some pics when the growth is a little more substantial.

Yeah the little green buggers have been a real pain to get rid of… when it was smaller I could wipe them off the leaves and stems by hand which killed them a plenty being so small and soft…. As it took off though that wasn’t much of an option. Anyhow, cheers, might give the Dustbuster idea a go. The root system of the vine seems as vigorous as the above ground part, it has very quickly grown into its various pot sizes. Definitely not one that is happy to sit in the same sized pot for long! Ill keep the thread posted with recovery pics if that’s the way it plays out! cheers again

Thanks mate, really appreciate that. I’ll pot it on tomorrow and prune it back a bit. Hopefully with a bit of ICU treatment it will pull through. Such a beautiful plant to grow. Amazing the amount of growth it will put on in just a day or two. It’s taken over the blind it’s in front of a few times now! Would be very rewarding growing in the ground but that isn’t possible here. thanks again

Thanks mate. This is good news. I was thinking about stories I’ve read of people growing it in the ground in areas that get frost and them dying back and coming back the following spring okay - so hopefully it handles my mistake. So annoyed at myself for hurting the plant.. it’s only a year or so old but it’s been doing so well even with the aphid outbreaks. live and learn I guess.

My vacuum cleaner would suck the leaves off the plant at very least… at most it would probably rip vine offshoots off… The plant had a big outbreak of green aphids which I treated by spraying with a weak dish washing liquid solution… it worked quite well. I guess I applied it once every few days the first time… then when the majority of the aphids had turned black (dead) I blasted the dead ones and whatever else was left on there off with a strongish jet of a hand spray bottle. The plant handled that well. No noticeable problems, if anything a boost in growth which I guess came from not being sucked on by the aphids… I stuffed up thinking it was a fairly benign chemical regime - I applied it for a few successive days recently trying to catch the next outbreak early… it also handled that okay. Then I swapped to a new brand of dish liquid and sprayed again, maybe twice, woke up a few morning ago and opened the blind it is growing up behind and a bunch of leaves fell off… then shook the vine a bit which I do to shift old leaves and a pile fell off… it’s continued to drop more over the last few days. yes I stuffed up. It hurts. I was very happy that the plant was doing so well in an area that gets winters down to -8… it’s an indoor plant in a window… Thank you for the support folks. I hope it bounces back.

Bloop

all good

all gone to good homes. thanks

“You’re off to great places, today is your day. Your mountain is waiting, so get on your way.” Dr. Seuss

Sorted out thanks cheers Sabbers

"After a day’s walk, everything has twice its usual value." G.M Trevelyan

Google search Australian native seeds... a number of suppliers are available. If you wanted to get a head start you could also search for nurseries selling native tube stock