And the results are in: the winner of the Triffid Ranch in the Workplace contest is Lewisville Salon Suites and Spa. Rosemont 6th Grade gave a hearty challenge, but with 78 votes, the Salon Suites was the decisive winner. Many thanks to everyone who voted, and now it’s a matter of getting Launch Bay to its new location.
The enclosures Novi and Hoodoo (shown here) went home last weekend, but we still have two contestants vying for Launch Bay. You have until midnight Central Time on April 28 to get your vote in, so make somebody’s day.
It’s over, and we now have winners in the first-ever Texas Triffid Ranch in the Workplace contest. Three enclosures are going out to those brave enough to submit why they thought their place of employment needed a carnivorous plant enclosure. Novi and Hoodoo are going to new locales right away, but Launch Bay has some competition.
As promised, if an enclosure got more than one candidate selecting it, the vote comes up to you, the general Triffid Ranch readers. Everyone who participated gave a reason why they thought they needed an enclosure, so it’s up to all of you to decide. The reasons:
Rosemont 6th Grade – “I work at a 6th grade center and my students LOVE new and interesting things. I recently bought two beta fish and these tough kids adore taking care of them. I think they would absolutely get a kick out of carnivorous plants on campus. They would ask so many questions about them and learn so many new things. This is great from an art standpoint, a science standpoint, and ELA because it could spawn so many creative story ideas. I believe that a school would be the perfect host to such a unique and amazing enclosure.”
Lewisville Salon Suites & Spa – “My husband and I own a salon suite business (its in a strip center next to a dentist, Tiff’s Treats, Karate studio, and a sports bar) and we have 32 rooms that we rent to hair stylist, nail technicians, massage therapists, eye lash experts, barbers, etc. When their clients enter the entrance of the salon there is a small lobby that is in need for something impressive. We have beautiful art work on the walls and some amazing chandeliers but my plants that I had in the entry way died since we were mandatory closed for 2 months. I tried to sneak up there to take care of them but they didn’t survive (didn’t help the landlord shut off our water). We need something fun!! We need something people can remember us by!! We need something we can feature on our website, Instagram etc. We are so glad our tenants (most of them) have survived covid shut down and trying to get their customers to come back in to the salon. We would love to celebrate with them by having a fantastic artistic plant in our workplace and to have something that will set us apart from the competition!!! Thank you for your time to consider us.”
So now it’s up to you. Ballot box stuffing is encouraged (after all, this is for fun, not for political office), so feel free to get friends and cohorts in, and the ballot box closes at midnight Central Standard Time on April 28, 2021. Pick your favorite, and check back here next week.
Update: the voting is now closed. Thanks to everyone who voted.
Just a friendly heads-up to note that the contest to win a unique Triffid Ranch enclosure for your workplace ends on April 21, and here’s the final call. If you’re not interested, feel free to pass on word to friends who are. The plants are waiting.
Okay, so things are gradually reopening through North Texas, both by choice and by necessity. Restaurants and bars closed for the last year are letting customers know that they’re open, limited occupation and otherwise. Meanwhile, the year-long experiment in working from home continues to evolve for many companies, with many preferring to keep offices closed permanently and others making plans to bring everyone back by the end of 2021. Vaccinations rates are up, people are much more optimistic about the end of the pandemic than they were six months ago, and stimulus checks are burning holes in peoples’ pockets. If the business of the United States is business, as the old saying goes, a lot of folks are getting off the couch, going through their work clothes, and setting alarm clocks.
In the process, the need for some green in the workplace never went away, but a lot of the plants did. Everyone in office environments has stories of coming back only to find long-dead flora that had been left behind when the shutdown orders hit. (I won’t even start with the aquaria.) It’s even worse with long-closed restaurants: I’ve heard stories of Oceans 11-style heists conducted by plant rental services trying to get Ficus trees and philodendrons out of newly bankrupt venues where nobody knows who has the keys. While garden centers and nurseries have been doing wonderfully through all of this, the business side of Dallas horticulture has had it rough.
On a personal level, the Texas Triffid Ranch ran into a big problem: a problem with space. The events and situations of 2020 meant more and more time to create new enclosures, but fewer opportunities to hold open houses, trade shows, and other events to find them all new homes. Even after the massive revamp of the gallery shelving system, the ideas kept coming, but the places to show off the end results eventually filled up. That’s probably going to change quite a bit in the next few months, but right now, there’s a need to find new homes for longtime enclosures. Our space issue is the gain of three lucky Dallas-area workplaces.
So here’s the situation: through the month of April 2021, the Triffid Ranch is going to give away three custom carnivorous plant enclosures to three deserving nominees. For the first two weeks (April 6 to April 18, 2021), share your best affirmation or sob story as to why your place of employ needs its very own enclosure. This isn’t limited to seemingly plant-friendly venues, either: doctor’s or lawyer’s offices, restaurants, comic shops, libraries, auto garages, bookstores, nail salons, tea shops, bars, pubs, distribution warehouses, showrooms, waiting rooms, and obviously dentist offices. (That goes without saying.) After that, on April 21, 2021, ten entries will be selected from the total entries and put up for an open public vote. Ballot stuffing is encouraged (hey, it works for D magazine), and the final three winners based on total votes will be announced on April 28. After that, it’s just a matter of setting up a time for delivery or pickup. Got it?
Now to see what you’re fighting for:
The first enclosure under consideration is Novi (2018), featuring a Nepenthes burkei x hamata hybrid.
The second offering is Launch Bay (2015), featuring a Nepenthes “King of Spades” hybrid.
The final enclosure up for giveaway is Hoodoo (2018), featuring a Nepenthes veitchii.
And now, the rules:
Numero uno: This contest is open to any business in the greater North Texas area. However, winners outside of the greater Dallas area (within a 35-mile radius of downtown Dallas) will be responsible for pickup. Sadly, this contest is not open to participants outside of Texas.
Numero two-o: For tax reasons, the value of each enclosure is listed at $200 US. Winning prizes may not be exchanged for cash.
Numero three-o: The care of each enclosure will be the sole responsibility of the prize winner, and the Texas Triffid Ranch will not be responsible for any costs or damages of any sort incurred after receipt of the prize. Planned locations for an enclosure should take into account foot traffic, customer or employee interference or vandalism, or any other factor that might lead to damages to the enclosure, the surrounding area, or individuals or groups with access to the enclosure.
Numero four-o: The prize will not come with lighting, locks, misters/foggers, thermometers/hygrometers, or other accessories, and must be provided by the prize winner. The Texas Triffid Ranch will assist with recommendations on the best options for the prize winner, but will not supply free accessories.
Numero five-o: All best efforts will be made to assist the prize winner with sufficient information for successful care of the prize, but the Texas Triffid Ranch will not be responsible for dead plants for any reason.
Numero six-o: One entry will be accepted per business. Multiple attempts by multiple participants may be made, but the judges’ ruling will be final.
Numero seven-o: Initial acceptance of entries ends at midnight on Wednesday, April 21, 2021. Public voting on the entrants will begin no later than Wednesday, April 21, 2021. All votes must be in by Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at midnight. No entries will be accepted after Wednesday, April 21 for any reason.
Numero Eight-o: This contest is not open to home businesses or to those working from home. That’s for another time.
Now, if that works for all of you, get those entries in. (NOTE: the contest is now closed.)
Posted in Contest
Tagged 2021, contest, hoodoo, Launch Bay, Novi, things to do in Dallas when you're dead
A few months back, some may remember my less than salutory review of the book Terrarium Craft and my complaints about the “put a bird on it” sensibility that still infects terrarium design. In the interim, I’ve been collating ideas on how to drag the concept out of the 1970s, and preparing to present them in something approximating a coherent form.
As usual, talking is okay, but action is better. The Los Angeles store Potted is hosting a terrarium design competition, with the grand prize being a $500 shopping spree. Each Friday starting on October 21, all entries sent to Potted will be voted upon, and the winners of each round will be submitted for a final competition. The final prize may be collected by anybody in the continental US, but I imagine entries don’t have to be limited to that.
Anyway. You know the drill. It’s time to take the word “terrarium” out of that horrible avocado-and-goldenrod kitchen and banish it forever from that famed kidney stone of a decade. I know you lot, and I know you’ll make your Uncle Zonker proud.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged contest, miniature gardens, Projects, terraria, vivaria
Okay, so FenCon VIII is only 16 days away, and the Triffid Ranch booth in the dealer’s room should be quite full. At least, that’s the idea, and the variety of plants available depends upon whether or not our relative humidity (currently running about 15 percent) ever goes up. When the humidity is this low, the Sarracenia can photosynthesize or they can grow, but they generally can’t do both.
Anyway. One of the issues with holding a plant show at a science fiction convention lies with people either unfamiliar or uninterested in the rest of the festivities. Either potential Triffid Ranch visitors are understandably unsure as to whether they’d have the time or the inclination to get their money’s worth out of a day pass, or they’d prefer to put the money for a badge into plants. At the same time, the crew at FenCon has been very good to the Triffid Ranch crew for the last three years, and I’d like to return the favor and make sure that the convention continues to run for a very long time. (I’ve let loose so many mea culpas over my initial suspicions about the viability of the convention that I went hoarse in 2008, and I’m very glad to see it finishing up its first decade.)
So here’s the deal. I currently have one three-day regular membership at FenCon VIII, a $40 value, reserved for one lucky individual. In order to sweeten the pot, four other participants will win Joey Boxes. All you need to do is:
In return, here are the restrictions:
And so it begins. If you can’t make it, please feel free to pass on word to friends and cohorts. If you can, get in your entry by midnight next Monday morning, and pull your 300-pound Samoan attorney out of storage. For this weekend, you’re going to need him.
And now that the heat is finally breaking and the air finally smells like something other than burning flint, it’s time to talk about the rest of the year in North Texas. If things go well, they’ll go quiet between now and September 23. On that Friday, the Czarina and I set up shop at FenCon VIII, and we won’t leave until I finish burying the attendees, organizers, and fellow vendors in more information on carnivorous plants than their fragile little minds can handle.
Friends who knew me back during my science fiction writing days, and knew my feelings about conventions during those writing days, regularly question my sanity on showing plants at conventions. I have a lot of good reasons for doing so. Younger convention attendees in particular may have no interest in roses or irises, but they want to know everything they can find about sundews and bladderworts. Not only do the plants bring a much-appreciated touch of green to a dealer’s room, but the only competition I offer to most of the other dealers is in the “rising tides lift all boats” variety. While I have less than no interest whatsoever in returning to writing about science fiction, I still miss friends involved with the genre, and this is a great way to see them while doing business. Most of all, the definition of true joy is watching the face of a seven-year-old who suddenly realizes that most plants in science fiction are unmatched by some of the weirdness in the “mundane” world.
Anyway, FenCon VIII looks as if it is going to be the convention’s best show yet, and the con staff wants to guarantee this. Because it’s offering a last chance at discounted rates and online ordering over the Labor Day weekend, the Texas Triffid Ranch is going to offer a free three-day regular admission pass to a lucky blog reader. Details will follow soon, and feel free to spread the word. Something interesting to do in Dallas in autumn that didn’t involve Red River Rivalry: who’d have thunk it?
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Billy Goodnick, but he’s a Santa Barbara garden designer best known for his Crimes Against Horticulture listings of particularly inappropriate or borderline offensive of trees, shrubs, and other boundary plants. I have a couple of particularly good examples here in Dallas that I need to photograph for him, but that’s not why I’m bringing up the subject.
No, the reason why Billy is, once again, keeping me from mowing the lawn around the Sarracenia area is because he’s running a contest. He recently finished Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott’s new book The Informed Gardener, and offers a free copy to the individual who has the best gardening myth to share. Feel free to head over there and enter, and then come on back.
Got it out of your system? Excellent. I myself had heard some great ones over the years. “Mixing sand into the ‘black gumbo’ clay in Dallas will soften it up.” (No, that’s a great way to make concrete, especially in summer.) “If you grow watermelons and carrots too close together, the watermelons will taste like carrots.” (That’s merely a great myth to explain why your watermelon cultivar was affected by viruses or simply bad growing conditions.) “Using charcoal grille ashes on your garden will kill your plants because of the lighter fluid fumes.” (Charcoal grille ashes will kill your plants because the highly alkaline and mineralized ash will burn the roots, not any long-volatilized or long-combusted lighter fluid fumes.) Oh, and “Watermelon seeds are poisonous if swallowed.” (Watermelon seeds used to be highly prized as a snack when roasted, and they were extremely popular in the Southern US around the turn of the last century. I have yet to track down exactly why this story popped up, but I suspect it had everything to do with the assumption after World War II that roasted watermelon seeds qualified as “poor food”.)
Now, these and others may be annoying, or potentially destructive, but they’re not dangerous per se. I have one, though, that had a fair chance of being lethal. Worse, it came from a professional who should have known better.
25 years ago next Tuesday, I first started work as a groundskeeper for a Texas Instruments facility north of Dallas. Technically, I was in charge of two of them, and I’d spend four days a week mowing and trimming the two acres of space on one site and then spending a day on the other. Back then, the big sites were named for the town in which they were located (Lewisville, McKinney, Lubbock), or for the road on which they were located (Forest Lane, Lemmon Avenue, Central Expressway) if they were within the immediate Dallas area proper. My main horticultural evil laboratory was at the old Trinity Mills site off Interstate 35 in Carrollton, and the smaller one was in the middle of an older industrial park space on Surveyor Road at the edge of Addison. Trinity Mills was a fabrication facility for TI’s Defensive and Strategic Electronics Group (DSEG), and Surveyor was a general supply warehouse for Trinity Mills and most of the other TI plants and offices in the area. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Since Surveyor Road was so much smaller than Trinity Mills, basic maintenance could be done over the whole area within a day. Basic mowing, kipple pickup off the parking lots, edging, and whatever else needed to be done right away. The problem was that there was just enough time to do the basics, but not enough for larger projects. For instance, we had a big pile of sand in the back of one parking lot for the eventuality of the lot being frozen over in an icestorm, and I had time budgeted to trim back the Bermuda grass attempting to claim its summit. However, there wasn’t enough time to move that huge pile, one wheelbarrow at a time, to a place where the Bermuda grass and other weeds weren’t an issue. Well, technically, I had the time, but it wasn’t seen as a priority to the four layers of management above me who wanted to make sure my TPS reports had cover pages on them.
One day, that changed. My boss’s boss noted that a big linden tree out in front of Surveyor was looking a bit shaggy, and he squeaked a bit about peasants and livestock. My boss interpreted that as a directive to clean up the tree, so he sent me out with a pruning bill, a pair of hedge clippers, and a warning “Don’t get too carried away. That tree is concealing a big transformer for the building, and I don’t want anybody to notice it.”
Well, “don’t get too carried away” still meant removing nearly a ton of dead or bedraggled branches, and I went into the job with all the enthusiasm a 20-year-old being allowed to play outside on a weekday can muster. No, scratch that. It was with all the enthusiasm a 20-year-old being allowed to play outside on a weekday, with implements of destruction, can muster. If I’d been any happier, I would have vibrated all of my molecules into a new quantum state. I chopped and lugged, and sawed and buzzed, and hauled for a while when the pile filled an entire parking space, and generally made me feel incredibly sorry for the people inside who were stuck in their cubicles all day. (Well, almost. Many of them were also the same people who’d dump their car ashtrays onto the parking lot, shove all of the accumulated garbage in their cars out a door, and then tell me “I’m just giving you job security.”)
At this point, I’d been going to town for about four hours, and I was starting to slow down due to the summer heat. Right then, I felt a sharp pain on the inside of my elbow, and then a very unpleasant tingling. As I watched, I got a lovely welt that kept growing as I watched, and the tingling started spreading up my arm.
To this day, I don’t know what critter tagged me, but I could tell that it wasn’t a honeybee. When honeybees sting humans and other large animals, the barbed sting remains trapped in the wound, exuding venom from a very ingenious pump system attached to the venom gland. The bee usually pulls free, tearing this apparatus away from the bee’s body and leaving it to continue shuttling venom below the skin. This is why, by the way, you should never pull a bee sting with your thumb and fingers: that action squeezes even more venom into the site. The best option is to use the flat of a knife, sharp or butter doesn’t matter, to scrape the sting away. In my case, no venom gland and no attached sting, but something got me. And since I’m very sensitive to beestings, this meant seeking medical advice right away.
I managed to get into the building before my right arm went completely numb, and I managed to explain the situation to both my immediate supervisor on the site and the very surprised security guard at the front door. Notice of envemomation, symptoms, and possible courses of action. Both of them figured that getting me to a hospital or care clinic was my only option, but my supervisor realized that according to TI policy, he’d have to get advice from a medical officer before letting me go see a real doctor.
At that time, each larger TI facility had an on-duty nurse for first aid issues, and Surveyor deferred to Trinity Mills’s nurse. The problem was that the nurse in question was, how do I put this, raised in an alternate dimension where medicine and biology ran in a different direction than on Earth. I still remember my jaw hitting my sternum when she told me with authority that mosquitoes didn’t drink blood: they attempted to drink blood plasma, but they died as soon as they bit an individual. Not only did she confirm this when I asked her about this, but when I pointed out that I was pretty sure that female mosquitoes ingested blood to increase the viability of their eggs, I was told this was “liberal propaganda.” Since I was about as low on the company hierarchy as you could go and not give access badges to the bacteria in the septic system, I shut up right then and prayed that I never needed real medical advice from her.
Wouldn’t you know it, this is the one person keeping me from getting to medical care. She insisted upon talking to me, even though my teeth were starting to chatter from the pain of the tingling, asking about symptoms and what I was doing when this happened. I stuttered them out, finishing with “I didn’t see what got me. It could have been a wasp or hornet, or even a spider…”
“Paul, spiders don’t live in trees.”
“I don’t know if it was a spider. I don’t see a puncture, but I can see the welt,” which was now about the size and color of a tomato.
“Paul, SPIDERS DON’T LIVE IN TREES.”
“Okay, whatever. All I can tell was that it’s tearing into me.”
“PAUL. Spiders do NOT live in trees.”
Between the pain and my naive assumption that I was talking with someone nominally classified as sentient, I didn’t realize what she was asking for about another five minutes. She wasn’t going to let me go until I told her “spiders don’t live in trees.” As soon as I admitted that, she finally let me go: two or three steroid injections at the local quack shack later, I was no longer worried about dying of heart failure or seizures, and my boss drove me home himself to make sure I was going to be all right. The whole time, doctors and bosses are chuckling ruefully “Spiders…in TREES? Was she SERIOUS?”
Both of those facilities shut down about three years later, and I have no idea where that nurse went when she was no longer needed. I still hope to this day that she didn’t become an insurance adjuster. She kept insisting that she knew from some grand authority, some hillbilly Professor Lindenbrock or Challenger, that spiders couldn’t live in trees for some reason, and I finally realized she’d have shot herself in the head rather than admit she might have been wrong. I have to admit, though, in my more bitter moments, that I have a fantasy involving someone finding a dessicated coccoon in a live oak tree above her garden, with “DEATH FROM ABOVE” written in the web surrounding it.
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Tagged Billy Goodnick, Books, contest, crimes against horticulture, spiders in trees
Just as a friendly reminder, the Joey Box contest is still open, and you still have 14 days to enter. Look at it as getting an item in the mail that isn’t accumulations of school supplies.
The addiction started half my life ago, when I was a beginning film critic for a long-forgotten science fiction magazine at the end of the Eighties. I started up a friendship with one Joey Shea, better known as “Joey Zone,” a fellow contributor and general troublemaker, and he and his lovely wife Cheryl LeBeau rapidly became People To Talk To. Shortly after we first made our acquaintance, I received a big package from Joey. It was full of band fliers, old horror magazines, toys, and other New England exotica, with a little note reading “The best thing about moving is that you can give away crap and people think you’re such a generous bastard.” I still have that note in my files somewhere, along with most of the items in that big envelope. I promptly put together a comparable box of Dallas ephemera and dropped it off in the mail.
Unbeknownst to me, I’d received my first Joey Box. I’d also sent my first one, and the tradition stuck.
I don’t want to get into a “when I was your age” tirade, but there was a weird fire to the world during the zine period between 1984 and 1999. Any number of people discovered that publishing their own magazines was a lot easier than they’d been led to believe, and they further discovered that a market existed for their publications. The end result was a lot of bush-league rivalries, drama, tears, screaming, and attempted homicide. It was a wonderful time to be alive, especially when you’d meet people via one zine or another and they’d send you a huge box of stuff in the hopes of convincing you their home town was the best in the world. You’d then reciprocate with a huge box, and your friends and their friends would fight like Romero zombies over who got the best stuff left over.
Now, Joey and Cheryl are up in Connecticut, so they had access to club schedules, movie promos, and demo tapes from all over New England. I couldn’t match the variety, but I could match the volume. Dallas was a great place at that time for all sorts of promo materials, and the Joey Boxes only got bigger once I started working for a local weekly called The Met in 1994. By 2000, they were getting a bit ridiculous, as one had to be split into three separate boxes because the one was too heavy for UPS. I kept waiting for the notice that Joey had broken both of his femurs trying to pick up the latest box, or that Cheryl would call in tears because Joey was dead from zine poisoning.
In recent years, I’ve had to cut back on the size of Joey Boxes, mostly because so much promo material is online instead. Nobody puts three weeks of effort into a band poster any more when they can just start up a new page on Facebook. It’s the same situation with Joey, and not just because he quit zine illustration for a library science degree a few years back. We still keep up the tradition, though, and we try our best to keep it going.
So now it’s time to expand the Joey Box concept. I can’t guarantee you’ll need a forklift to get it inside the house, but it should make things interesting.
So here’s the contest. I have five separate packages awaiting the winners. Each one contains Triffid Ranch stickers and buttons. Each one also contains at least one issue of Gothic Beauty magazine, containing my gardening column, or the May 2011 issue of Reptiles with my article on carnivorous plants in herp vivaria. Each one will contain a gardening book out of my collection (I’m phasing out the book selection I used to carry at Triffid Ranch shows, so this is your gain). Other than that, each one will be different in its contents. Best of all, all are sealed up beforehand and selected randomly, so I won’t know which one is going where.
Now here’s your shot. Send an old-fashioned postcard or envelope to the contact address for the Triffid Ranch, with your name and mailing address. Out of the postcards received by July 30, 2011, five participants will each receive a randomly selected Joey Box. This is open to everyone on the planet, so don’t worry about not being able to play because you don’t live in the States. (In fact, I’m reserving an additional Joey Box for the person with the most interesting mailing address, so if you know someone at an Antarctic research base, send the addy.) Many may enter, and all will receive Triffid Ranch buttons and stickers for their efforts. And for those worried about their addresses used for spurious purposes, here’s the privacy policy.
As always, feel free to pass this on to friends and neighbors. Half of the fun of something like this is the sharing.
EDIT: For those on Facebook, you have the option of another contest entirely for a Joey Box via the Triffid Ranch page. Look at it as Christmas in July, with Jack Skellington driving the sleigh.
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Posted in Contest
Tagged contest, Gothic Beauty, Joey Box, reptiles magazine