orphan plant reprise, part one

About a year and a half ago I wrote about my little orphan plant project, a random effort I’d taken on when I encountered a rack of discount, near-dead houseplants in a local hardware store greenhouse and adopted a small collection of them to nurse back to health.

Three of them died. The rest of them thrived. A gamble, sure, but a cheap one when the plants are about a buck a piece compared to their ten dollar, so-called healthy counterparts.

I was back at that same store last weekend and bought five more orphan plants from the (presumably) same rack of near-discards. This new collection included, and I was pleased to have found, two charlie-brown quality trees of the Coffea arabica variety, or Arabica Coffee Trees, each about sixteen inches tall, scraggly, and in search of a loving home.

So after spending two bucks on coffee trees and another sixteen bucks on a big pot to replant them into my orphan plant project takes a bit of a turn towards a coffee AND plant effort… soon to be chronicled here, no doubt.