Alien Pod Hatching

There has been some serious Cereus action in my house! I had always heard that all the blooms happened on the same night. This year is the first time I've had more than one bud, and they seem to be disobeying orders. One flower bloomed Monday night, but the others stayed shut. This was good because I had to work 'til 9pm Monday night and I didn't get home until after 9:30.

Tuesday night I still had four unopened buds, and once again I had to work until 9pm. Luckily, I wasn't scheduled to be on the desk for the last hour, so I was able to go home one hour early! Thanks, Alene! I set up a light before I went to work, and Michael had started the video on my camera at 7:00 when he left for Kung Fu. I got home at 8:30 just in time to change the battery on the camera and see most of the blooming. I took a bunch of stills and a couple hours of video. I hope to take the video and do some time lapse fiddling. I'll post that sometime this week.

One bud still hasn't opened, and I'm pretty sure it will bloom tonight. The plant is right next to a big window, and the blooms face the glass making them hard to film. The plant is too huge to turn around entirely. I'm going to try to twist the last one around to get some full-frontal-bloomity.

Meanwhile, I've uploaded my photos to a Flickr set.