Thanks for looking and for all the great info and advice.
xo
kittee

Hi, Kittee. :)

Nice plants! Not all collections need be extremely exotic/rare. Seems like your plants are very happy.

Thank you!
They will be lots happier soon, since I'm finally getting around to taking better care of them.

Hello Kittee!

Beautiful plants and pictures!
I love the colors!

:-)Ingrid

Hi Kittee,

Your Hoyas are very healthy and you're smart to grow your collection slowly, learning the needs of your plants as you go. When seeing so many beauties to choose from, it's tempting to jump in and get a huge collection going early, making it hard to learn what each needs to be happy. Nice plants! I especially like the super-closeup of the developing flowers.

Denise in Omaha

Great photos and congratulations on the blooms. You know I bet most of us started out with a single Hoya carnosa. There is a reason why that species is the classis Hoya house plant, it's tough. I am sure as time goes by you will diversify your collection with more beautiful Hoyas. You're in the right place if you want to be enabled.

Mike

Kittee, your photos are beautiful, and I just love that pot in the second picture. Thanks for taking us on a teeny tiny Hoya tour. I kind of wish everyone would do that, now. :X

Thanks everyone! Someone on Craigs List responded to my call for hoyas/cuttings, but I can't decide what to do. She has two 13 year old, very large carnosas with lots of blooms she will sell me for $35 each. I'm not sure if I should go for it, or diversify. The cowboy seller on ebay has a few more interesting varieties I was going to purchase. I dunno! It'd sure be nice to have a mature plant with millions of blooms to gawk over...

xo
kittee

The picture of the flower buds is just beautiful! Look at those promising fuzzy little 'soon to be' flowers! :)

And to start a collection with carnosa and linearis is really nice - two hoyas which is quite different from each other both in appearance and in care. I just love the way linearis looks when those long vines hang heavily from a basket.

OHHHH!
I am super excited, my BFF and I found these small plants for sale about six months ago at a plant sale we go to annually. They were labeled "mini hoya curtail." We snapped them up of course, but since I googled and didn't see our plants under "hoya mini" I just assumed they were labeled wrong.

I am super excited, because I did some more research online tonight and I am pretty certain we actually found Hoya Krohniana Eskimo! I will post a pic tomorrow, if anyone wants to see...these were only $3! Ohhh, I can't wait for the little white flowers...

xo
kittee

Kitee,

I want to see the picture..... if you got a Eskimo you'll be very glad with it!

Mitzi

The label makes me wonder if they meant H. curtisii. Check that one out, too. In that case, the leaves would be very small and rough, like a cat's tongue.

I agree with GG, Hoya krohniana 'Eskimo' would not be a Hoya that you would stumble upon at a plant sale. This Hoya is still quite rare in collections unless you import it from Thailand. Still Hoya curtisii is a great little plant and well worth growing.

Mike

Ah! Y'all are correct, it is a small curtisii, they just misspelled it on the tag, but they sure do look similar to the krohniana 'eskimo.' It hasn't done much in six months, so I am going to repot it with lava rocks and new dirt and find it a better spot in the house. I'll post a pic when I can.

Thanks so much!
xo
kittee

They really do look alike, when going off pictures online. I never really thought about it before, because they aren't plants you would confuse in person. This was a fun case of mistaken identity. :)

It's not really unusual for a Hoya to not do anything for 6 months or a year, right after it's been purchased and moved to a new home. It just takes some of them a while to acclimate and once they have, they really get going. If your curtisii is in a bad spot, of course you could move it to better light. And of course it won't hurt it to repot it if you prefer a different medium, but you may end up setting back its adjustment period again. Just a thought. Some Hoyas are more/less fussy about being disrupted. I do think it took my curtisii about a year to settle in with me before it started growing, but after that it was really reliable.

Thanks GG. I made a little spot for it in a sunny window where my carnosas hang out. I did some reading today and lots of sites say that h. curtisii doesn't like wet feed and can be hard to grow. Mine is a really small cutting in a 4" pot, but I am thinking I should fill the bottom with lava rocks to help keep the roots from sitting in moisture. Anyway, I really appreciate your advice. I'll leave it in the new window for a while and see if anything happens.

xo
kittee

Intolerance of "wet feet" is a pretty universal Hoya characteristic. That's why we grow them in airy fast draining medium. I don't think that curtisii is any more fussy about this than the next Hoya.

The thing about labeling Hoyas as difficult is that in many cases it's a very subjective observation. Curtisii was one of my first Hoyas and I grew it for several years in AV mix, treated it like a Gesneriad, and never saw any drama.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, it's great you're optimizing your setup, but don't read too much into what any one person says about a Hoya's difficulty.

Just out of curiosity, what are you growing it in right now?

That's great info. When I bought it, it was in a very small pot with a lot of perlite, and I just put it in regular ol' "potting soil." All of my hoyas are like this, but one in particular does not drain well, so i just went out and purchased a bag of perlite to loosen it up.

Love the pics! I wonder why many of us had carnosa's first in our collections? So common but soooo classic!

Here is the H. Curtisii in it's new location.
xo
kittee