Moss: rare, common, and despised

This tale of moss starts at Terra Sol Garden Center in Santa Barbara (a stop on our drive back home after a stay in Thousand Oaks, CA), and has nothing to do with moss, at least to begin with.

Monkey tail cactus! (Cleistocactus colademononis, I believe)

I don't know exactly why I find this sign so humorous, but I do. Do they think a cartoon monkey is going to help sell an expensive plant?

They have ferns!

If I hadn't already picked up a Blechnum gibbum 'Silver Lady' earlier in our trip I would have definitely grabbed one here.

Platycerium superbum, $49

This! Some sort of large Epiphyllum. Guess how much. Seriously, guess. Bet you were wrong.

What!?!

Okay so now I've discovered the moss, very unexpected. Maybe even rare, in these parts.

Buy it by the square inch for .50 cents, or by the square foot for $56. If you really want to get carried away you can get 5 square feet for $279, but I wonder where they're keeping those larger quantities because they aren't here...

Carpet moss? I didn't take a photo with an easily read label.

A few weeks later and a stop at the Oregon Flower Growers Association where there was a selection of moss on offer. A flat here (approximately 1ft x 2 ft) was going for $16.50. Moss isn't so rare up here in the Portland area.

Back at home I was thinking about those moss prices as I did my annual spring clean-out of the rock-moat around the patio, and spent far too long staring at the nearby moss.

I'm lucky that I don't have to pay .50 cents an square inch for this!

On the other hand, we did just pay a local company a large sum of money (as in a few hundred dollars) to spray the moss on our roof, so that our new homeowners insurance wouldn't cancel our coverage. 

I find it rather ironic that I rescue moss when it falls from trees in the neighborhood (and bring it home) and I cultivate it in my own garden, and yet we were paying someone to kill it.

As you might have guessed I was VERY concerned they'd end up killing not just the roof moss, but moss around the garden and other plants too (a bleach mixture that kills moss but doesn't hurt your plants... that just doesn't seem possible).

Thankfully the damage was extremely minimal and I can still count my moss fortune one .50 cent square inch at a time.

I'm rich!

The Bit at the End

Lots of moss in the adorable hummingbird nests in this blog post from David Perry: A Few Small Birdy Updates.

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