Wires_Guy_wires
Imperial Masterpiece
It's neither! My girlfriend is a big hoya & pilea fan, but she's not allowed back in the apartment because she doesn't treat her aphids in her home. I got her to order some systemics today to finally get rid of those. Right now she owns roughly 14 cultivars of hoya. But most of them have never flowered.Awesome. I saw the pilea and a hoya in there?
The climbing vine is the laurel clock trumpet vine that I imported from Thailand. The pilea look-alike is something I don't know about, but it's growing on a stem and not from a rosette or bulb.
The sticky plants are drosera from Africa (capensis? From the cape?), they're pretty popular plants in nurseries but nobody knows a thing about them so most people kill them. I had a collection of 5 or 6 different types from all over the world, but one hot summer killed them all. They need constant moisture and if they dry out, they die within hours. They're pretty easy to propagate from leaf cutting though; a teaspoon of sugar in a teacup of water is enough to get them growing from excised leafs that float on top of the water, cover the cup with some plastic wrap and place it on a window sill. Shouldn't take more than three weeks before something pops out of the leaf.
The snail is the only surviving asolene spixi (out of two), the apple snail. I have some snail-eating assassin snails too, but they're being eaten alive by some kind of flatworm. I used pond water to fill this tank at first, there was a lot of life in there; flatworms with eyes, flatworms without eyes, leeches, all kinds of legged creatures and some crustaceans. It took some time to establish a balance; getting plants to grow faster than the algae, and there's still a warfare going on between the flatworms and the snails. Right now I'm waiting for the flat worms to die out naturally before I get my pink back-up snails out of the terrarium. Akadama serves a good purpose as aquarium floor. Pumice not so much, it floats.
It's true that pilea are insanely popular now in Europe, and they have been for the past two years. They're so easy to grow and multiply that I'm really not sure if I know anyone who doesn't have one. The polkadot begonia is also gaining foothold, and they're scarce too. A decent sized plant would easily be sold for 40 euros/USD. These too can be propagated from leaf cutting.