We're baking

 

February may have been particularly cold, May may have been particularly wet, and July the hottest month on record, and damage was done, but in spite of it, some things seem to be unaware.

Fortunately, the little yellow pear tomatoes are tasty enough, because I mistakenly planted 7 of them instead of the 'German Johnson' variety I intended.  

I may be getting only half a dozen 'German Johnson' fruits because first it was too cold for them, then too wet, and now too hot.  To say nothing of the fact that I only ended up with two plants.

One of the 'German Johnson' tomatoes is starting to ripen.  I hope it gets ripe enough for me to pick before the raccoons eat it.  Or, rather, take a big bite out of it and throw it on the ground.

'German Johnson'

A couple of weeks ago I sowed tatsoi seed alongside the beans that the rabbits stripped of leaves, and they've gotten much larger than I expected in that time.

Since then, I sowed some, 'Red Swan' bush beans between the two and replanted the last few of the 'Calima' bush bean seeds I had in the row the rabbits ate.  Bless their hearts, though, the stripped plants are putting out new leaves which I've been spraying with deer and rabbit repellant.  I hope both (or either, really) bean varieties have enough time to produce and ripen before a freeze.  With the weather we've been having this year, I'm not particularly optimistic.

While the peppers had a rough start (like everything else), they fruited and are coming along.  Surely they'll get a chance to ripen before any other weather disaster hits.  Knock wood.

snacking peppers

red bell peppers

 'Quadrato D'Asti Giallo' bell peppers

chili peppers

It doesn't look like my attempts to protect the grapes from birds by bagging some and by hanging reflective bangles is working.

They've pecked off both bagged and free grapes.  I guess I'll just have to hope they can't get to every cluster and will spare me one or two.  They didn't last year, though, so I'm not feeling hopeful.  

The smut on the ornamental 'Striped Japonica' corn really got ugly fast.  I wonder whether the word smut was used first for the fungus or for obscene pictures.  I assume the former and, if so, can see why it was chosen for the latter.  Disgusting.

I cut off all that was there and bagged it in the trash to prevent any dispersal of spores.  Hopefully, there won't be more infections.

The kernels that are uninfected are small yet, but quite pretty.

This year I cut way down on the number of cucumber plants, as I usually have too many and have harvested a half dozen fruits so far.   

'Marketmore' cucumber

The rain has let up, but the humidity hasn't, so early mornings, the cucumber leaves have beads of moisture at the margins.

The condition is called guttation, and it happens when there's enough moisture in the ground and air both that it's not evaporated from the leaf edges quickly enough as it's pulled upward from the roots like it normally would be.

The kohlrabi may be ready to harvest.  I'll have to look for recipes, but I'm expecting it will taste pretty much like cabbage, so I expect they'll be mostly roasted or slaw variations. 

The only reason I planted kohlrabi and kale this year is they were two of the free seeds offered with my Baker Creek orders. I usually at least give all their free offerings a try.

Off in the flower world, there's one lone Thai double blue butterfly pea vine.  This is the first flower I've gotten in two years.  Last year, none of the plants even survived.  I'm not ready to give up though.  In fact I'm encouraged to try again next year to get a wall - or at least a column - of these blue beauties.

This year, the cactus zinnia are doing quite well in spite of the weird weather we've had.  Or maybe because of it.  I don't know.  

I love their multi-toned colors and fancy forms.

Be well and stay cool until next time.

'South Africa' yellow roses, cactus zinnias, verbena boriensis and perovskia

Late July (an excellent chip and cracker brand)

While I'm expecting great things from the melon family this year, a number of other things just didn't do so well.  I can't blame them.  Spring was unseasonably cool, and the early summer was way too wet.

The onions made a poor showing.  I don't think the cool spring  hurt them, but with the deer pruning and the soggy summer soil, they haven't grown very large.  They still taste good, but they're quite small.

The two 'German Johnson' tomato plants I ended up with really had problems with the weather.  They're producing fruits that are a bit smaller than previous years, but the plants are only half as tall, so I'm assuming I'll get maybe half the yields.  And, because I mislabeled my tomato plants this year, I only have two plants.  😢  That's going to severely limit my BLT season.

The plant in a cage is only reaching halfway to the top.

Last year at this time, they reached the tops of the cages, and this is how the fruits looked:

There are no clusters this year.  Last year, they were all growing in clusters.  

I recently planted a row of tatsoi along side my row of  'Calima' bush beans.

You don't see the beans, do you?  That's because rabbits stripped every single one of the leaves last night.  They left the stalks:

The ears of the 'Striped Japonica' ornamental corn that didn't form husks nevertheless are forming a few kernels. 

That kernel near the top looks a little smutty, and while some cultures consider smut a delicacy, I believe I'll pass.

Happily, there are still some flowers doing well enough that I can make a few bouquets.

'Grande Amore' red roses, cactus zinnias, globe amaranth, 

butterfly milkweed and greenery from baptisia and crapemyrtle

While the Japanese beetles are the only insect pests I have to control, they aren't the only insects in the garden.  The striped monarch caterpillars are fattening up on the butterfly milkweed (their only food source).

And I spotted this lone milkweed leaf beetle the other day.

Fancy, eh?

Until next time, stay safe.

Hibiscus - unknown variety

P.S.  Speaking of tomatoes (and flower parts from the previous post), here's a good video from GrowVeg.  All of the GrowVeg videos are excellent, so you might want to subscribe, which you can do from the link at the end of the video, by hovering over the icon image of Ben in the upper left corner of the video, or by clicking the red subscribe button on the web page. 

A short(ish) post about flowers

 

During a recent check on my pumpkin patch, something that had always been hovering around the back of my mind came forward, and I decided to check into why some flowers were producing fruit and others weren't.  My first idea was that some of them were male flowers and others were female.  You knew that, I'm sure. But the stumbling block for me was that they all look alike.  On closer inspection, even though they look alike, they aren't borne on the same type of peduncle (or flower stalk).

Short aside here: I originally typed pedicel instead of peduncle, and in checking to make sure I was using the right term, I found I wasn't technically correct.  A peduncle is the main flower stalk, and a pedicel is the flower stalk of each individual flower on a bloom made up of several smaller individual flowers.  

Okay, back to the pumpkin flower...

The male flowers are all borne on long, thin peduncles:

And the female flowers are borne on short, thick stalks.  The pictures below show the fruits (ovaries) already swelling atop the stubby peduncles:

And then, by happenstance, I noticed what I thought was a strange formation of the sex parts of one of the flowers, maybe a mutant:

Most of the ones I had been noticing were like this:

As it turns out, -- you guessed it -- the first picture is a female flower, and the second is a male.

Nature is amazing.

Once the flowers have served their purpose, the males simply wither up and that's that.  The females, of course (if they got pollinated), fall off and leave a developing fruit behind.  

I should have lots of pumpkins this fall if the weather holds, because a colony of honeybees is having a party in the pumpkin patch.

Some bunny ate most of my plants early on, and I had to replant pumpkins.  I didn't have any more daisy gourd seeds, so I wasn't sure any of those survived.  The vines and flowers look exactly like the pumpkin ones.  And then, I spied this little fruit:

Funny looking thing.  Now I know at least one gourd vine survived.  It should turn out to look like one of these:

Picture source

That business about male and female flowers doesn't apply to all plants.  If the plant has separately sexed flowers on individual plants, it's called dioecious, from the Greek meaning two houses.  That's probably the rarest arrangement, and is where they tell you that you need both male and female plants if you want flowers - or at least have a male plant within pollinating distance.

If the flowers are separately sexed, but on the same plant, it's called monoecious, or - yes, one house. And that's what plants in the cucurbit family have, which includes pumpkins, squash, zucchini, gourds, melons and cucumbers.

Then, there's another type of flower, which you no doubt have thought of - the "perfect" flower.  It's perfect in this sense meaning both male and female parts exist in the same bloom.  Like this hibiscus:

This is a very common type of arrangement with the anthers (the male pollen-bearing structures) surrounding the pistil (the female receptacle that leads to the ovary, the seed-bearing structure).

The hibiscus plant was the only one in the wildflower garden, and every year it struggled to compete enough to produce one stalk and a couple white flowers hidden amongst all the rudbeckia and monarda surrounding it.  And then when it produced its one or two flowers, the Japanese beetles would destroy them.  I dug it up and moved it to my perennial bed two years ago, and I found the flowers actually open up to these gorgeous pink tinged petals with a deep pink center.  And this year, it looks like this:

This iris, too, is a perfect flower, but it's parts are much more elaborate and not so easily detected.

I'm not going to go into the whole story of the iris structure, but here's a basic article on it if you're interested:

I normally remove all iris stems once the bloom fades, but this year I left one standing while it developed seeds:

I'll plant some out next year to see how long it takes to get a bloom from seed, and what the bloom looks like, considering this iris is a hybrid.

Double stargazers have neither anthers or pistils - no reproductive parts.  So you know they have to be grown from cuttings or clones.  It seems the reproductive parts formed into extra petals.

A benefit is that you don't get orange stains on your nose when you sniff them up close, or on your clothing or white tablecloth when the anthers drop.  They're interesting, and they smell just as nice as normal stargazers, but I rather like the look of the graceful anthers and pistils.

Stargazers' showy reproductive parts include long thin anthers on stalks (called filaments) surrounding a long thin pistil.  Well, technically, the pistil includes the stigma at the top which receives pollen from the anthers, the tubular style, and the ovary at the base.

That's all folks.  Stay cool and get your covid-19 vaccinations to thwart virus mutations that seem to be popping up.  Missouri is doing especially poor in this pandemic.  Put your masks back on in crowds.  And go outside where you don't have to wear one, and check out the flowers in your neighborhood or the wild ones in parks and countrysides. 

Or...do whatever you want...just enjoy it.

For more information on floral reproductive parts:
Botanical Terminology: Flowers, Houses and Sexual Reproduction