The apple crop

TPP has not had the best luck with apples.  Previous attempts to have a few apples have been failures in one way or another. The most recent failure was a dwarf Novaspy, the first time Northern Spy has been successfully dwarfed. Of the two trees planted, both were initially vigouous and one flowered and fruited nicely in its 3d year, but then it went into a decline and died. The 2nd tree stayed vigorous, but it never flowered and fruited and seemed determined to grow into a larger sized tree. The one crop of apples was great, real Northern Spys, a superb variety that is hard to find.  
So try, try again, and two Colonnade apple trees were planted, both the same variety, Flamenco, derived from orange pippin ancestry. These are a columnar dwarf, growing 10-12 feet tall and 3-4 feet in diameter, and the nursery stock was beautiful. However a pollinator was needed and only one variety of Colonnade was available, so an Urban Apple columnar tree was gotten from another vendor. This was a Tart Lime, a granny smith type apple that TPP was not so keen to have, but biology. This tree was half as big and half the price (notice how that works),  but the flowering of these varieties may not work out in terms of flowering time, but no matter as the Colonnade trees did not flower in their 2nd season, while the Urban Apple did. Now crab apples of the ornamental type can pollinate apples if their flower color is similar. And the image above shows the apple crop, the whole apple crop, one apple, on the tree bought as a pollinator.  It's a start.

Don't do this at home - Corpse plant flowers

Here's a video of the corpse plant flowering (Amorphophallus titanum). Yes, this video shows "flowering" but you don't see the flowers. This is basically one damned big jack-in-the-pulpit and a member of the aroid family, so there is a spike with flowers at its base and a big sterile apex ("jack" - the spadix) subtended by a modified leaf, a bract called the spathe (the pulpit). What's unusual about the titan arum is that the whole thing is so damned big and smells of incredibly bad, unless you like the odor of carrion.  What you see here is the sterile top of the spadix extending beyond the spathe which is what opens giving access to the many unisexual flowers at the base of the spadix.  Many of aroids flower using food and water stored in a big fleshy underground stem, a corm, and they do this in a season when their vegetative growth is dormant. In another season a big single leaf grows and the process of storing food for reproduction continues. The flowering of a corm is a big deal because it can take a number of years for a corm to get big enough to flower. TPP was given a tennis-ball-sized corm of a smaller species of Amorphophallus (Can you figure out the genus name?), and each year the corm was dug in the fall and stored in the basement in a pot of sand.  Each year it grew the corm got bigger and in 5 years it was the size of a volleyball or small basketball, and then while being stored a shoot emerged in February. So being curious TPP brought the pot upstairs and a 4 foot tall inflorescence appeared just like the titan arum, just much smaller, but hoo boy, it did smell.  Mrs. Phactor's curiosity quickly waned and demanded its removal. My colleagues being good biologists enjoyed showing the item to students all day long and explaining about pollination attractants and pollinators, floral placement, and pollination.  Great stuff.  Here's a diagram of the life cycle although it labels the corm as a tuber. 

Sounds of fall? Feels like fall? Something is crazy.

Yesterday evening, after a long day, TPP was sitting out on his patio sipping a margarita while checking email on his laptop.  It was quite pleasant outside in the dwindling twilight.  A stroll around the gardens found a nice pale yellow water lily in bloom.  The gardens are still quite green especially having gotten a decent watering.  And how pleasant to be listening to the cicadas singing.  And then you stop an think, it's the 11th of October.  Waterlilies and cicadas should have come and gone.  That waterlily first bloomed on May 30th, and now it still has an open flower on October 12th.  That's some flowering season.  The only other perennial to come close was the Missouri evening primrose, but it stopped flowering about 2 weeks ago.  Now TPP asks you in what world are you able to sit on your patio drinking a margarita, listening to cicadas, and looking at waterlilies in mid-October?  Well, the answer is a world experiencing a warming climate and where the seasons of warm-loving things like margaritas are expanding. So this is more like mid-September than mid-October, and what with April being more like May, you are getting the idea. It just doesn't seem like fall, yet.

Something new - Balmy weather in March

It was quite a day here in the upper midwest.  The high was near 80 and while dinner was cooking the Phactor was sitting on his patio at 7:15 pm nursing a margarita in the dwindling twilight and mid-70s temperatures.  This was definitely something new, for March, with the exception of that one year March 14th was spent in Ft. Lauderdale Florida because the Phactors had friends whose car could dependably cover the distance to Florida, and because Uncle Jim the judge offered to let us sponge lodging off him.  While his political and career advice left much to be desired, this was many, many years ago, he is generous to relatives and very big hearted.  Lots of plants develop very quickly at this temperature.  Hate to see the apple buds swelling so quickly.  Bloodroot popped up and flowered overnight, new plantings, rescues from sprawling development.  Our Abeliophyllum has never looked better, a cloud of pink-white flowers.  If you don't have one in you garden, do think of getting one.  But it was a delightful evening, an attractive sunset, so no complaints, except maybe needing a sarong-clad young woman to deal with the empty margarita glass, a regular tropical fantasy.  The Phactor needs a pinch; this is still March!