First of the season

In my own opinion, this is a rather good picture nice berry, a  flower at the stage of seed dispersal.  Today is the 30th of June, and this was picked this morning.  TPP grew up near lake Ontario in upstate NY, so according to the good old boys, if you got a tomato before July, you were doing well.  This year our area suffered a late frost and some "early" planted tomatoes and their tropical kin, peppers and eggplant, got nipped.  Our frost tree date is about 10-15 May, so TPP was not in a hurry before then and soil in boxes tends to warm up pretty fast.  Now this image doesn't provide a very good size metric, and indeed this is a so-called "cherry tomato"; generally rather small.  Mrs. Phactor ate this nice little fruit a few seconds later and declared it delicious.  These golden colored cherry tomatoes do seem to be sweet and tasty.  And here it is a whole day before July, the very beginning of our 3 month long tomato season.  That's it, 3 months to get tasty garden tomatoes.  It just doesn't seem fair, but it does represent a challenge.  The cherry tomato is a lot more like its wild cousins in being composed of 2 carpels (seed bearing leaves), which can be easily seen when the fruit is cut in half.

Friday Fabulous Flower - pretty red

This display certainly caught TPP's eye, and next hopefully some migratory birds eyes' too.  This is a nice illustration of a flower at the stage of seed dispersal, i.e., a fruit.  The actual fruit is rather cone-like and composed of a number of little follicles (like milkweed pods) that peel open exposing a pair of dangling seeds.  The seeds have a shiny dark brown to black seed coat.  But you don't see it here because the seeds are covered with a bright red-orange fleshy aril, which has a high lipid content to nourish those migrating birds.  

This is Magnolia virginiana in case you didn't recognize the flower at this stage.

Dinosaur renderings in fruit

This was pretty interesting.  Stylized dinosaurs rendered as fruits by computer intelligence, although clearly a lot of instructions were needed.  Still they are pretty neat.  Enjoy. 

Flowers at the stage of seed dispersal

Of course TPP is talking about fruits, flowers at the stage of seed dispersal. These particularly handsome berries were among the best part of our kitchen garden this season, so far. Note the past tense. Now begins the whining of a gardener with a small garden.  One of the major problems with small gardens is that they cannot sustain much damage. The person who plants 50 tomatoes at her Father's place in the country doesn't have to worry about losing a plant or two, or a variety that doesn't like the weather this year, or an animal eating their fill. A rather violent thunderstorm toppled one of our tomato trees (5 feet tall) in a cage and the fall snapped off the stem about 8 inches above the soil.  It would grow back and probably even produce some fruit, but that was one sixth of our tomato orchard; it was replaced by a late season bargain from a garden shop closeout sale. So far this year the eggplant had been a stand out; vigorous, healthy plants, early prolific fruiting. Yea!  Then some miscreant who hadn't read or decided to ignore "wildlife friendly yard" agreement picked almost all the leaves off the eggplants at the base of the petioles, and dropped them.  They weren't to their taste, but in a classic slow learner response, they tried another, and another, and so on down the row. This was not one of the usual suspects, not neat enough for bun-buns or tree rats, and neither ever pays any attention to eggplant (nightshades generally are not their thing).  A couple of small eggplant were chewed on a bit, and TPP suspects perhaps an opossum.  The thing is that eggplant without many or any leaves don't produce much fruit until they recover. On the good news side of things the Japanese beetle season is about over; it was fairly brief and the beetles were not very numerous. Big cannas and a June berry bush were the only plants significantly damaged. 

Squash pollination & fruiting

The F1 has a huge zucchini plant, but yet she reports not many fruit; "They're little and fall off." Ah, a pollination problem, right up TPP's alley.  Garden squash plants are what we call monoecious, one house; they produce two kinds of flowers on the same plant, those producing pollen ("males") and those producing fruit and seed ("female").  They aren't actually male and female, but the explanation takes more effort that TPP has right now.  The plants usually start out producing male flowers, they use less energy to make so plants can start flowering at a smaller size.  The female flowers are easy to distinguish because you can see the immature fruit below the yellow corolla (right side), which is lacking on the males (left). If not pollinated, no more energy is wasted and the flower aborts. This can happen in a small garden, maybe with only 1 zucchini plant because maybe no males flowers were produced on a particular day. However it also could be because you don't have any bees around to move the pollen for you (or you have left a row cover in place too long keeping the pollinating insects our along with the bad guys). If you lack bees you can pick a male flower, tear off the yellow corolla, and swab the anthers on the stigma of one or more female flowers effecting pollination yourself. This can also happen with cucumbers. Bees visit male flowers and collect pollen as a reward; females flowers have stigmas that mimics the males, thus deceiving pollinators into visiting and delivering pollen.  Tricksy plants! Note the flowers are edible themselves, so if you are getting too many squash, try eating some at their smallest stage.
For more information on raising squash and their relatives go to Renee's Garden.  The image used above is from this site.

Is rhubarb a fruit? Let's check a seed catalog.

A reader sent along a picture from seed catalog and to no one's surprise, rhubarb was placed in the "fruit" section. For those who like such things, fruits are flowers at the stage of seed dispersal. Rhubarb is a vegetable that is used as a fruit, but that does not make rhubarb a fruit. Specifically rhubarb is a petiole or leaf stalk; this is fairly obvious because of its U-shape in cross section. Some people think it's a stem but what we pluck is the whole leaf, but then the green blade is cut off, which is good because it's toxic. The fleshy sour-sweet leaf stalks are most commonly used to make pies, and one old nickname for rhubarb is "pie-plant", and divisions of mature clumps would be given to newlyweds to help them establish their garden. Boy, those were the days, when getting a barn built and planting your garden were top priorities.  And speaking of seed catalogs, Johnny's Seeds catalog (Winslow, Maine) showed up in the mail today, and if you can't find what you want in it's 240 pages then it really isn't for sale. This is a great catalog for browsing, but it's ridiculous for us micro-gardeners. This is really a catalog for small farmers, so to make up for them sending me this monster, I've provided the link for some online shopping. In particular, baby bok choi (or pak choi) is hard to find in most garden seed displays at shops, so TPP has to order seeds on line, and this is probably how the mailing list was constructed. This catalog features around 50 different kinds of microgreens, over 40 different "baby" greens for salad mixes, but be careful, some are sold in quantities up to 25 lbs. and that's a lot of greens my friends. Some aren't even sold in individual packets; they start at a price per ounce, and that's still a lot of seeds.They provide more information about germination and disease resistance than any catalog, TPP has ever seen. At any rate if any of you have a favorite seed catalog, let us all know in the comments. Mrs. Phactor has said the TPP will get an Italian seed catalog that she requested, so something to look forward to. And it's getting to be that time of year to place your seed orders. 

Durian - Love it or leave it

Unless you have traveled and delved into the culture of SE Asia, you probably don't know a thing about durian. Durian is often called the stinkiest fruit in the world and my Thai friends tell me durian "tastes like heaven, but smells like hell".  Here's what TPP knows based on his experiences with durian. It is true the fruit has an odor that can best be described as similar to the smells wafting out of a sewer, a not uncommon smell in SE Asia. The fruit is a big spiny capsule about the size and shape of a smallish rugby ball, and this isn't the part you eat. The largish seeds are surrounded by a thick, creamy yellow-colored fleshy aril, the reward for seed dispersers, presumably primates and other arboreal mammals. Not sure who among our family tree finds the odor attractive? Apart from the fruit, the fleshy aril is not all that unpleasant to eat; it has a firm custardy texture with a sort of mild cheesy flavor, but rather insipid. It is not as horrible or as disgusting tasting as many people have made it out to be, but it is not on TPP's list of preferred tropical fruits either. TPP has seen durian for sale just once in the great Midwest, frozen (and no idea how it holds up to that) at the famous Jungle Jim's grocery north of Cincinnati. So TPP thinks that durian isn't as divisive as people make it out to be, although my Thai friends truly relish it and were happy to eat my share.   

 Image courtesy of Yun Huang Yong, Wikimedia Creative Commons. 

Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

For the jillionth time, the tomato is a fruit. That this question went to the Supreme Court is totally silly, but then to add that the justices had to consult a DICTIONARY, well, that's just insulting! You consult your friendly neighborhood botanist to answer such questions.  That's what we're here for. Typical though that SCOTUS justices didn't know enough to know who to consult. Very simply they should have just contacted a botanist, someone like John Kress (the Indiana Jones of ginger) at the Smithsonian, and gotten an authoritative answer in 5 sec or so, if he was in the country. So the next time you get your tomato jam out (often called ketchup), remember the tomato is a fruit.

Pepper sex? You must be kidding.

TPP just got this image by email, and if this is the way 2014 is going to go, it'll be a long year. 

Flip the bell peppers over to check their gender. The ones with four bumps are female and those with three bumps are male. The female peppers are full of seeds, but sweeter and better for eating raw and the males are better for cooking.

 

OK, there's the message that accompanied this image.  What a crock!  Fundamentally peppers, like most members of the nightshade family have 2 carpels (modified leaves) composing their pistil; those shown have 3 and 4 carpels because we've selected for bigger peppers so there are more units composing the fruits.  They can even have 5 sometimes.  Most of your smaller peppers have the standard two carpels.  The 4-lobed fruit will have one more placental ridge bearing seeds, but on average for the variety, in every other way they will be the same.  This is where a sample size of two, combined with someone who doesn't know any botany, led to a completely ridiculous assertion.  Fruits are part of the asexual phase of the plant life cycle so there are no sexes among fruit, and while the fruit are what develops from the floral "gynoecium", from the "ovary", there are no sexes here either, just popular, traditional, and very wrong names for flower parts.  Plant sex actually occurs at a different level, although people commonly refer to flower sex.  Pollen grains are dwarf males and way down inside the pistil, inside the "ovules" (actually megasporangia), the megaspore will develop into a very dwarf female.  So fruit sex is just pure bull.  No idea of the source, and it really doesn't matter.  A lot of crap floats around on the web, and at least this is harmless bogus information.  Surprised they could count that high. 

 

Flower, Fruit - What's the difference?

A reader asks what is the difference between a flower and a fruit? Oh, the Phactor wishes he got a dollar for every time he's answered this question. In fact, why not? To read further deposit one dollar US in the slot to the right of your monitor. Hurry, this display will automatically turn off if you do not pay by ... 3, 2, 1. ? ? ? You're still there?
If you can still see this, something didn't work correctly. Most of the other bloggers here don't know that FoS has and allows this pay as you go system, so let's keep this just between us for now. Damn, there goes this week's lunch money.
Flowers and fruits are the same thing, but at different stages. Flowers are at the stage of pollen dispersal; fruits are at the stage of seed dispersal. Both have many diverse adaptations for accomplishing these dispersals. Usually the showy parts of the flower, one or two whorls of perianth and the androecium (stamens) having functioned in pollen dispersal are discarded post pollination while the rest of the flower undergoes more development to become a fruit containing one to many seeds.
That's all you get for free.

Friday Fabulous Flower - At the stage of seed dispersal

A fruit is a flower at the stage of seed dispersal. Fruits aren't something different, just those parts of flowers that undergo a post-pollination development. Here's a particularly interesting one of Paeonia japonica, a species new to our gardens, and what a cool fruit/seed display. The follicle-like fruitlets have an unimpressive dull green-gray to brownish color, looking a bit like a short pea pod, until they dehisce, opening along a lateral suture and then how colorful is that! The fertile seeds have a dark blue fleshy covering (aril probably, or fleshy seed coat) while the undeveloped seed are soft, fleshy and red, and makes you wonder if this is a plant making to most of an otherwise wasted resource (unpollinated seeds) as an attractant and reward because they are considerably larger than at the time of pollination. If not pollinated, most ovules abort their development. The inner fruit wall is purple. This display is exactly what you would expect for bird seed dispersers. Calling all cedar waxwings!

Plant ID Cell Phone App

For those of you who have found cell phones useful, there soon will be a new application (that's what app stands for) that will take that picture of a flower or leaf you took and compare it via a google like search, but using images not words, to identify the plant. Now the Phactor has no idea how good the Leafsnap plant ID app is, but the botanist involved is my old buddy John Kress of the Smithsonian, the guy someone called the Indiana Jones of Ginger, and he does know his stuff, and no question about it, this cell phone app will be a whole lot easier to move around than John's usual plant ID facility, the Smithsonian's millions of plant specimens housed in their (our) herbarium. So if you find yourself lost deep in the wilds of New York's Central Park (Well, you have to start somewhere with plant ID so why not someplace central?) you can identify every plant found there with a leaf, flower, or fruit. So those of you actually have a cell phone, a smart one that can use these apps, do let us know how it goes. Now as a long time experienced plant IDer, it will be interesting to see how this works because variation is the demon, and how does the program make image comparisons? Maybe the software is borrowed from the face recognition programs that work so well on the CSI programs, but then again they seem to have scanning electron microscopes that no only image things like pollen grains but label them for you! Oh, did anyone mention that Leafsnap is free? Plant ID will be added to the list of reasons why the Phactor doesn't need a cell phone.

Friday Fabulous Flower – At the Stage of Seed Dispersal

This isn’t precisely a flower, but then again it is a flower at the stage of seed dispersal, but a very pretty and unusual image the result of having gelatinous seed coats. This also isn’t exactly a common plant especially when viewed this way. So who recognizes this very nifty image?

Friday Fabulous Flower - Beach Rose

Today's vacation adventures included exploring beach and salt marsh conservation areas, very interesting and very fragile coastal communities of great importance ecologically. So why not pick a fabulous flower from this area like the beach rose? OK, some of you may wish to suggest to the Phactor that this is a picture of a rose hip, the fruit of the beach rose (Rosa rugosa), not the extremely fragrant pink flower. However, one of the best definitions of a fruit is a flower at the stage of seed dispersal. Large patches of this rose, probably individual clones, dominate certain portions of sandy coastal areas, but this rose is an exotic species naturalized in these areas. A little later in the season these fruits will be more flavorful and juicy, and they make quite nice jelly.