Friday Fabulous Flower - lychees

Mrs. Phactor and her sister ran off to the Bahamas leaving TPP and his brother in law to struggle along with lawn landscaping, and since tropical is possible down here in southern Florida, at least before the area floods from ice cap melting, some new fruit plants are definitely a must.  Here's a lovely example of flowers at the stage of seed dispersal.  Fresh, lovely, and very tasty, Litchi chinensis, in the soap berry family, a rather unappetizing name for a lovely fruit.  Now how about carambola?

Friday Fabulous Flower - Kahili ginger

The Phactors are back home in Lincolnland greeted back from Hawaii by a snow storm, which is somehow fitting. So as jet lag wanes, and our lives get caught up, TPP is happy to be only one day late with the FFF. One of the more notable things about Hawaii biologically is, unfortunately, the prominence of invasive species. And none are more troublesome or more handsome than Kahili ginger (Hedychium gardnerianum), an ornamental species from Asia. This ginger forms almost impenetrable stands in the forest understory shading out native species.  And the massive rhizomes form dense mats preventing anything else from taking root.  In flower the 4-6' tall aerial shoots have terminal inflorescences of yellow-orange flowers that smell quite wonderful. The tan-colored fruits that follow are sort of nondescript until the fruits open revealing bright orange aril-covered seeds.  That's what's being shown in this image; flowers at the stage of seed dispersal.  Amusingly it makes the fern sort of look like an angiosperm.  The arils are both a visual attractant and a reward for the bird seed dispersers. So this plant can really get around.
Getting rid of such a plant is quite a chore, if not nearly impossible. Not knowing what is recommended, TPP suspects it takes cutting off the stand of aerial shoots, no small task, and then spraying the remaining stalks and rhizomes with an herbicide to prevent regrowth.  The idea of chopping out such a stand by hand sounds almost impossible, and reminds TPP of some of the worst gardening disasters of his experience on steroids. 

Fruits and vegetables up close and personal

Here's some pretty neat images of young, immature, fruits and vegetables. See if  you can figure out what you're looking at. Oh, the strawberry does not show you the individual seeds, but the individual fruitlets on the fleshy receptacle, an accessory fruit that will clearly get much larger.  Warning: the images are flogging a book.

Who gives a fig?

Rachael Roscata asks: "So not to go on a tangent and cause a billion questions beginning with "Well what about...", but what about a fig? Is it a fruit?"
Well, the Phactor doesn't have to go out on a limb (?) to answer this. A fig is a real fruit, but a very strange one. Rachel found the Phactor's 3-yr-old blog about whether an artichoke was a fruit or a vegetable, a blog read by over 5,500 people since the software began keeping track of traffic.
A fig is a multiple fruit, and an accessory fruit, one composed of a whole inflorescence of flowers that develop enmass into a single fruit. A fig is a synconia, a bulb-shaped receptacle, a modified stem bearing many flowers on its inner surface, so you never see fig flower unless you cut the whole synconia open. So how do it get pollinated? Tiny wasps live and reproduce inside the synconia. Male figs don't produce fruit but they provide a brood substrate for wasp larvae and pollen, which is carried upon female wasps seeking new synconia in which to lay eggs. The pollinated female flowers produce the edible fruits, each flower resulting in a single seed. Each species of fig has a specific and different species of wasp, an interesting evolutionary dance where each species needs the other for its reproduction. Fig flowers are very small, so the actual flower-fruit would be just one of the sort of stringy units within a fig, but the receptacle also develops into fleshy tissue. As pointed out in the artichoke blog, accessory fruits include fleshy tissues associated with the flower or flowers. But Rachael was pretty perceptive in thinking that a fig was a pretty strange fruit. Well, what about that! Try not to think about what happens to the wasps after pollination, but you know those little crunchy bits? They're seeds.

Eat your vegetables!

If your Mother didn't ever yell at you to eat your vegetables, well, let's just say it's a given part of growing up. Now of course my Mom's motivation was to get you to eat right, and it was such a struggle until you finally realized that your Mother's idea of cooking was to cook everything into submission, and when properly cooked, why vegetables were much better tasting and way more appealing. Funny, the only thing that was actually cooked properly was sweet corn, and that was my Father's special province.
In order to maintain good relationships with my colleagues in the pseudosciences, the Phactor tries not to criticize their research, but this particular study caught my attention (HT to The Thoughtful Animal).
Eating for Pleasure or Profit: The Effect of Incentives on Children’s Enjoyment of Vegetables (Psychological Science 2011 Feb 1;22(2):190-6.)
The experiment, which included controls (yea!), involved giving children rewards (tangible but non-edible, tangible & edible (desert), repeated exposure without reward, and a control. Where was the yelling Mother? OK, pretty unrealistic, but still, OK. The experiment involved having children sample carrot, red pepper, sugar snap pea, cabbage, cucumber, or celery. Well, my plant oriented readers will notice right away that only the 3 Cs are vegetables (carrot, cabbage, celery). And psychologists still think sex and gender are the same thing too.
Ah well, Rome wasn't built in a day. Oh, yeah, the rewards worked. But, if memory serves me, so did yelling.

Kitchen Garden Roundup - 2010 was OK

'Twas not the best of gardens, nor the worst of gardens, as is often the case. The early season garden was great raising expectations; asparagus, rhubarb, salad greens, and berries (red, straw, blue) performed very well. The early summer garden produced plenty of snap peas, broccoli, and beans, but the warm weather crops got off to a slow start and never really recovered, but to give credit where credit is due, while not prolific they hung in there and seldom have eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers all been harvested in October! Still the champion this season for longevity were the cucumbers, which usually die of beetle transmitted bacterial wilt after a month or so of productivity, but this year, a bad year for cucumber beetles we may assume, the cucumbers made it into September, and unlike the terrible bitter, seedy variety grown the year before, these were excellent fruits. The other vine crops were disappointing, first too wet and cool, then too hot and dry; can you imagine not having enough zucchini? In the Phactor's memory this has never happened before, except for the one time the stem borers wiped out the crop when we were away. And of course this year marked the first tree fruit crop - nova spy apples. The late season salad greens were a bust, woodchucked and slugged, but the bok choi and even some spinach may yet be successful, and at long last, the Phactor having temporarily won the battle with voracious herbivores, may yet get some parsley!

Fruit Quiz, Spice Quiz, Veggie Quiz - Take the Challenge

Here's an interesting online fruit quiz that was found via a recent commentor's web page who without noticing that the goods had been given away in a more recent post correctly IDed the eerie lights picture quiz. Congrats to meristemi. There are some interesting botanical posts there at meristemi. By the way, the Phactor totally aced the fruit quiz (11 of 11), so do let us know if you manage to match the master. There's also an obscure spice quiz and an unfamiliar vegetable quiz, links at the end of the fruit quiz too. The veggie quiz was the easiest (no sweat getting 8 out ot 8), but even the Phactor missed 5 of the 11 spice questions. Yikes! Go ahead leave a comment bragging if you do any better. But come on, when you have to guess between ginger and tumeric, well, it could go either way.

Ludicrous fruit display

The Phactor noticed this ludicrously colorful fruit display this morning on the tree outside his building. What a wonderful presentation this fruit display makes! Looks like something from a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Do you recognize this common genus in fruit?

This fruit is from the bigleafed magnolia (Magnolia macrophylla). The pendent, cone-like fruit is a lurid pink and consists of fruitlets, one from each pistil, in the form of a one or two-seeded follicle (like a milkweed pod). When the fruitlet splits open the seeds dangle forth on a thread and are covered by a fleshy pink-orange aril, a reward for the bird dispersers. The actual seed is black and has a hard shiny seed coat. This time of year a flock of grosbeaks or cedar waxwings will find this tree and an hour later every single seed will be gone.

Garden Score Board

As summer here in Lincolnland slides into September and as the Cubs sink out of sight, it's time to do some garden evaluation.
1. The decision to save and transplant storm damaged Japanese maple is a clear winner. The now one-sided tree looks great in its new location and the cool, wet summer took the risk out of the transplanting.
2. Tomatoes. Wow! Blight and weather resulted in worst year in my decades of gardening history including the year in tropical Australia when the Phactor planted tomatoes on the sunny side of his apartment in the spring (August) only to realize the sunny side would become the shady side when the sun shifted back north and sunny shifted to the opposite side, a lesson on life in the tropical zone.
3. Squash. In spite of missing the critical period for controlling squash stem borers, the season was good for zucchini and fair for winter squash. Dwarf orange hubbards look worth planting again. Discovered a quick zucchini pickle recipe that can transform a pound of zucchini into the best sweet-sour pickles ever (to be shared in an upcoming post).
4. Wedding veil and netting. Clear winners! Japanese beetle destruction of apple tree foliage was essentially eliminated. First time in years for green beans without beetle nibblings, although inside their rodent exclusion fence (another winner) and under the veil, the beans looked like inmates.
5. Asparagus. Grew like crazy and produced the largest aerial shoots ever which portends good things for next year's crop. Some things liked the cool, wet summer.
6. Peppers. Not great, not awful, but Melrose, a reliable producer here in Lincolnland had one of its worst years.
7. Eggplant (Asian varieties). Doubled the number of plants and still didn't get enough. Combination of weather and flea beetles (too small to control with netting) made for a meager crop.
8. Raspberries. Canes rebounded and produced a much larger crop than predicted. Blueberries produced so few none actually made it out of the garden, but the snacks were appreciated.
9. Spring greens. Excellent year for salads aided by early cold frame start and transplanting of lettuce seedlings. Late season crop is planted, but a little late to be certain of good production.

Typical enough scoreboard. In small gardens you never bat one thousand. What were winners & losers for my readers?

Unusual tomato plants

OK, quick tomato growers quiz. What's wrong with these tomato plants? Nothing actually; they are normal enough tomato seeds sprouting normal enough tomato plants. What makes them unusual is that they are sprouting from inside an intact tomato fruit, and you don't see this happen very often.

Like many plants, seeds inside tomatoes are inhibited from germinating. Fleshy fruits function by attracting and rewarding animal seed dispersers, and they broadly fall into two categories: fruits with many small seed and fruits with few, large-seeds. The former get eaten with the fruit, pass through the GI tract unscathed, and get deposited in a nitrogen rich environment ready to grow. Some seeds actually require passage through the GI tract to readily germinate. The seeds are numerous enough that while a few get destroyed by chewing, the majority get swallowed intact. And the digestion process removes the inhibiting tissue from around the seed, and may even render the seed coat more permeable.

When seeds get larger, animal dispersers like ourselves generally pick them out and discard them rather than swallowing them. Something about the size of a watermelon seed is about the break point on swallowing versus picking out. Fruits with big seeds (grapefruit) or pits (inner part of fruit with enclosed seed) like peaches and mangos are no brainers. You can follow fruit eating monkeys through a rainforest and see, based on what they drop and defecate (don't follow too closely), that their choices are very similar to yours.

For some reason, probably having something to do with the way it was stored, the environmental conditions overroad the inhibitors and kicked these tomato seeds into premature germination, so here they are growing their way out of the fruit.

HT to a curious botanical colleague.

Reasons for gardening

A recent article provides 10 reasons for planting your own garden: preserving seed diversity, self sufficiency, thoughtful gifts, exercise, cut fossil fuel use, save time, lessons for kids, nutrition, harvesting, save money. The Phactor finds most of these completely unrealistic and even a bit naïve. Come on this is the best they could do? Who plants a garden to have thoughtful gifts? Giving away excess zucchini is hardly thoughtful. Maybe throwing an over-ripe tomato at your neighbors' barking dog might count as thoughtful , from a certain perspective. Makes you wonder if the author of this article gardens? Real gardeners aren’t motivated by such reasons, so here’s the Phactor’s 10 reasons for why you should have a garden.
Reality check – Gardens provide a means of keeping in touch with reality. You watch plants sprout, grow, prosper or dwindle, and die. Some things do well, others flop. That’s life in a microcosm.
Taste – Fresh from the garden fruits and veggies tastes so much better than the aged offerings in stores. Only farmer’s markets come close. I doubt there is actually any significant nutritional difference, but who cares.
Berries – Nothing is better than fresh berries, other than value added berries, like a berry pie, especially for breakfast. If you don’t understand this refer back to taste, and of course, marry someone who knows how to bake a pie.
Weather – Gardening puts you in touch with the weather more than any other activity, other than maybe sailing, but that’s hard to verify here in Lincolnland. Highs, lows, rainfall, storms all begin to matter in ways you never noticed before. If you don’t understand refer back to reality check.
Asparagus – Nothing says spring more than fresh asparagus. Oh, this stuff is what it’s all about. Asparagus grows well along fences and borders, but plant it far enough inside your lot that your neighbor can’t reach it. Check the link to improve on something that doesn’t need improvement.
Snap peas – Yes, your kids may decide it’s fun to watch things grow (mine didn’t), and it may be a way to teach them to eat better, but I recommend not even giving kids the good stuff. They’re happy with McNuggets, so why share something as good as snap peas with the little ingrates?
Bragging rights – Gardeners really really like to brag about how big this grew, how many peppers they got, how early their first tomato was. It’s like comparing gold scores, except golf is the antithesis of gardening, unless you go to pick raspberries along the edge of the fairways, and I grew more anyways.
Vine ripe tomatoes – Tomatoes purchased from a store are indistinguishable from red plastic. Lightly toast buttered slices of a baguette under a broiler. Rub them with the cut surface of a garlic clove, and the surface of a dead-ripe just-picked warm-from-the-sun tomato. Toast just a bit more. Eat this toast with a glass of cold bone-dry Spanish champagne. Don’t understand? Refer back to taste. Then go get yourself some McNuggets.
Hmm, that’s 8 reasons. But what does it matter? You shouldn’t need any more stinkin’ reasons; gardening is just what the best people do, no matter what, no matter where! Maybe some real gardeners can suggest a couple reasons more.