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. 

Baobabs on the bucket list

Baobabs are remarkable trees, and TPP wants to see these badly, so they are on his plant bucket list. Note that the dopey photographer has the lizard in focus not the trees, rather a typical sort of plant near sightedness. But these trees are in Madagascar, not an easy place to visit.  The Phactors have seen some different baobabs in South Africa and the baobab like bottle trees of Queensland. But these bottle tree baobabs are just the coolest trees.  It's hard to believe these aren't a made up scifi alien tree.  These and the ones in S. Africa are species of Adansonia and while a species does occur in Australia the bottle tree there is a species of Brachychiton. The general term for trees that grow like this is pachycauly, thick stems.  For many years TPP had a fig that grew as a pachycaul and it was pruned to look like one of these baobabs. It was a pretty cool bonsai tree, just like this one from Dave's Garden. But still not quite the same.

Breaking long time resolutions and not your back

Quite a few years ago, quite a few apartments ago, and quite a few roommates ago, TPP swore he was not going to move any more hide-a-bed couches up or down stairs for the F1. This was just a common sense, survival sort of resolution so TPP had be good at keeping it. So it generated a certain degree of dread and foreboding when Mrs. Phactor announced that a loveseat hide-a-bed had outlived any limited usefulness it ever had and would not survive the transformation of a small bedroom/library into her retirement office. With the exception of a long-haired kitty-girl, no one ever found this particular piece of furniture very comfortable for sitting let alone sleeping, again with the exception of afore-mentioned feline who wisely eschewed the seat and mattress for the pillow top back.  So this seat is not as impossibly heavy and awkward as a full-sized hide-a-bed, but balanced against its smaller size is the fact that TPP is a lot older since his last hide-a-bed move. Part of the problem is the particularly odd door to this room, narrow and set at an angle to purposely make all ingress and egress difficult. Getting it in the room took a certain amount of brute force combined with an ignorance of physics and geometry, getting it out was no different, but fortunately the stairs are quite wide so standing the seat on its end and sliding it down one stair at a time did not require hefting its bulk. This proved quite successful, but then at the bottom you end up having the whole thing just hulking there, much to the pleasure of said cat who decided she could happily live with this new arrangement and perched herself upon the upmost end for  gazing out the window. Hopefully later today a couple of hulking brutes, or at least younger backs, will come to haul the object away for a new gig with someone needing just such a seat, probably one of 3 people in the known universe. Most happily TPP's back will survive this glad parting. And Mrs. Phactor is pleased with the outcome.

Botany within your reach. 3. Potato tubers are stems.

It's always nice when other people help the cause.  So here's a link to a nice discussion about potato tubers. When things grow underground there arises considerable confusion about whether they are roots or stems. There are three kinds of subterranean storage stems: horizontal ones often near the surface are called rhizomes (ginger)(labeled "ginger root" but it's a rhizome), short erect ones called corms (taro), and elongate to globular ones are called tubers. Tubers can also grow aerially.  So like all good stems potatoes have leaves, highly modified, and buds ("eyes")that give rise to branches. This is well illustrated at the link above.  And then these branches can give rise to roots, and ultimately to new plants. This was an idea TPP was going to do for his BWYR series, but this blog was just too good to pass up.  HT and many thanks to the Botanist in the kitchen blog. TPP provides a regular feed so you can just look for them in the blog roll side column.
For the record sweet potatoes are roots but have a stemish quality at their proximal end. True yams are tubers, but in North America, yams are a variety of sweet potato. 

Fat Bushy-tailed Tree Rats

These are not our favorite animals as their functions in life seem to be 1. eat everything, 2. chew on everything, 3. dig up everything, and mostly in that order. This is the largest squirrel native to N. America, the so-called fox squirrel, and everyone but gardeners think them cute and handsome. Our estate is home to a dozen or so individuals at any given point in time. Often anywhere from 8 to 18 can be seen here and there around the gardens. If you have any that are fatter than these you'll have to prove it because it may not be possible. These are midwestern corn and squash seed, along with sunflower seed fattened squirrels. This particular fellow is disposing of stale, ancient raisins, so they do have some trivial uses as food disposals. If times ever get too tough squirrel stew will be on the menu. One of our residents this year has 3 or 4 prominent whitish scars that look as though they were caused by talons, a close call with a red-tailed hawk perhaps. The worst thing they do is chew the bark from tree limbs to get at the inner bark, and many of the limbs that fall show evidence of such limb-damaging or limb-killing girdling activity. Even worse than the bun-buns, the bark gnawing takes place way up in the canopy, so no caging will help. And they are not fast learners; they'll eat a magnolia flower bud, find it distasteful and move to the next as if the outcome might be different, and one year they chewed all but one flower bud on a big-leaf magnolia, and about then you begin thinking about squirrel stew again. They do provide diversion, a sort of cat TV entertainment for the kitty-girls. We had a big, big cat who seemed to delight in treeing squirrels and then hanging around to listen to their shrill scolding. Does your wildlife need to be diversified?  Let us know.

Friday Fabulous Flower - not so large, not what you think

Here's a tropical plant from Thailand and TPP knows what you are thinking.  What a cute little snapdragon!
Cute and little (about 5 mm long), yes, but not a snapdragon, although it was long so classified. Of course molecular data has resulted in the complete disintegration of the snapdragon family (Scrophulariaceae) to the point where TPP had to engage students in the massive effort to refile a dozens of genera in our herbarium, and now some things will prove hard to find without consulting a guide post or an alphabetized list of genera that will point you to the "correct" family.  At any rate, TPP found this plant growing in brick walls of old temples, basically weathered laterite clay. And both morphological and molecular data places this plant as the basal genus of the Orobanchaceae (broom-rape family), a family of parasitic and hemiparasitic plants.  All of the former Rhinanthoideae subfamily of hemiparasitic snapdragons got shifted to  the Orobanchs.  However, this genus is the only fully autotrophic plant in the family and it has the smallest seeds TPP has ever seen in this group, absolutely dust seed, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. It grows in our glasshouse quite well.

Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!

Maybe you haven't seen the movie, but TPP was amused to see a new green gardening product being advertised under the trade marked product name Beetlejus.  This must be pretty new because TPP hadn't notice it before, but supposedly this is a Bt insecticide for beetles!  Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis and when consumed the beetles soon stop eating (don't you like the sound of that) and then die.  Since humans are not susceptible to this particular bacterium, it is pretty harmless and can be used up to the day of harvest.  It works on Japanese beetles, adults and larvae, and hopefully on cucumber and bean beetles too.  And if it works on flea beetles, what joy!  This is not an endorsement because TPP doesn't do those, but an informative message, so no links to retail outlets.  It's an integrity thing. And so far this is untried by yours truly, but other Bt products have performed well. Not sure if this will work on butterfly larvae or not, the product label does not so indicate although the ads say "caterpillars", which beetles don't have. So doubtful it will work like on them.  Different strains of Bt for different insects. But you have to say the name three times.

Student consults syllabus; campus in shock.

TPP must say that he can only remember one time that a student consulted his syllabus, and then it was to practice for a career in contract law litigation, clearly not understanding that some syllabi are aspirational documents.  At any rate this is pretty funny.

Interactive climate map for 2100

This is a sort of fun interactive climate map for cities in the USA.  You plug in your city's name and it'll show you what current city your city will be most like if climate projections continue to 2100.  So for example out city will have half as many days  where the temperature goes below freezing (now about 4 months, 120 days), and a summer about 10 degrees warmer than our summers now something like in southern California!  Just in case you need some incentives to consider life changes that can affect climate, this may help.  Maybe you need to forward this to some legislators. 

Whale of a good hologram?

This is a pretty spectacular little video of what purports to be a hologram.  The effect is quite amazing, but is this a 3D image really being projected into the gymnasium or is this a bit of video trickery, where one bit of video is superimposed upon an other?  The spectators certainly react as though they are seeing the image, but the area is pretty bright and there is no obvious projection equipment visible.  What do you think?  Is this a really amazing hologram or a bit of video trickery?  Inquiring minds want to know.