Tag: experiments

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12/23/2023 basketflower

Surprise! Seedlings!
The label
Has an adult leaf
Younger one
Several including one nibbled on
Basketflower seedlings have emerged! It’s an annual, so I assume they start now and then goes through summer. Hopefully they can survive frosts. Presumably they can though since seeds fall all fall in the wild too.

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12/21/2023 preparing for solstice rain

The rain barrel on its now bare stand, with the tepary bean vine pile, a glass Pyrex bowl of tepary bean pods, and a rolling stool on the driveway in front of it, on a cloudy day.
We have been slowly harvesting all the tepary beans dry off the vine. The vines made this rain barrel hard to use in summer, so we’ll stick to no vines on it next year. I moved some strawberries to under the rain barrel where I can let it drip on them in summer.
I’m holding a dormant ampelopsis plant. Its root has two side branches and the main root branch is torn.
I’ve had my eye on an Ampelosis near the woodpile all summer. It’s finally dormant but it turned out to be mostly under the edge of the patio. We shall see if it lives.
I point at four clumps of a divided sedge at the base of the red oak, among many fallen leaves.
A native sedge in the backyard sprouts up between the pavers periodically, so I’m slowly moving (and dividing them) out of the path. I like to move plants in the winter right before rains so I don’t have to water them.
I’m holding a dried mystery grass by the tops. One seedhead is visible.
Top of grass
I’m holding a dormant grass by the base, so you can see the roots are relatively short in the damp earth.
Roots
Four grasses, I think all one species, came up between the concrete blocks and the path, not on the other side of the blocks where I wanted native grasses. I don’t recognize this one but I assume I put it there and it washed down. I moved all four back into the prairie area. The soil is still nice and soft after last week’s inch of rain.

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04/14/2023 maybe possibly hopefully a Spiranthes rosette!!

The below three pictures are of leaves I found on the east side of a grass clump in the backyard prairie. It feels less fleshy than the invasive introduced dayflowers and most of those also have a reddish stem. I have flagged it and we’ll wait and see if it disappears (probably a Spiranthes!!) or keeps growing into a dayflower. As a reminder, I seeded them from a pod from my parents’ house last winter.

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04/01/2023 earwig night one survived!

The Agastache survived with its defensive ring of petroleum jelly. Gonna have to go buy another tube.
The Blackfoot daisy made it overnight!
The second daisy made it too! There are fewer earwigs in the rock garden.
Paula pointed out last night that our other agastaches that got completely chomped by earwigs are putting up new shoots.
Here’s the second one also having a tiny sprout.
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03/31/2023 thanks past self!

Past me ordered plants in the winter!
Pets very much liked the box. It had good smells. Here Gram steps right in before I’ve unpacked the crinkle paper.
Good thing there was cardboard protecting the plants too.
Gram moved to sit on the crinkle paper and smells one of two Blackfoot daisies. Briar observes. We put the daisies in the rock garden. I had one in the backyard once when we first moved here but I think it was too wet. The rock garden is the driest hottest spot in the yard.
The other plant we got was an orange Agastache. The damn invasive human-introduced earwig horde has already started eating it, so we are trying petroleum jelly around the base. It has worked for tomatoes before but didn’t work on a different Agastache recently, so we’ll go back out before bed and check again.
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02/05/2023 peppers growing

Before, a tall pepper seedling in a big yogurt container.
After, with new potting soil up to near the leaves. We did this to all the peppers and ground cherries. This is my experiment to reduce transplanting stress by just letting them grow more roots in place since these can root from stems.
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09/29/2022 oh mine too!

A few of my sprouts of Maximilian sunflowers are starting to bloom too! I love how it is peaking through my second new bunch of little bluestem.
This one’s thinking about opening but hasn’t yet. The big clump we moved to by the brush pile seems to be less happy. Not enough sun? I’ll let it go another year.