Musings

I snapped this while I was at the Bot Garden the other week. I didn’t look for an ID on this plant because I was mesmerized by a leaf apparently having a bloom attached to it. I saw others with a similar leaf-bloom morphology, but this is the best snapshot. The flower is not very large, maybe 2 cm tall.

Sad note: Uga VI died on Friday (WashPost); he was almost 10. No mention of whether he’ll be planted with the other Ugas adjacent to Sanford Stadium—or if he leaves progeny—an Uga VII.

Posted at 6:21 PM | Comments Off on Strange practices

I’m not even going to comment on the willpower it took not to nab this ’mater.

Our neighbors are out of town, and I went over this morning to check how their veggies were doing. Sadly, in combo with the lack of rain, the bright sun has hammered them—all the leaves were terribly limp. So, I took the dishwater over (remember, watering restrictions and drought in these parts). It wasn’t much. I am happier now, since we one of those summer-afternoon pop-up storms nailed us this afternoon, delivering some blessed precip (not much, but we’ll take whatever arrives!).

The beautiful rain had another impact, however. The Blue Tarp is showing its age, and JCB spread a plastic dust cloth on the dining room floor to catch the drips….

Posted at 6:08 PM | 2 Comments »

The other day I had some lovely south Georgia freestone peaches. Right now, I’m eating my way through some tasty clingstones, grown on an in-town otherwise-ornamental peachtree.

My dad always grew freestones; although I see several places on the web claim that freestones tend to have a harder flesh, Dad’s freestones were always super-juicy. I remember coming home from school in the fall and heading out to the trees directly from the school bus, and selecting an especially huge, red specimen, then bending over to eat it so the juice dripped harmlessly off my chin into the grass instead of on my school clothes**.

Despite the fact that Georgia continues to be (proudly, in some quarters) nicknamed “The Peach State*,” the USDA statistics record that for some years the state with the biggest peach crop has been California. In 2004, CA grew 76% of the US peach crop, up from 75% in 2003.

Peaches are from China. They weren’t in the New World until the arrival of European-types. Thus, finding peach pits on an archaeological site of indeterminant age in the Southeast, for example, means it dates to the historic period.

* Sam Henry Rumph, of Macon County, developed a peach he named Elberta for his wife. Apparently, this lead to the state taking the Peach State moniker.

** Other than the obvious uniforms, do kids even have “school clothes” any more?

Posted at 10:47 AM | Comments Off on Freestone vs. Clingstone

While T. and I were at the Bot Garden on Saturday, I also (like you had any doubts) took flower photos (and other stuff, duh!). I’m guessing there are quite an assortment, botanically speaking, of plants I’d term “water lilies,” and this is one. Heck, maybe it’s a weird papyrus or something, one of the other floral inhabitants of the reflecting pool…. I hope the file-size management strategies I’ve employed with Photoshop haven’t totally obscured the fine contrasting-colored veins and other luxe features of this gorgeous bloom….

* Hey, where’s my hand lens (better than bifocals…) for examining these botanical subtleties.

Posted at 8:13 PM | Comments Off on Bloomin’ details*

I took this picture last spring, in northwest Georgia. I think it’s wheat. I guess that would make it…winter wheat. I think.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Plant periodicity

Archaeologists commonly monitor pollen types in sealed (buried) horizons—well, if the project has sufficient funding for it. From the pollen, you can discern things about the climate, the season the material was buried, etc. Only in unusual circumstances do we find seeds. Archaeologists found date palm seeds at Masada (yes, the fortress built by Herod around 35 BC and destroyed by the Romans in AD 73), and one is now three years old and more than three feet tall! (Science link, too.)

Posted at 11:52 AM | Comments Off on Dated date

I can’t seem to focus on one thought-stream, so this’ll be a mish-mash.

Today I attended two birthday parties. I don’t think I’ve attended two in one day before. At one, I watched a assortment of well-behaved children play a lot of pocket billiards—which involved considerable focus and only the rare occasion when the ball aimed at actually fell. I really liked watching the little guy who concentrated so very hard although his eyes were below the level of the top of the rails. The other party was a small, cozy family affair (no game room; no tots). Ice cream choices were dubbed green and white (mint choc chip and natural vanilla).

The picture: this is the present form of the mystery plant I identified in May as a jack-in-the-pulpit. I spent a bit more time than usual googling to find a picture of a the plant at this stage, but finally found one. So, yes, this is what a JITP looks like in this phase. Identification confirmed. I also note that I can expect the berries to turn bright red. Waiting.

JCB also brought us perspective on our Prius (supposed to be released by the body shop mid-week), but I’ll save that for its own entry—and photo.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Parties, plant, Prius

Lots going on today, but instead of recounting it (or part of it), here’s a picture from deep in the digital archives, from the first weeks I had my first digital camera (image number 00128, to be exact). Indeed, I think this was the first of what has become a (somewhat) long line of insect photos (many by accident).

Okay, I’m pretty fried; look at all those parens!

Posted at 9:10 PM | Comments Off on Stomping grounds…

Here’s some clarification for Saturday’s somewhat garbled post. This is The Botanist’s garden (well, the west end of it) where we’ve been doing so much work, mostly weeding and laying weed-discouraging newspapers (the ones that were blown about in the winds).

Decoding: OS = old strawberries; NS = new strawberries; Peas = (English) peas; On = green onions; Pep = green peppers; Tom = tomatoes; Asp = asparagus. Here’s the story….

The strawberry plants not only produce berries, they also send out runners, which extend a foot or so from the parent plant, then seek to root, making a new daughter plant. The Botanist trains them in a single direction, thereby creating a strawberry bed with sections each of a different age. So the OS is on it’s third year, and the NS is either on its second year, or, in the area with sparse plants farthest from the OS bed, the plants were bought new this year. We removed all blossoms and incipient fruit from these newest plants, so this year they put their energy into making plants rather than making fruit. The second year and newest plants are surrounded by newspapers, every one put down by JCB (an unexpected skill-set, perhaps; he’s really quite good at it).

I checked the pea pods, and they were a little over an inch long yesterday. Perhaps in another week the peas will be big enough to pick. Then shell. Lots of work. But excellent sweetness and flavor—nothing like those frozen ones…. Actually, the “Peas” label is more on top of a lot of extremely tasty lettuce that is growing between the peas and the newest strawberry plants.

For a little extra Vitamin K, there’s three-quarters of a row of green onions. Toward the back of that row is about six feet of collard greens and then about five feet of beets. Clearly, The Botanist prefers onions to greens and beets….

Behind the fence, where there’s another place with lots of newspaper over open spaces, there’s a row of green pepper plants then a row of tomato plants. The individual plants are almost impossible to spot among the greenish weeds that are holding down the newspaper.

The fluffy tall plants behind all of these are asparagus. They grow from buried crowns that sprout every spring. You can snap off the sprouts (as it were) for a while (yum!), but then you have to leave some to mature and go to seed.

You can’t see the raspberries (pruned to be fall-bearing) and peonies and grapes that grown in the lowest corner of the yard beyond the asparagus. At the other end of the main garden, to the left outside the frame, are un-hilled hills of muskmelon and a row of cucumbers at the base of a fence (they’re easier to pick and take less room when trained up a fence).

No sweet corn this year. Raccoons have gotten the entire crop the last three years. The Botanist says not this year.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Garden achievements

I’ve been watching the hard spherical buds on the two peonies, and today’s the first day they both have fully opened flowers, so we took one of each color up to Mom and floated them in a bowl.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Peony watch