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August 2009Disaster in the Garden and Magical Pumpkin
Please click on the August link to the right to read this and see photos. 8/4 Disaster in the garden! - Heirloom Spanish Musica pole beans are wilting fast and it’s not due to lack of soil moisture. - On the back of a pumpkin leaf, there is a cluster of tiny copper-colored bumps. That plant is getting yellow-edged leaves. If anyone knows what this is, please email me at: mary@dig-itmag.com - Low fruit to flower ratio on the tomatoes - Tomato plants croaking from the bottom up - Never laid eyes on Cerinthe: Pride of Gibraltar that I planted months ago. If anyone has a photo of the seedlings of this plant, please send to: mary@dig-itmag.com so I can post it. I know what most garden weed seedlings look like, and I have not seen anything different. - Pepper and chile plants are wilted and spotted. Good things: - Lots of Supersette crookneck squash - Zinnia transplants from seed sown in the garden grow easily. - Pumpkins, even when trained to grow vertically, need more than 1 square-foot to grow. Their big leaves shade out everything in front of them, such as the cayenne plants. It may be fine to plant greens in their shade in summer. - Potatoes are sprouting. - And the corn is as high as a human’s eye. 8/1 Does a plant have a “brain”? Even a pea-size brain? What triggers their every action? Imagining a vegetable brain is not hard; after all, they have ovaries – and we eat them (vegetarians, take note). I wonder. The tendrils on a climbing pumpkin plant are one of the most amazing plant structures I have ever seen – intricate, functional, effective and beautiful. I think they will grow to whatever length they need to in order to accomplish their task: plant stability. Long, delicate and wavy in search, they become wound tight as coils on a spring when they reach their destination. Lance says the coils allow spring action in wind so the stem doesn’t break. Mother nature’s springs. One tendril fastener per location is not enough for pumpkins. They seem to arrange for the future increase in plant size and weight by sending out fasteners in all directions to grab hold of horizontal and vertical structures – much like a map view of highway intersections and jughandles. Their immense leaves are gearing up for super production. What will the plants bring? If never a fruit, their leaves, tendrils and stems are entertaining enough. If my son were small again, pumpkin is the plant I would grow for him. |
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