Unknown Citrusy Flowers

My husband bought two root-bound flowering plants on clearance a few months ago. We did not expect much out of them but a temporary bit of color to hang in the pots on the garage. Imagine our surprise to find these beautiful flowers, coming and coming! The plants will soon be too big for the pots, but I can rip out some overgrown mums and place them in a decorative bed. Another interesting thing- I was"dead-head"-ing the plants yesterday when I opened a dead head to show my husband all the seeds inside. It was packed! And after handling them, my hands smelled like oranges! I do not know what these flowers are, but I like them.

Tomatoes are Back

It just is not summer without a window sill full of ripening tomatoes. ours are recovering, so what I mistook for wilt was probably just the drastic over-watering from the downpours in July. production has slowed, but it is recovering. Some of the tomatoes are scarred by insect damage, but that is normal for this time of year. It is good to eat your own tomatoes.

I Picked a Peck of Pears

OK,I don't know exactly how many, but it was a lot. I didn't need a ladder,even. With a ladder I would have been able to pick at least a few BUSHELS, and that's way more pears than we eat in a year. These are firm canning or cooking pears, not those for fresh eating. A neighbor has a beautiful pear tree in the front yard, literally dripping with them. We saw pears falling to the ground on our walks last week, so I walked down and  asked if I could harvest some, and they said, "welcome". Wow! Now to put them up... the hard part.

Saving Basil Seeds

Forget the pitiful harvest. My tomato plants are coming out (except for the Sungolds, which are still producing, tiny as they are) this week-end. Those brown things on top are the mature seed pods of the basil plants. Each pod has 4 parts, each with about 4 little black seeds in it, so you can get a huge number of seeds from even one stem of flowers. I rub them out between finger and thumb over my palm or a white piece of paper, then throw the plant waste in the bushes. I let these get away from me a bit and flower early, having harvested WAY too much basil last year. I did not learn how to make pesto until this year, because I needed a low-sodium version, and we don't have pine nuts around here. I grew basil this year from saved seed, and it worked, though I did wind up buying a few plants extra to try to deter the tomato hornworms. When the tomato plants got taller than the basil, the basil had no apparent repellent effect. However, the urge to pose at the top of the plant in the evening when I was watering DID lead to the demise of several of those nasty critters. Lord willing, the garden will be cleared and ready for fall crops by the end of the week-end.

Tired

This is an eggplant flower. The plant has flowered, but no baby eggplants. I am sad about that. My summer plants are tired (at least the tomato and cucumber that produced magnificently earlier in the summer seem to be), and I am,  too. Spent the day scrubbing dust and grime off surfaces in the culture rooms, which should be kept painstakingly clean. Even the hood in which we store pre-autoclaved materials was filthy. No wonder I'm wheezing a bit (wore a mask for the really nasty bits). Tossed a cucumber plant into compost this afternoon. Clearing space to plant anew for fall. Hope it works.

Beautiful Storms

Storms can be scary. Dark clouds gather. Some of them rotate. Winds whip the trees around. Lightning flashes make the emerging darkness eerily light, temporarily. The rain pours down, drenching everything and flooding the streets. We pray that the hail (and the trees) will not fall.

But storms also bring a welcome coolness this time of year, and the advancing phalanx of cumulonimbus clouds can be a sight to behold. My husband and I stood outside this evening, watching the clouds swirl as birds wind-surfed and the tree branches whipped around. It was great. We pray for all the typhoon victims as we watch the clouds swirl above, knowing our storms are small by comparison.

Fungi are Not My Friends

O.K. Maybe portobello and white button mushrooms are my friends, but that's it. I got my husband's foot and nail fungus after we started sharing a bathroom, and proved to be sensitive to the medication taken internally, so those fungi are NOT my friends. 

My Arkansas Traveler tomato plants are sick. I noticed some oddly yellow branches on one side toward the bottom of one plant a few weeks ago, during the unusual cool and wet weather we've been having, and promptly forgot about them. Now the crown of the plant is affected. It looks, from the tomato diagnostic pages I can find online, to be fusarium wilt. I am most saddened that I will not be able to grow those yummy fruits next year in that sunny spot. Arkansas Travelers are not fusarium wilt resistant, though they are very drought, heat, and crack resistant. I'll have to try another, more resistant variety. I would provide a sick plant pic, but it is raining too hard to risk taking the camera outside. There is a pale hope that I'm mistaking insect damage and overwatering from the massive rains we're getting lately for the wilt, but I doubt it. We shall see.

The Joy of Cantaloupe

This grew out back! All 5 lb 4 oz of it. Forget my disheveled clothing- I was too excited about the amazing aroma of a ripe cantaloupe to notice an un-tucked facing. I cut it open to see an interior the color of orange sherbet, not gelatinous or mealy, but freshly ripe. I like my melons fragrant, but firm, and this one was perfect. I was too excited to remember to take a picture of the interior, but it was very good. Here also is a picture with the vine, for future reference.

Afternoon Adventure of The Less Pleasant Kind

This afternoon, on the way home from church, my husband's car DIED at an intersection. Simply would not run, would not turn over, no power windows to go up, nothing. It was not an intersection in the best part of town, but there was a gas station nearby. The attendant was completely encased in bulletproof glass/plexiglass, with pockmarks in a few places. I asked for numbers for a taxi and a tow truck. His first language was not English, and from the accent, probably not Spanish, either. I can speak enough Spanish to get by. When I motioned for "phone" and said "numbers" a second time, he waved me to a phone book outside the glass. We called a cab, and the driver was quite nice, even switching his radio station when he saw my church clothes and Bible. I was glad he was driving with all the windows open, because there was enough cigarette residue in the car to activate my asthma otherwise. I came home, got my car, and went to the dealership to pick up my husband and bring him home.

Lessons: carry keys at all times, carry phone and have it charged, and be ready to walk if necessary. We had all but the last one. Triple A would have been nice, too, though I've seen Mom and Dad wait a lot longer than we did for a tow. Boy scouts aren't the only ones who should Be Prepared.

Flower on Mud Island

We took advantage of the gorgeous weather to go to the park on Mud Island Sunday afternoon and walk around. This plant was growing in the rocks at river's edge. Each flower had a bee in it, oblivious to the world. I looked at the flowers while my husband added to the artistic rock piles balanced precariously near the water. We later shared a strawberry-banana smoothie. Fun!

Reading Again

Now that the candidacy meeting is over, I'm back to reading about canning, gardening, preserving food, etc. Now I am reading Forty Acres and No Mule by Janice Holt Giles. My family had a lot in common wiht the Kentucky Appalachians she describes in the book. We are devout Christians, and we used to have close-knit communities based on family ties and long-standing land ownership going back to Revolutionary and War of 1812 grants. Even the food described in the book is familiar (including a lack of asparagus- I do not remember eating it until adulthood). The manners of treating others are similar, though the verbal expressions are different. It is a fascinating look at how an outsider adjusts to a small, family-based community.

Poona Khira

This is a traditional variety of cucumber from India, usually available only in the area around the city of Puna. The plant TOOK OFF growing when the temperatures went above 95 F for daytime highs. It is supposed to stay sweet despite the heat. If global warming is going to happen, or global cooling, or whatever changing conditions may be, it is wise to use our global communications to ask others, "what do you grow in hot,dry-yet-humid conditions? How do you plant it, fertilize it, and grow it? How do you know it is ready to eat? How do you prepare it?". Maybe the land grant institutions could catalog and maintain seed banks and information, not just for "germ plasm" as raw material for experiments, but as a rich record of the agricultural ingenuity that enables humans to live and grow food in a wide variety of conditions all over the world. It would be a lot easier to help people adapt with resistant plants that already exist than to say "Give us millions of government dollars, and we'll engineer a resistant plant- sure it'll need a ton of water and specific fertilizers to make up for the fact that the inserted vector hit an essential enzymatic pathway, but it'll be rust resistant!" Can't we just try using what God has already given? We do not have to reinvent the wheel when a very nice vehicle sits in the driveway, fueled and ready to go.

A Dreaded Enemy Has Found Me- Manduca Sexta

I knew they would show up eventually. I was watering my tomato plants when I saw that one looked a bit chewed. Examining more closely, I saw this- entire branches of fresh, new growth partially denuded. I knew of only one local foe of tomatoes that destructive- the larva of the Carolina Sphinx moth, otherwise known as the tobacco hornworm. The tomato hornworm is a relative that is equally destructive, and they look a lot alike.

You can read about them at http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/insects/butterflies/sphinx/sphinx.htm#carolina. 

It is a large and pretty moth (you can mistake it for a hummingbird or a small bat), that has large and ugly offspring. This is in a pint jar. The caterpillar is as big around as my thumb, and as long as my index finger. Its head is not shown, but that red tail spike (black in the tomato hornworm) is an identifying mark. The best thing to do is to inspect your plants regularly, and pick them off. If you have birds or chickens big enough to handle eating them, feed them to your animals. Otherwise find a way to kill them before they skeletonize your rich tomato dreams.

The Harvest is Gearing Up- And So is the Heat

There is a heat advisory today, meaning temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s F, and hazards for the very young and the elderly in terms of overheating and dehydration. I grew up without AC for most of my childhood, though the old house was surrounded by fields and trees, so it didn't get nearly as hot as a sun-baked house surrounded by the concrete and steel of a city. Watch out! Stay in the shade; move slowly; wear a big, floppy hat; and drink plenty of water if you are outside in the heat of the day! 

In the better news, the garden yields are going up. We harvested only a little over a pound of produce last month. This month was harvested over five pounds so far, with over a pound coming in yesterday. The larger tomatoes have not even started ripening, and the corn will not be in until mid-July! Then we'll have some big numbers. Stay cool.

15 Minutes Can Change Your Life

At about 4:30 Friday, I was cleaning up after finishing an assay when the sky blackened. Rain poured over the building in sheets. Leaves and trash swirled upward from the construction site below the window. I headed downstairs, despite the lack of any alarm. It was over in a few minutes. The tornado warning alarms sounded for the next half hour. They may have been going during the storm, but we could not hear them indoors.

On the way home, I saw the usual small branches and leaves littering the road. The electricity was out when I got home, but I called the utility company, and the automated service said it would be up in a few hours.

Hours passed. We went for a walk after dinner at the local cafe, which had power. A few blocks south of us, a huge, mature oak had split from the bottom (roots were shallow and black with rot, though the crown was lush and green) and fallen on a thick north-south power line, crushing a utility pole with the transformer and leaving lines in the road. We learned that this had happened all over the city, with winds up to 70 miles per hour, and a tornado suspected in Bartlett. It travelled up Bartlett Boulevard. It hit densely populated areas along the route. Nobody died, and only a few were injured. About 130,000 people were left without electricity. We bought some dry ice and prepared for the worst.

The trucks started coming and going the next day. The neighborhood echoed with chain saws and generators, but was otherwise strangely quiet. The holes for new poles were being drilled by Saturday afternoon. Police cars with spotlights patrolled the neighborhood all night. Wires were up Sunday, but there were other wires down that had to be fixed before they could safely restore our electricity.

The dry ice was gone by Sunday afternoon, and the refrigerator was getting too warm. We went hunting dry ice, but to no avail. We bought regular ice and hustled all remaining salvageable cold goods into the chest freezer in the garage, packing it full so that it would stay cold.

We grilled a dinner of fresh vegetables and thawing chicken in our smoker/grill. We'll eat a lot of chicken and pork chops in the next few days. Fortunately the meat did not thaw completely.

We learned that we are too dependent on the electric company for our basic needs. Freezing as a sole means of food preservation is not good. We lost a LOT of frozen vegetables. We need a battery or crank-operated radio. I'll be canning a lot of strawberry jam in the next few days, as the strawberries thawed, too (but stayed cold). We need to build our emergency supplies. We will.

Basil Aplenty

I like basil in soups and pasta sauce, but sometimes my plants produce so much, we may not be able to eat it all. If you want to start herb gardening, I would suggest starting with basil or mint if you like them. They grow easily, aren't too fussy about conditions, and produce big yields. Fresh basil (especially enough to make a pesto, if you can get pine nuts) is REALLY expensive, so it could easily repay the cost of a pot and some soil and seeds or a seedling. You can freeze basil or mint, or use them fresh. Advice is mixed on drying them, and I have never tried. I might try it in the attic this summer, but it gets so hot up there that the flavorful volatile oils of the basil might evaporate. A small batch as an experiment won't hurt. The picture is from last year on July 4, and the basil is in the front next to the tomato plants. Scary thing is, my tomato plants are almost that big now, from seed, in a different bed with more sun. Wow!