[ Lost in the Landscape ]

thank you rob!

Before the hol­i­days got in full swing I got some pitcher plant seed and seedlings from Rob of The Pitcher Plant Project. Rob is super-enthusiastic about the genus Sar­race­nia and his blog bounces along with his energy. Check it out!

Rob’s a cou­ple years ahead of me in mak­ing his own cus­tom hybrids and has some really cool plants com­ing along. Here are some shots of the seedlings he sent me.

These first all come from the cross of Sar­race­nia Bug Bat x Diane Whit­taker. This cross com­bines the seri­ously snakey-looking hood of S. minor with the frilly hood and wild pat­tern­ing of S. leu­co­phylla. The plants are young, but you can begin to see what promise they have. You can also see some of the vari­a­tion that’s pos­si­ble in a com­plex hybrid.

Two views of a seedling from the com­plex cross of Sar­race­nia ((pur­purea ssp. pupurea x jone­sii) x (leu­co­phylla x rubra ssp. gulfen­sis)). All four par­ents of this hybrid share a rare reces­sive genetic muta­tion that pre­vents the leaves from pro­duc­ing red pig­ments, leav­ing this hybrid green green green from chloro­phyll. One of Rob’s spe­cial inter­ests is in these so-called “anthocyanin-free” (“AF”) plants, and I think they’re pretty amaz­ing too. It really focuses your atten­tion on the archi­tec­ture of the pitchers.

Even if you’re only mod­er­ately technically-oriented you can make a lot of sense out of what’s going on with these AF plants in a paper by Phil Sheri­dan and Richard Mills, first pub­lished in Plant Sci­ence and now avail­able online at Mead­owview Bio­log­i­cal Research Sta­tion: [ Pres­ence of proan­tho­cyani­dins in mutant green Sar­race­nia indi­cate block­age in late antho­cyanin biosyn­the­sis between leu­co­cyani­din and pseudobase ]. Accord­ing to the paper the muta­tion that makes these plants green is one that affects the final stage in the meta­bolic path­way that cre­ates red antho­cyanin pigments.

And the plants kept going… Here are some first-year seedlings of the cross of Sar­race­nia Godzuki x ((flava x oreophila) x flava var. rugelli)…

And finally a big pile of seed from some really inter­est­ing crosses:

• S. oreophila “Veined” x Adrian Slack
• S. (oreophila x Royal Ruby) x Adrian Slack
• S. leu­co­phylla x Adrian Slack
• S. (leu­co­phylla x oreophila) x Brooks Hybrid
• S. (leu­co­phylla x oreophila) x (Ladies in Wait­ing x Judith Hindle)
• S. Bug Scoop x Brooks Hybrid
• S. alata, Texas x flava var. maxima

They’re now in indi­vid­ual bags of damp sphag­num moss in the lower veg­gie crisper of the fridge. A cou­ple more weeks of the cold treat­ment and then they’ll be ready to pot up.

If I man­age to keep all the plants and even half of the new seedlings I ger­mi­nate alive I’ll be up to my ankles in hun­gry young car­ni­vores. To some peo­ple this might sound like a 1950s B hor­ror movie, but as far as I’m con­cerned life doesn’t get much bet­ter than that!

Thanks, Rob!

December 28 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: sarracenia • seedlings • stratification • The Pitcher Plant Project | 8 Comments »

why a greenhouse?

I find that I’m ask­ing myself whether I need the green­house any­more. Left over from an obses­sion with warm-growing orchids a cou­ple decades ago, it sits in the mid­dle of some prime real estate in the every-shrinking back yard.

Its cur­rent incar­na­tion is more shed than green­house, with bags of pot­ting mix and pots tak­ing up most of the space. Still I con­tinue to use it for some prop­a­gat­ing. Because of the famous green­house effect tem­per­a­tures inside dur­ing the day­time can climb ten to twenty degrees higher than outdoors–and that’s with heavy shade­cloth on the west­ern expo­sure. Even at night it stays a lit­tle warmer than the out­doors. Before sun­rise dur­ing a cold snap a week and a half ago I looked at the ther­mome­ter inside: 42 degrees. Pretty cold, but it was but four to five degrees higher than a nearby ther­mome­ter outside.

The extra warmth can help seeds ger­mi­nate a few days ear­lier than out­doors. And once the plants are up they can grow quite a bit faster. The warm spa tem­per­a­tures inside the green­house, com­bined with some pro­tec­tion from maraud­ing nature, can give you a leg up on the season.

If you’re occa­sion­ally impa­tient like me it’s nice to see big­ger plants sooner.

And this last photo shows another advan­tage of the extra warmth. These are year­ling seedlings of the North Amer­i­can pitcher plant, Sar­race­nia. All three pots were started in the green­house a year ago, but the one in the mid­dle spent most of the sum­mer out­side in strong sun­light. These plants are sup­posed to like the intense light, but you can see that they were more par­tial to tem­per­a­tures that reminded them of the South than intense sun. For plants that ordi­nar­ily take five years to mature, it’s look­ing like the extra warmth can take a year or two off of the usual time. It’s cool to have a green­house to save a few weeks but hav­ing it help shave one or two years is pretty persuasive.

So as I talk myself through all this it’s look­ing like I’ll still want to have some sort of green­house, even in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. But it might not be this really inef­fi­cient and poorly located green­house. And did I men­tion that the cur­rent build­ing has termites?

The replace­ment might be sep­a­rate lit­tle struc­tures. Maybe they could be enclosed carts and have wheels so that they could be repo­si­tioned to take advan­tage of the best sun angles. And if they’re on wheels they could be stuck in a cor­ner of the yard if they’re not being used for prop­a­ga­tion. And some­thing like a cart wouldn’t waste space on aisles to walk down.

Well, there are lots of pos­si­bil­i­ties, and I’ll be think­ing about what to do. I’m one of those peo­ple who likes to stare at a prob­lem for a long time, but maybe in a few months you’ll be read­ing about the next big gar­den con­struc­tion project.

December 12 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: greenhouse effect • greenhouses • propagation • seedlings | 6 Comments »

from seed, the labor-intensive version

While my last post was ded­i­cated to an easy seed prop­a­ga­tion project, this one details a cou­ple that were a lit­tle more labor-intensive. Still not hard, just a lit­tle bit more work to pull off.

I’ve posted about my pitcher plants a few times before–Sar­race­nia species from the Amer­i­can South and some hybrids–and this is the first year I’ve tried sow­ing my own seed. All eight species (or nine, or ten or eleven, depend­ing on the expert you lis­ten to) are inter-fertile, and hybrids between all of them are pos­si­ble and have been made at one time or another. The hybrids, too, are gen­er­ally fer­tile, and you can go crazy with the genetic possibilities.

For cre­ative sorts you can arrange gar­den plants in inter­est­ing ways, but with this genus you could also design the very plants that you grow. If you live in the heart of pitcher plant coun­try, this might be a prob­lem. Bees could carry pollen from your hybrid plants to nearby native species and cre­ate some new unnat­ural hybrids. But the genus never crossed to this side of the Mis­sis­sippi River so Cal­i­for­ni­ans can play Doc­tor Franken­stein all they want with­out wor­ry­ing about mess­ing with the native pop­u­la­tion beyond our cas­tle walls.

So…I began in the spring mak­ing some hybrids, and the pods began to ripen in August, with the last pods just fin­ish­ing up ripen­ing right about now.

The seeds require a cool, damp period in order to ger­mi­nate. I emp­tied the pods and put the seed in a plas­tic bag with a few strands of moist chopped sphag­num moss, one bag for each cross. And into the fridge they went for four weeks.

After this period of cold strat­i­fi­ca­tion I sowed the seed on the sur­face of chopped sphag­num moss which I’d lay­ered on the top of post filled 50/50 with a sand/peat mixture.

Next, I put the pots into a clear plas­tic box, poured in half an inch of stand­ing rain­wa­ter, closed the lid, and put them near a win­dow that faces south-southeast. If every­thing goes well–and it looks like it did–the seedlings begin to emerge in two to four weeks. Warmish weather is best, though you don’t have to be too fanat­i­cal. This batch expe­ri­enced the recent 90– to 100-degree days as well as many cooler days in the 60s. As long as the seed think it’s spring, they’ll begin to germinate.

That’s pretty much it. Some peo­ple place the seedlings under con­stant bright lights and 70-plus degree tem­per­a­tures for up to three years to speed them up to matu­rity. I’m hop­ing that bright day­light in a warmish inte­rior spot will give them enough of a boost that I don’t have to resort to the equiv­a­lent of putting the plants on steroids.

And here you see the rea­son why peo­ple might try to accel­er­ate growth. These are year-old seedlings from a cross by Brooks Gar­cia that I sowed a year ago, think­ing I’d prac­tice on some­one else’s cross before attempt­ing my own. I grew these in my unheated green­house which has fairly low, less-than-ideal light­ing con­di­tions. They did get some bot­tom heat dur­ing the cold­est months of the year.

The other car­niv­o­rous plants I’m prop­a­gat­ing this fall are of this Mediterranean-region species, Dros­o­phyl­lum lusi­tan­icum. While vir­tu­ally all car­niv­o­rous plants are crea­tures of swamps and bogs, this one is unique in that it comes from fairly dry areas with be lim­ited sum­mer rain­fall. Unlike the pre­ced­ing sar­race­nia bog plants, this species could actu­ally thrive in California’s wet-winter, dry-summer cli­mate with­out too much addi­tional life support.

Its com­mon name is “Dewy Pine” because the leaves have lit­tle ten­ta­cles tipped with sticky bug-catching fluid that looks like dew. But Barry Rice men­tions a much cooler moniker: Its Por­tuguese name trans­lates into “Slob­ber­ing Pine.”

This plant and the pre­ced­ing Sar­race­nia do catch insects. It’s a con­tra­dic­tion I’m try­ing to come to terms with. I plant a lot of Cal­i­for­nia native plants, which pro­vide nec­tar and other food for all sorts of winged and crawl­ing crea­tures. And then I have these lit­tle mon­sters that actively trap and con­sume them. Call me a man of con­tra­dic­tions. In the end I hope I’m doing lots more good than bad.

I only know of one seller who ships Dros­o­phyl­lum so you pretty much have to grow your own from seed if you want one. (I got my seed from the seed bank of the Inter­na­tional Car­niv­o­rous Plant Soci­ety.) The lit­tle black seeds have a hard coat that slows down ger­mi­na­tion. If you have some 220-grit sand­pa­per around that’s not a prob­lem. Just lightly–and I mean lightly–rub the seed between two sheets of the sand­pa­per until a patch of the black seed coat is worn away to reveal the white layer under­neath. Then pop them on top of the same mix­ture you’d use for ger­mi­nat­ing Sar­race­nia and keep the mix moist with good-quality water. Ger­mi­na­tion for me was about two to six weeks, no cold strat­i­fi­ca­tion necessary.

There you have it. With both of these kinds of plants it was a lit­tle more work than my last post grow­ing blad­derods from seed. But really, it isn’t that hard if you’re patient.

November 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • Drosophyllum lusitanicum • hybrids • sarracenia • seedlings • seeds • stratification | 14 Comments »

from seed, the easy version

Fall: Prime time to sow many seeds in California’s mediter­ranean cli­mate. Self-sown gen­er­a­tions of clarkia, pop­pies, baby blue eyes, buck­wheats and lupines are show­ing up all around the garden.

But this year has pulled me in lots of direc­tions and I haven’t put a lot of effort into sow­ing seeds. Also, part of this lack of moti­va­tion is an attempt to accept the real­ity that the gar­den is pretty full as it stands, and I try resist the delu­sion that a plant grow­ing from a tiny seed won’t take up as much space as a nearly mature one from the nurs­ery. Con­se­quently the only active seed-sowing I’ve taken part in has been lim­ited to two very dif­fer­ent kinds of plants: the California-native blad­der­pod and some car­niv­o­rous plants.

The blad­der­pod was mainly an exper­i­ment. The pods that give Iso­meris arborea its com­mon name are full of seeds the size of dried peas. How easy would they be from seed?

Very easy, as it turns out. I opened up a cou­ple pods and buried the seeds about a quar­ter to half inch in these pots just two weeks ago. Here they are, show­ing almost 100% ger­mi­na­tion and phe­nom­e­nal seedling vigor.

Now that I see they’re really easy from seed I can check out the other thing thing I was curi­ous about. I have two blad­der­pods in the gar­den. One is slow-growing but is assum­ing a nice upright pos­ture. The other is an exu­ber­ant floppy mess of green-gray leaves and yel­low flow­ers. Both forms have their use in the gar­den, but I was really hop­ing for more upright growth pat­terns when I put them in the garden.

My seedlings come from the more upright plant, so we’ll see whether they fol­low mom’s growth habits when placed in var­i­ous loca­tions around the yard. Is the dif­fer­ence in growth habit nature or nur­ture? Might I have a con­sis­tently strain of upright-growing blad­der­pods on my hands?

In the native plant com­mu­nity grow­ing spe­cific strains or cul­ti­vars is often looked down upon as reduc­ing nat­ural vari­a­tion and dumb­ing down the gene pool. But in the gar­den it’s use­ful to know what kind of plant you’re get­ting. A gar­dener might be dis­ap­pointed to end up with a low mound instead of an open upright shrub. The cus­tomer might never buy another native plant again and instead fill their yard with hydrangeas. They’d spend thou­sands of gal­lons water­ing their hydrangeas, there’d be no more water for peo­ple and plants, and civ­i­liza­tion as we know it would collapse.

Any­way, so far this has been really easy. Next post I’ll look at my more high energy-input efforts to grow some car­niv­o­rous plants from seed.

November 21 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bladderpod • cultivars • Isomeris arborea • native plants • seedlings • seeds • sowing seeds | 8 Comments »

unusual october

Octo­ber usu­ally throws some ridicu­lously warm and dry weather at us. This was the month that in 2003 and 2007 saw mon­ster wild­fires rac­ing through the county, includ­ing the largest fire to hit Cal­i­for­nia in recorded his­tory (in 2003).

We’ve a few of those warmer days, but what’s been sur­pris­ing has the the cool, wet fore­taste of win­ter. Here’s a lit­tle exam­ple: This is my park­ing pass for work, where I usu­ally go in to the office Mon­days through Thurs­days. Each big dark X cor­re­sponds to a day when it was too wet to ride my scooter in to work. Add to that another morn­ing when I got a bad weather report and arrived pretty drenched.

Over the last two weeks it seems like half the morn­ings looked a lit­tle like this, with mist–or out­right rain–turning the pave­ment wet.

Finally, the line of repur­posed cat lit­ter buck­ets that had looked so for­lorn all sum­mer at the drip edges of the roof were begin­ning to fill with water. In fact my two rain big bar­rels are now full, ready to have their con­tents shared back into the garden.

In response to the cool­ing trend plants are leaf­ing out; seedlings are ger­mi­nat­ing. Read­ers not in mediter­ranean cli­mates might think they’re read­ing a gar­den blog from the south­ern hemi­sphere. But no, this is Cal­i­for­nia, which shares this wet-winter/dry-summer cli­mate with less than 5% of the earth’s sur­face. To make up for being so spe­cial we’re treated with almost 20% of all the world’s plant species. More than a fair trade for long sum­mer months with close to no water.

I was out in the front yard over the week­end, tidy­ing up growth that had hit its expi­ra­tion date. Mixed in with branches that had truly died were plenty belong­ing to drought-deciduous plants that were com­ing back to life. On the left is our local chap­ar­ral cur­rant, Ribes indeco­rum, turn­ing from brown twigs to leafy twigs. On the right is Ver­bena lilacina, a plant that can stay look­ing fairly green over the sum­mer if you give it more water than I do.

Every­where I stepped I had to avoid mash­ing tiny lit­tle buck­wheat seedlings, or these guys, itty bitty lit­tle chia plants (Salvia colum­bariae). Early this sum­mer when I took out the dead plants of this annual I made a point of shak­ing the seed heads over the dirt. Still I was wor­ried that I wouldn’t have enough ger­mi­na­tion to repeat the amaz­ing show of last spring. Looks like I didn’t need to be so concerned.

In the back yard seedlings of baby blue eyes were push­ing their way through the mulch. The mulch really does help keep down the weeds, but this species for­tu­nately doesn’t seem overly daunted by my attempt to save myself a few dozen hours of weed­ing. Var­i­ous crea­tures do find these seedlings extra-tasty–including the cat, which seems to think these are almost as good as cat­nip. Once they’re larger the cat doesn’t seem to pay them any atten­tion. I’m hop­ing for a nice half dozen or so survivors.

And there were even more seedlings. These are a few days away from show­ing their first true leaves, but I’m hop­ing that they’re the begin­nings of clarkias that sur­rounded this patch of bare dirt. If not clarkias, they’re likely seedlings of this really nox­ious weed that shared the space with the clarkias. We’ll soon find out…

Yes, it’s been an unusual Octo­ber. But I’ll take plants leaf­ing out and seedlings push­ing their way out of the ground any day over another round of brushfires!

October 26 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • October • rain • seedlings | 5 Comments »

two reasons to mulch

One of the week­end gar­den projects was to put down some mulch around a cou­ple of the fruit trees. I’d resisted doing it ear­lier because I’d been using the bare ground at the edge of the lit­tle orchard as a place to sow var­i­ous annual wild­flower seeds–clarkia, baby blue eyes, pop­pies, fun things like that. Mulch would have pre­vented the seed from germinating.

A lit­tle gar­den of annual wild­flow­ers sounds really cool, but it’s a lot of work to keep going. Bare ground dur­ing the wet win­ter and spring weather is an open invi­ta­tion for all the dor­mant weed seeds to set up house, and keep­ing the bed weeded was a several-day-a-week chore.

Add to that that we’re re try­ing to do more to con­serve water. Mulching around the trees to con­serve water was mak­ing too much sense to not do. Come win­ter I’ll be glad for the reduced weeding.

The raised bed with the fruit trees still con­tains some orna­men­tals near the edges, and I mulched up to near the edges of most of them. This is the local Dud­leya edulis, com­bined with blue chalk fin­gers, Senecio man­dralis­cae, from South Africa.

Some of the other plants in the bed were so low-growing that mulching would have cov­ered them entirely. I left a cou­ple lit­tle patches of the native Dichon­dra occi­den­talis with mulch only at the edges. Hope­fully the plant will be able to grow up through the mulch a bit.

This lit­tle San Miguel Island buck­wheat seedling was large enough to not bury, but a cou­ple seedlings nearby were specks in the dirt that would have never seen the light of day.

For these tini­est seedlings, I left the ground bare. In addi­tion I erected a cou­ple lit­tle goal­posts to mark the loca­tion so I wouldn’t stomped on when I walk through or pull them out think­ing they’re a weed. It’s a tech­nique I use when­ever I plant some seeds in the open ground. The lit­tle upright twigs usu­ally stay around long enough for the seeds to ger­mi­nate and get to a safe size.

I’ll miss the lit­tle meadow in the spring months, but not the weed­ing. And I feel bet­ter that the fig and plum will be able to get by with a lit­tle less water. Come fall, if I decide I’d still like some annu­als to liven up a gar­den spot with the bare branches of the trees over­head, there really wouldn’t be any­thing stop­ping me from clear­ing lit­tle patches of dirt through the mulch, sow­ing some wild­flow­ers, and erect­ing lit­tle goal­posts to pro­tect the plants from maraud­ing gardeners.

Hmm. I’m not sure why it took me so long to do this…

July 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: mulch • seedlings • water conservation | 5 Comments »

and the winner is…

Burned, boiled, scraped with a rasp, doused in acid, or left alone? What’s the best way to ger­mi­nate man­zanita seeds?

I’d begun a lit­tle kitchen exper­i­ment over two months ago to see which tech­nique would give the best ger­mi­na­tion for the Mex­i­can (or pointleaf) man­zanita, Actostaphy­los pun­gens. As of a cou­ple days ago, the win­ner is: scraped with a rasp.

Here are the first two tiny seedlings that breached their seed coats and made it up to day­light. I’d filed down through into the hard seed coat on the seeds of this batch, let­ting mois­ture reach the embryo inside, and to make it eas­ier for the new plant to emerge. (In gardener-speak the process is called “scarification.”)

I’ll post more results as the other seedlings emerge. If they ever emerge. This is not one of those instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, buy-it-at-the-home-store-and-stick-it-in-the-ground experiments…

December 20 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Add new tag • Mexican manzanita • pointleaf manzanita • seedlings • seeds | 7 Comments »

winner of an ugly contest

Last sum­mer John and I were at the farmer’s mar­ket in Ocean Beach, a funky, alter­na­tive neigh­bor­hood of San Diego. We were look­ing over some of the offer­ings at a stall when some­one behind me starts laugh­ing and shouts out over my shoul­der, “Look at those ugly-ass tomatoes!”

Obvi­ously some­one used to the per­fectly shaped (and per­fectly taste­less) gro­cery store toma­toes, he was point­ing out a pile of Chero­kee Pur­ple toma­toes to his girl­friend. “They’re, like mutant. Who’d buy that?” To be sure, the toma­toes were flat, irreg­u­larly shaped and sized, partly green and partly reddish-purple. Noth­ing to win a spot on a pinup cal­en­dar of tomato vari­eties. But these toma­toes have their rabid fol­low­ers, and I count myself one of them. They’re like the best tomato you’ve tasted, and sliced up they’re actu­ally pretty attractive.

The above is a pic­ture from the Seed Savers Exchange cat­a­log [ source ]. These are pret­tier exam­ples than you usu­ally find of this variety.

One per­son even has a domain name, cherokeepurple.com attached to his blog entries about try­ing to grow this vari­ety (with­out much suc­cess) in Arkansas. I might not be that rabid, but last year I decided to save some seeds from the best exam­ples of Chero­kee Pur­ple from the farmer’s mar­kets so that I could grow my own. This is an heir­loom, open pol­li­nated vari­ety, so they should come true from seed.

I con­sulted Sav­ing Seeds, an older book by Marc Rogers that’s still avail­able via Ama­zon (and prob­a­bly a few other sell­ers). If you own the book, give it up–You’re a plant geek. There, the basic instruc­tions were to first clean the seeds as best as you could. Next you drop them into a jar full of water for a few days until the gummy pulp sur­round­ing the seeds fer­ments and lib­er­ates the seeds. When that hap­pens, the pre­vi­ously pulpy seeds–which floated–would sink to the bot­tom of the jar. Finally you drain and dry them and store them away. I fol­lowed the instruc­tions, but I was wor­ried that there was still some pulp attached to some of the seeds when I was done with the process so that not all of them sank.

The acid test came three weeks ago when I put some of the seeds into pots. Maybe not all the seeds were processed per­fectly, but I’m now the proud par­ent of six pots of Chero­kee Pur­ple seedlings!

I have a few spots around the yard selected for them, places where I’ve never put toma­toes, so I’m hop­ing they’ll take to their new loca­tions and thrive. I’ll prob­a­bly give them a cou­ple more weeks in their pots, and then it’s time to set them loose. I’ll post the baby pic­tures as they grow up…pictures so ugly only a par­ent and lover of Chero­kee Pur­ple could love.

April 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • heirloom tomatoes • saving seeds • seedlings • tomato seeds | 2 Comments »