More passionflowers

We’ve had a beautiful weather year for the garden.  The moist spring turned into a warm but not parched summer, and our fall cold front came almost a month early, bringing lovely cooler nights and plenty of rain.  Because of the way our weather works in this part of Texas, it’s almost like we have two springs – everything gets a second wind, picks up, and rejuvenates.

Passiflora “Temptation x Temptation”

Through the summer, I’ve had the occasional bloom on my “Temptation x Temptation” passionflower vine.  This is a cross originally made by Volker Sanders in Germany, although I got my plant from Passiflorista on Ebay (Jim Nevers).  During the hottest days, the flowers suffered horribly – they looked like they had been under a heat lamp, with wilted petals and limp coronas.  I will have to get a photo if it happens again – it was a real surprise the first time.  The other types do not have this problem.  Now, however, it’s putting out these luscious, plump flowers with the most amazing coloring.

Passiflora “Incense”

When I have just one in my hand, the flower on “Temptation x Temptation” looks a lot like the “Incense” vine that it is adjacent to (and mingled with) – big, purple, curly flower.  But the color is really quite different.

“Incense” (L) and “Temptation x Temptation” (R)

“Incense” on the left, “Temptation x Temptation” on the right. If you look, you can see the different leaves, too – “Incense” has five-fingered leaves, and “Temptation x Temptation has three-fingered.

Close-up of filaments on “Temptation x Temptation”

 

Very close to, the corona filaments look like something from under the sea – maybe a sea urchin…

 

Corona filaments on “Temptation x Temptation”

Or a sea anemone.

“Temptation x Temptation” from the side.

From the side, there’s a lot of difference between the two flowers.  “Temptation x Temptation” is strongly reflexed – meaning that the petals pull back from the flower and arch downward, so looking from the top you see the corona floating in the air.  They’re also very robust and fleshy – this plant is a tetraploid hybrid, meaning that its parent plants were chemically treated during the hybridizing process to give it double the usual number of genes.  Tetraploids are famous for thick, hardy plants and big flowers. The anthers on this plant are often a little odd – here, they’re pointing upward at the sky, instead of downward at the theoretical bee that should be pollinating the plant.  They sometimes manage to rotate downward before the flower closes, but sometimes not.

Side view of “Incense”

In the side view, “Incense” is nearly flat.

 

A new addition – this one is “Blue-Eyed Susan,” with parentage similar to “Temptation x Temptation” and another hybrid, “Bucky” bred by Jim Nevers in Florida.  I’m hoping with these three tetraploid hybrids, I might be able to get some fruit.  “Bucky” in particular is known for good fruit. Because of the different chromosome number, tetraploid (4n) plants can’t set fruit with normal diploid (2n) pollen; they need 4n pollinators.

 

 

And this is “Blue Bouqet” – another hybrid, this one made by Richard McCain.  This game little plant just got out after traveling cross-country in a postal box; the whole plant isn’t much past a foot tall, but it’s bloomed already.  It’s supposed to be more blue, so we’ll see if that happens.  A lot of this kind of flower difference comes down to things like humidity, soil chemistry, hours  and intensity of sunshine, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trapped!

The composting worm bin lives in the upstairs bathroom adjacent to my office/studio room.  So when things get weird in the bin, I know about it.

I think that I picked up earwig eggs when I added compost from the outdoor compost bin – I always do this to help stock up the micro-flora.  However it happened, I started getting more and more earwigs.

The pincers look fierce, but aren’t actually pinchy from what I can tell.  They stink a lot if squashed.

There are lots of them.  They thrive on the same kind of vegetable waste that I feed the worms, and they’ve reproduced like mad.  Of course, my options for insect remediation in the compost worm bin are quite limited.

Traps are usually the best.  I looked up how to trap these guys, and most of the sources pointed to a similar technique.  A straight-sided can, like soup or tuna, with a mixture of equal parts of molasses (or corn syrup), vegetable oil (with the possibility of a drop of added bacon grease, for fragrance attraction) and soy sauce.  Because of what I got hold of in the cabinet first, I’ve tried a couple of different oils.  It’s amazingly effective.

 

 

This is five or six days worth of earwigs.  They mostly end up in the trap overnight, as they are nocturnal.  I let it go a few days, then tip the oil out in a non-agricultural part of the yard (the chickens declare the bugs delicious!) and refill and reset.  Apparently it works in the garden or house as well.

Scientific American

I have a very definite niche.  Many of the things that I do, not a lot of people do.  And, I document most of what I do – with lots of pictures, which I post online.  So, when people are searching the web for something related to my unusual interests, they often find my pictures.  Then, if I’m lucky and they’re polite, they write me and ask for permission to use the pictures.  I usually say yes, although it’s case by case; sometimes there’s even a little money involved, or a contributor’s copy of a cool book or magazine.  I’m particularly likely to say yes if it’s for a museum supporting science, or for educational materials for schools – the only exception is if it’s for a religious organization promoting pseudo-science.  I think that teaching creationism to kids is an insidious and very damaging form of child abuse.  Sorry about the soap-box, but it’s something I’ve run into hard a couple of times.  If you want to tell children that God made silkworms for the express use of mankind, I respect your Constitutional freedom to say so – but I also have a right to sue if you use my copyrighted pictures without permission.

 

 

This time, it was a writer with Scientific American’s website; he was looking for some images to support an article on metamorphosis.  So, now, I’ve got a photo on their website, with links back to mine – and it’s a very cool article!

The article with my photo

Another article, related information, same author. 

 

Skeeterbag

This is not a paid ad.  I have received no promotional support for this endorsement – I just think these things are cool, and want to tell my friends.

We live in a lovely, wooded area of south Dallas.  We back up to the confluence of two year-round creeks, Crow Creek and Five Mile Creek.  This gives us a fairly lush vegetation, full of towering trees and wildlife – but it also gives us lots of bugs.

I hate spraying chemicals.  I use a few organic pesticides for the vegetables, but I also use a lot of old-fashioned, low-impact non-chemical solutions.  I catch grasshoppers in a net and feed them to the chickens; I encourage the wasps to eat caterpillars from the passionflower vines.  And starting this year, I started using Skeeterbags.

I had read about these last year, but didn’t get around to ordering them.  I tried a home-spun version involving tulle netting and duct tape… let’s just say, I decided that the price of the commercial version was definitely worth the cost.

 

Basically, it does just what it says on the box.  They’re easy to attach to a standard cheapo-model box fan, and they kill usually between 100 and 200 mosquitoes a night.  One is next to the chickens’ house, and the other is next to the garage.

 

 

The mosquitoes are all hanging on to the side of the netting first thing in the morning; by noon, they’re dried up and dead.   Every few days, I empty out the little pile of corpses.  They have definitely made a significant impact on the yard’s population.  Living next to year-round water, we’re never going to be mosquito-free, but we’ve gone from “I’m being eaten alive if I step out the door” to being able to walk over and check on the chickens without getting bitten.