solanum walk

at least one of the four corners buds has bloomed which led me to look around the yard and through the photo archives for family resemblances...

tomatoes are nightshades...

and, redundantly, so is bittersweet nightshade...

as is black nightshade...

and any of the other thousands of varieties of spuds you'd care to mane...

the stubbornly invasive caroline horse nettle is solanum as well...you'll have to dig up representations of eggplant blooms on your own.

rain ( sort of )

it was raining when i got to the garden this morning...

and the lawn there certainly needs some...however, let's be clear...

it was more of a drizzle than a rain and there was about five hundredths of an inch of it in my rain gauge when i got home...so...

even though the soil surface appeared moist ( because it was )...

just below the surface it was desperately dry...

so i watered in the rain...

my "official" bed looks good...

my most important correspondent will note the alfalfa's recalcitrance regarding limits...

it is in full bloom which helps the bees...

some carolina horse nettle has bloomed as well...

the spuds behind the asparagus are looking happy...

and one of them is pondering a bloom or two as well...

and, finally, i do not recall ever seeing an asparagus spear do a three hundred and sixty degree turn before..alwways something new in the garden.

delay can be costly at times

when i was at the campus garden a week ago it was in a downpour of rain...the photos i took were clearly blurred by the excess of water around and, because of the rain, i elected not to harvest the remainder of the einkorn wheat...this was error...

error because when i arrived at the garden this morning the first thing i noticed was that the starlings and grackels had beaten me to the harvest...

what was left was so thoroughly picked over i lfet it for th birds...fortunately i did bring in enough to plant nest spring so it was not a dead loss...

the bed is in the process of being colonized by japanese bottle grass so nest trip out i will be cleating the bed and planting some sort of cover crop...not rye grass since what i did plant in this bed failed so perhaps field peas to turn under in the autumn...

on the other side of the bed the asparagus has put up another summer spear...so things seem in order there...

over in my "official" bed the hopi turquoise is looking robust...

flowers are emerging and we will be looking for ears soon enough...while we are talking flowers...

the alfalfa is still blooming, however...

there are signs of fall as the fertilized blooms die back and begin forming seed pods ( alfalfa is a legume after all...there will be pods )...and in further flower/fertilization news...

the garden is home to a flourishing bed of carolina horse nettle, complementing the plants scattered throughout the garden lawn...and the blooms...

across the bed...

are being happily worked over by what was, by my unscientific survey, a dozen bumble bees...and the result of that work ( aside from well fed bees )?

a secondary reproductive system to complement their spread by rhyzomes...like palmer's amaranth, carolina horse nettle has found a home here.

iuncg 6-25-2020

i want to make it clear that i stood in public spaces and used the "zoom" features on my cameras to take these photos...i did not wander onto university property ( unless, of course, they lay claim to the alley and the sidewalks...not beyond them i imagine...and we could launch into a discussion of the increasingly corporate structures of universities here...however this is a gardening blog so i will refrain...or save it for another venue )...i wouldn't want there to be any misunderstanding...i also wanted to have a look...

someone did have the foresight to cover the beds with landscaping fabric to reduce the number of native plants that found their way into the fallow beds...a logical and well thought idea...

and it proved mostly effective across most of the beds...except...

maintenance doesn't seem to have been part of the thinking...late spring and early summer storms have brought wind as well as substantial rain and some of the fabric has come unmoored...exposing the beds to colonization...

and among the natives i found a thriving population of the non-native carolina horse nettle...

some of which are happily blooming which signals that they have been up and running for weeks, not days...the fabric's unmooring is not a recent development...

and even around the edges of the covered beds the opportunistic natives are moving in...

over in what was/is my bed i was pleased to see they left the alfalfa uncovered...it is blooming if unruly and in need of some containment...if the garden should reopen that will be one chore to see too...and there has been an irruption of volunteer spuds there...i never seem able to retrieve all the tubers they set the previous season...there are volunteers in the wheat and rye beds in my back yard as well...for the second year running...

finally, the asparagus is mostly green and fully "ferned" as it should be...however it really needed to be staked upright...unfortunately it is probably too late now...the stems have surely become woody in the heat and attempting to straighten them would likely snap many off...so...bent it will be...there is talk of "reopening" with masks, gloves, social distancing, consent forms, and waivers of responsibility as the university, like any good corporation, covers its legal ass...the "other" community garden is practicing social distancing as well...on the honor system...no paperwork...we are getting along fine.