Blogging for The Garden Professors: Fall seed sowing

In case you haven't heard yet, I'm blogging regularly for the Garden Professor's Group. My posts go up every Tuesday, and today's post is here: http://gardenprofessors.com/cold-stratification-for-seeds/ Hope to see you all there in the comments section!

A gardener's guide to evil mammals

All three are available on mugs on my zazzle store.

Garden cartoon calendar!

So I've been drawing these gardening cartoons for a while now...

I have fun with them, and people seem to like them, so I've decided to create a 2016 calendar with with a gardening cartoon for every month of the year. Check it out here: http://www.zazzle.com/gardening_cartoon_calendar-158039515787385795
And may I say, it would make a perfect gift for any plant obsessed person in your life.

I'm taking winter into my own hands

It is official. This thrice blasted winter has gone on too long. I'm not taking it any more.

(PS, for those of you who want content OTHER than silly cartoons, I'm going to get back to other, word and idea based posts soon. So stand by.)

Talking seeds and breeding with the one and only Margaret Roach

If you don't know Margaret Roach already, you should -- she's amazing. So I was thrilled when she asked me to be on her podcast/radio show. Check out our conversation on her site: http://awaytogarden.com/catalog-shopping-think-like-seed-breeder-says-joseph-tychonievich/

The Seven Stages of Gardening with Deer

What stage are you in?

SAD: Seed Acquisition Disorder

It is a little recognized condition, but I think more people suffer from it than is commonly realized...

Do you have SAD?

Garden Professing

I'm blogging somewhere new! I have recently joined the team over at The Garden Professors and am blogging periodically for them, along with the rest of the good folks there. I'm very excited, it is a terrific group of people, and I'm really enjoying interacting with and writing with them! I'll still (probably) blog here from time to time on things of a more personal nature, but my "sciency" posts will all be over there from now on. My latest post there is here, and an earlier one I'm rather happy with is here. You can of course follow that blog, and also check out the garden professors facebook page and group for all your sciency garden discussion needs.

My favorite vegetable varieties this year

We've had a cool, rainy summer this year here in Michigan, which I have loved, but it has been hard on the traditional vegetables of summer, the tomatoes, peppers, and squash, that love a little heat. But poor growing conditions can be nice in one way: They serve to highlight the very toughest varieties that really perform no matter what. Here's what I'm loving in the garden this year:

Tomato 'Matt's Wild Cherry'

I've long been a huge fan of this tomato. The flavor is off the charts -- sweet, rich, juicy and wonderful. It even beats the always delicious 'Sun Gold' as my very favorite tasting cherry tomato. But what really puts it over the top is the sheer vigor, yield, and disease resistance. Cool wet weather like we've had this year is an invitation to every fungus in the garden to beat up on the tomatoes, and all my other varieties are a mass of ugly brown blighted foliage. But not Matt's Wild Cherry -- it is green and pristine, not a speak of blight or leaf spot.

Pepper 'Flavor Burst'

This is a new variety for me this year, and I'll confess I bought it just for the name. I mean, Flavor Burst! How could I pass that up? In reality, I have to say that the flavor isn't particularly noteworthy, good, but typical bell pepper, but the performance! Big bell peppers always grow for me, but with my cold, short summers, I don't usually get much of a crop from them, usually just a few peppers that I can harvest full ripe and colored up, the rest are still green when frost arrives. But Flavor Burst has not only been the earliest ripe of ALL my peppers, sweet or hot, this year, the plant is also nearly twice the size of any of my other bell peppers, and loaded with way more peppers than any of them. This is my new gold standard for bell peppers for the north.

Zucchini 'Costata Romanesco'

I've been in love with this variety for a long time... and every year it proves yet again that no other zucchini can come close to matching it. The zucchinis this produces have a wonderful nutty, rich flavored. And the texture! Most zucchini, if you even think about cooking it too long, collapses into a pool of wet mush... this holds up firm with an excellent creamy texture even after prolonged cooking. Another plus, it produced about half the yield of a normal zucchini, which means you have enough for nearly every meal, but not so much you resort to throwing it into the open windows of passing cars. Finally, it is lovely and distinctive looking. The ribs down the zucchini means that when you slice it, the forms little star shapes. Can. Not. Be. Beat.

Squash Mini Red Turban 

Another new variety for me this year, and one I will certainly be doing again. First, this is a Cucurbita maxima variety, which is great because this species has great flavor and a very long storage life so you can eat them all winter. Second, it is lovely. Pretty enough to be displayed for fall decoration, to be sure. Third, it isn't too large, so I can cook up just enough for a meal instead of having to figure out what to do with a massive squash all at once. And fourth, it is producing like MAD. I've never had a winter squash yield so heavily. I think I'm going to have 20 maybe even 30 of these things by the end of the season... and that is in a summer that has been generally terrible for squash! 

So... those are my winners this year. Any favorites you have that I should try out next year? 

Native, gorgeous, and very much under appreciated

Let's just start with  photo:

Meet Mentzelia decapetala! (EDIT: Panayoti says this is actually Mentzelia nuda, and I think he is right.) I've been growing this plant a couple years, and it is officially one of my top plant crushes. It is native to a big swath of the middle of the US, basically the plains states... Notably tolerant of harsh, dry conditions, I feared it would simply rot in cool, soggy Michigan (which has been even cooler and soggier than usual this year) but I couldn't have been more wrong:

It has settled right in and has been pumping out these gorgeous flowers since the beginning of July. There are only two things you should know about this plant before getting yourself one: First, it is an evening bloomer. For me, the flowers open around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. Which I honestly rather like... there is something charming about the garden taking on a different character in the evening, and of course the pale blooms just glow in the evening light. The other thing is that, like many prairie plants, it is a bit floppy, probably especially so in my wet soil. That's easily solved, though, simply cut it back early in the season and it will grow into a nice bushy, compact, three-foot sphere of these amazing blooms.

Here is my other beloved and much under appreciated US native:

Salvia azurea. I LOVE THAT SHADE OF BLUE SO MUCH!!!!
Ahem. Sorry about that. Let me calm myself.
But you have to admit, that is a pretty darn dynamite shade of blue.

I always used to think that all the really pretty salvias weren't hardy. But this is the exception to that. S. azurea is native, again, mostly to the plains states, though the range comes further East, and it is an absolutely tough, hardy, and effortless to grow plant. It is a late summer/fall bloomer... and how about that luscious shade of blue with some good hardy mums? Can't be beat.

I love this plant so much that I have (of course...) started doing a little breeding with it. The plant pictured above is my very earliest flowering one, quite a few weeks earlier than most of the species. I'm also breeding for shorter plants that don't flop over, which the species is pretty prone to.

This is my best seedling for that trait -- a nice compact three feet tall. You can see the more usual loose, sprawly habit of the plants in the background... This one will be later blooming as you can see, but I'm very happy with that growth habit.

And then unexpected things pop up, as they do in breeding projects...

White flowers! I'm not sure how I feel about that exactly... I mean, the blue color is what I love so much about this plant. But the white IS kind of pretty too. What do you think? Would you ever grow the white one, or stick with the blue?

Podcasting with Ken Druse

I had a blast chatting with the legendary Ken Druse on his podcast this week! Check it out here.

My new favorite website: Encyclopedia of Life

I'm pretty much head over heels in love with this website: Encyclopedia of Life. It is a massive effort to create one huge database for information about all of life. I'd stumbled on the website once or twice before, I think, but it must have been early in the stages of development, because I came away unimpressed. But recently I was contacted be the director of operations to see if I could give some feedback on the project (and when someone's contact information includes the words "Smithsonian Institution" you don't say no) and I am BLOWN away. Such an incredible resource for plant lovers!

The site is great to find good information on incredibly obscure plants... for example, my friend Kelly Norris recently has been gloating on facebook about his Silphium albiflorum. It is a lovely plant I know basically nothing about...

Type that name into eol, and I get tons of great stuff:

Pictures, ranging from herbarium sheets to the whole plant habit to close ups of the flowers!

Maps, showing where exactly this has been observed in herbarium records, giving an approximation of the range of the plant:

No, you aren't going blind... there are just TWO tiny spots there in texas. Not a big range on this thing.

These maps a really useful when I'm trying to figure out how hardy something might be. For example, I'm all gaga for Ononis right now, but most of the things I'm growing are basically not in cultivation, so it is hard to get information on how hardy they are.

Type Ononis spinosa into EOL, and...

Those yellow spots go PRETTY far North... don't think winter cold is going to be a problem.

Ononis cenisia (syn, O. cristata) on the other hand...

Doesn't look to promising. We'll see. But I'll be sure to give it some extra protection just in case.

EOL also rocks because it is just for organisms... So you can search for plant names without getting a lot of other clutter.

For example, a Google search for Fabiana gives me this:

Um... NOT quite what I was looking for...

But EOL gives me this:

MUCH better.

The other thing I love about this is getting the proper names for plants. As I learned in my podcast about the naming of plants, there is no organization that decides on one official scientific name for a plant. Rather, if a scientist thinks as name should change, they publish a paper saying so and why, and if other scientists think that makes sense, they start using the new name, and if they don't, they don't. Official names are arrived at by slow consensus... which makes it confusing for the poor gardener who just wants to know the dang name is.

So... if I want to know about, say, bleeding heart, I type Dicentra spectabilis  into EOL, go to the names tab, and I see this:

Three different sources, all listing the possible names of this plant, with the name they prefer marked with a green spot. So, I can see that one has switched to the new Lamprocapnos, but the other two are sticking with Dicentra, which makes me feel fine about staying with Dicentra as well, even though the only reason I don't want it to change is because I can't SPELL Lampro-whateveritis.

But when I do the same thing with Anemonella... turns out they all agree it is Thalictrum now. Guess I'm going to have to get used to that one...

Other cool things to do with EOL:

Find pictures that drive my ever growing obsession with Gladiolus into even wilder frenzy:

And browse randomly to discover useful facts like that a Koala weighs 0.36 grams at birth, or discover that raccoons first appeared between 1.8 and 4.9 million years ago, and there are TWO references which say that raccoons feed on american alligators! That is has got to be a bad ass raccoon. 

In short, it is a delightful rabbit hole of delightful information! I'm thoroughly entranced.

Accidental petunia gene theft.

I think I'm accidentally stealing patented genes. Of a petunia all things, too!

I always say that I hate petunias... it is a classic case of graduate school research induced loathing. Spend enough time doing research on them, and you'd hate them too. But I do have a few in my garden every year. Not the normal ones -- I grow a raggedy, sprawling mess, descended from hybrids between Petunia axillaris, P. exerta, with a wee bit of P. integrifolia for good measure.

They're nothing like the neat, tidy little moundy commercial varieties, but I like them, especially because they're powerfully fragrant. Every year I sniff them all, note the most fragrant ones, and save seed from them for the next year, along with some seeds of anything else that I like particularly well. This isn't a breeding project aimed at commercial release, just a pleasant side note in my garden.

But this year I'm afraid they've crossed into legally murky territory... Because of this:

This is one of my plants this year... and honestly, I kind of love it. The color is cool, but more importantly, it is by far the best and strongest scented petunia I've grown, even during the day (most petunias are most fragrant at night). But the problem? It looks to me a lot like the variety 'Dusty Rose'. Which the couple next door grew in my old neighborhood. I'm fairly confident that this color pattern popped up because a bee or moth carried pollen from their 'Dusty Rose' to my rambly, weedy, petunia patch.

Which normally wouldn't be a problem. But 'Dusty Rose' is protected by a utility patent.

Most patented plants have "Plant Variety Protection" -- which means you aren't allowed to clone the variety (cuttings, division, tissue culture) without permission of the patent holder. So you can't take cuttings of a 'Knock-Out' rose without permission of the breeder. But, you can collect seeds from your 'Knock-Out' and grow them and even, if you wanted to, get your own plant variety protection on the seedlings.

But increasingly new annuals like petunias are being protected with utility patents, which prohibit not just unauthorized cuttings of the plant, but any unauthorized breeding with the plant. So you can't save seeds, or pollinate another plant, or, you know, let the neighborhood bees slip some pollen into your population. This is famously the type of patent used on genetically engineered varieties of corn and soy beans, but is now increasingly being used for conventionally bred varieties of petunias, impatiens, even lettuce.

I'm pretty sure that the patent holder, (Ball Horticultural in this case, though all the big breeding companies are using these types of patents now) owns the rights to this petunia... To be sure, they almost certainly don't care as long as I don't try to make money off this seedling or any of its siblings. It wouldn't be worth their time or money (or bad PR) to sue me for a silly seedling in my garden.

But still... I kind of don't like feeling like a company has ownership over my very personal weedy, rambling, fragrant, petunia patch. I could yank out the individuals with the tell-tale yellow centers to the flowers, but that wouldn't actually guarantee that the patented genes aren't in other individuals in the population. And it IS kinda pretty. So I think I'll keep it. Hopefully I don't get sued.

Hardy artichokes!

Is it just me, or does "Hardy Artichokes!" sound like it should be a folksy expletive?  Hardy artichokes Batman! Well. Anyway.
Artichokes are delicious but rather annoying to grow. They're perennials, but not big fans of hot summers, and not very winter hardy either. Which is why 99% of the commercial production is in cool summer parts of California. You can also grow them as an annual, but that is sort of a pain, as you have to make sure you give the seedlings a dose of cold temperatures when they're young to ensure they flower. More work than I'm really willing to do, particularly in the already insanely busy period if early spring.
What the world needs (and by "the world" I mean, of course, me) is a fully zone 5 hardy artichoke you can just plant once and then harvest from every year.
So I decided to make one. It started several years ago when I requested seed from every variety of artichoke (and cardoon, which is the same plant, just selected for tasty leaf stalks instead of flower buds) I could get, and planted them in the warmest, most sheltered spot in my old garden, along the South wall of my very poorly insulated house.

Baby artichoke plant huddling for warmth by the south wall of my old house

As luck would have it, that first winter was incredibly mild, and though most of the plants died, a few -- the most cold hardy -- survived!

It's alive! Despite appearance to the contrary.

These artichoke plants look rather rough when they first emerged that spring, but they were alive, so I greeted them with joy, in all their mushy weird-looking glory.

If you don't eat the artichoke, it turns into this. 

They flowered that summer, and I let the bees cross pollinate all my toughest survivors, collected seeds, and sowed out another generation. The next winter came, and my little babies faced -17 degrees F (-27 C) and...

Two survived! Two! Yay! Then this past winter came, and apparently all the Pure Michigan ads trying to lure tourists to this fair state worked, because the polar vortex came for a couple week vacation, causing temperatures to drop to -24 F (-31 C), and for a full week temps barely got above 0 F (-17 C)... I figured for sure my "hardy" plants were goners.

But gone they most certainly aren't! BOTH of them pulled through, and there you have wee little artichokes just beginning to develop! Zone 5 hardy artichokes, baby!

Now, I must confess that the artichokes themselves are quite small. I've got quite a bit more work to do on these to get them as big and beefy as the regular tender 'chokes, but I'm still quite euphoric. I've cleared the biggest hurdle, the rest will be easy, if a bit time consuming.

In other seemingly good news, this spring I also had two plants from my project to try and breed zone 5 hardy perennial kale survive the winter as well!

Then the groundhogs found them. Grrr... Chicken wire fence is now in place. Hopefully they'll recover. Have I mentioned that I hate groundhogs? And deer? And rabbits? And squirrels? And... well, honestly, most herbivorous mammals?

Anyway, cold climate artichoke lovers, rejoice! Hardiness has arrived! Unless you live in zone 4. Or 3. In which case... sorry about your luck. I've gotten them to 5. You'll have to take it from here.

When in doubt... wear snapdragon earrings

For those of you who didn't know already:

Snapdragon flowers will clip to your earlobes like earrings.

You are welcome.

Oh no, Miss!

The title of this post doesn't make any sense... I know. But that is what I always think when I look at the flowers of one of my newest plant obsessions: Ononis.

Ononis is a European genus, going by the common name of rest harrow because the thick roots were strong enough to stop a plow going through the soil back when plows were powered by horses rather than diesel. These plants are, as that name implies, as tough as nails. They laugh at drought and have been equally at home this summer which has been insanely cool and rainy here in Michigan (In June we had almost TWICE the normal amount of rainfall). And, so far, despite a rash of obnoxious deer, rabbits, and (worst of all...) groundhogs, nothing nibbled on my plants in the garden.

And they are gorgeous. At least they are if you, like me, are obsessed with the unique form of flowers in the pea family.

This, the first of the genus I've grown, came from seed that was supposed to be Ononis rotundifolia, but I'm pretty sure it is actually Ononis repens. In any case, I think it is gorgeous. The delicate, intricate form of the flowers, a wonderful shade of clear pink, the veining on the petals... the flowers are, admittedly, a bit on the small side, but I can live with that.

New for me is Ononis natrix. I grew it from seed this year, and in just a few months it has formed a happy, sizable plant, has been pumping out these lovely yellow flowers since mid-June, and shows every sign of keeping it up the rest of the summer. The form isn't quite as nice as O. repens, but the flowers are significantly larger.

I'm also growing O. cenisia and O. spinosa... Neither have flowered yet. O. spinosa has, as the name implies, some pretty vicious spines, so I'm not in love with it so far, but we'll see if the flowers win me over. O. cenisia has been by far the slowest growing of the lot, but again, we'll see what I think when it blooms.

I have, of course, been cross pollinating them... hybrids between pink and yellow flowers usually give you all sorts of lovely oranges and scarlet, and I'll be breeding for bigger, more profuse flowers while I'm at it. If, of course, they consent to make babies together. Fingers crossed!

The latest version of a crazy project...

This is flowering in my garden right now...

What is it? Well... it started out like this:

Regular old Plantago major, aka plantain, aka, everyone's favorite weed.

Starting with some exisiting cool forms, I made this, which I call 'Purple Perversion' because it is purple and twisted, and you'd have to be a little perverted to grow it because it is, after all, a weed. Even if a purple frilly one.

Now... the latest edition! The flower spikes have been transformed into these crazy cool thingies that I REALLY like. Probably most people still wouldn't grow it because, you know, people have this whole thing about not wanting to plant weeds, but I think it is awesome. (And I bet they'd make awesome, long lived cut flowers.)

What say you? Would you grow it?

Playing with pelargoniums

I play with a lot of different breeding projects. Some of them are more-or-less sane, reasonable ideas that I think will be successful and valuable for gardens... And then there are the crazy things I try on the off chance they'll turn into something cool. I do a lot of those. Mostly because they are really fun, and because, well, why not? It takes hardly any time to splash a little pollen around and see what happens. If those initial forays turn out well, I can forward to try and breed something nice, and if not I'm not out much.

Currently, one of the odd-ball, probably-won't-work projects that I'm having fun with is breeding pelargonium. Not with zonal pelargoniums. They're kinda boring.

And no, not regals like these either, though they are gorgeous. I'd serious consider it, but the brilliant minds are Garden Genetics are already doing amazing things with them, (along with a lot of other cool stuff – you've gotta check out their blog where they post about all sorts of exciting projects) so I'll just wait (not very patiently) for their work to become commercially available.

No, I'm playing with a handful of rather obscure species that have caught my eye for various reasons.

P. caffrum has beautiful ferny leaves:

And, when it flowers (mine hasn't yet – but soon, I hope!) the flowers should by crazy fringed like this:

(photo from geraniaceae.com)

P. pulverulentum's flowers aren't nearly as exciting looking, but they do boast a really wonderful fragrance.

Both of these, along with a few others I'm growing, have tuberous roots and go dormant in the winter – which should be perfect! Winter dormant plants are easy to over winter in a garage or the like, unlike the bulk of the really cool species pelargoniums which go dormant in the summer, which isn't so easy to work into a climate like mine.

I'm also growing some odd-ball hybrids like this 'Arden' which... just love those colors on the flowers!

And of course I had to have P. sidoides, which has these amazing dark flowers over a neat mound of lovely silver leaves and is quite simply one of my most favorite plants of all time. This form is a more purpley-wine color than redder forms I've grown in the past, and seems to flower more heavily as well.

I ordered this rambling, irregular collection of plants from the wonderful nursery Geraniaceae (www.geraniaceae.com) (which you really MUST check out. Lovely, amazing stuff) and I thought, well, I'll just splash pollen around with a liberal hand and see what happens. I didn't really expect to get too much, figured the species would be too dissimilar to hybridize.

But, just the other day I noticed a few seed pods starting to develop! Happy dance!!!

So stay tuned... in a few years maybe I'll have crazy fringed fragrant flowers in a range of colors and... who knows what else! Or maybe none of the seed will germinate, and if they do the hybrids will be ugly and sterile. Or maybe something totally unexpected will happen. You can never really tell with plant breeding... and that's half the fun. Maybe more than half.  

Declines in Monarch butterflies: A problem you can do something about

When I read this article, Habitat loss on breeding grounds cause of monarch decline my first response was "Hurray!"

Not because I hate butterflies. But because the researchers found that the problem with monarchs is here in the US where they feed and breed, NOT in Mexico where they congregate and overwinter. Which is good news because that means that I, and all of you who live in Monarch territory, can DO something about it. Monarchs are declining because there has been a 21% decline in the amount of milkweed for them to feed on since 1995. You can help by planting milkweed. That's pretty simple. Much simpler than the high unemployment, drug wars, and lack of opportunity that bedevil efforts to preserve overwintering habitat in Mexico.

So plant some milkweed. And, while you are at it, plants lots of OTHER things. Because monarchs are far from the only fascinating animal that is suffering the results of extensive habitat loss, even if they get a disproportionate amount of coverage. The best way to support the widest possible range of insects and other animals in your garden is to grow as wide as possible a range of plants. Especially if they are different from the plants your neighbors have in their gardens! Then follow that up by not using any insecticides on your plants.

Changes

Big things are afoot. Yesterday was my last day working at Arrowhead Alpines nursery. I'm taking the leap into self employment as a freelance garden communicator and independent plant breeder. I'm very sad to be leaving the nursery (though I'll still be helping out now and again) and equal parts excited and terrified at the prospect of self employment!

In any case, I'm going to have a lot more time, and am scheming up various new projects! So stay tuned.