Pampas grass

September 5, 2015 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

Cortaderia selloana commonly known as Pampas grass is a tall grass native to South America. It forms dense clumps and can grow with fascinating speed if growing conditions are optimal. Cortaderia selloana likes to grow in full sun and can handle drought quite well. Pampas grass forms showy plumes on up to 3 m tall stems. Its leaves are razor sharp so you have to be extremely careful when you prune it. Do not even think about handling this blood-thirsty beast without long sleeves and gloves, it’s leaves are sharp as razor blades and can easily cut deep through the skin. Pruning should be done in early spring or late winter. Make sure you don’t cut too deep too early! Dry leaves act as protective layer for the roots and developing shoots. Roots are safe inside the dense layer of dead plant material, but will get exposed after pruning, especially if you drastically cut near the soil level. Some say it can be burnt in early spring after it gets established enough, but I never really decided to try this method.

Flowers finally start emerging in early fall — Flowers finally emerging in early fall

Showy flowers towering above sharp blades.

Seedlings appear in just a couple of days after sowing. Seedlings grow slow at first, but with every new leaf, growth speeds up a bit. In colder regions with severe frosts, best thing to do is keeping the seedlings somewhere protected during their first winter. It’s important to keep it in cold location at around 5°C when overwintering. If kept in cold location it doesn’t need much care or light. If temperature is higher, it starts actively growing which means it needs a lot of strong light (direct sun), occasional watering and fertilization. As mentioned before, pampas grass is quite resilient to dry conditions, but it’s prone to root rot if kept in overly moist soil, especially during the winter.
Seedlings usually set their first flowers during their second growing season in late summer or early fall. Here, it usually sets flowers in mid to late September and keeps them until first heavy wet snow manages to break the dried out tall plumes. It’s highly ornamental during early winter, especially if you leave the flowers.

It ads exotic feeling to the garden at night as well — At night it ads exotic feeling to the garden

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Crossing Chili Peppers

August 25, 2015 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

I’ve posted about Trinidad Moruga Scorpion chilli peppers not showing their original features. Instead they were different in appearance and had completely different pods. Trinidad Moruga Scorpions are supposed to be stable so they would grow more fruit and their physical appearance would be practically the same. I figured out that I most likely received first generation hybrids from Trinidad Moruga scorpion plant. Since I only grew one chilli the first season and the fact it’s self fertile with male and female parts on the same flower, I’m sure it was not cross-pollinated with another chilli. Weather was cold and wet most of the year and there were no other plants nearby, which means that pollination with pollen from plant growing nearby was highly unlikely.

A bit about genetics and making new chilli varieties

Hybrid chilli from self pollinated red chilli appeared orange because of recessive genes.

Chilli flowers are, as I mentioned above, self fertile, which means they are able to self pollinate, resulting in seeds that give very similar plants with similar features to their mother-plant. In case of cross pollination, chromosomes from mother and father plant mix and you can receive a plant, with combination of properties from both original plants. The first year, new plants usually show identical characteristics and there are no observable differences between the F1 (first filial generation) seedlings. These F1 seedlings will however show a mixture of characteristics from both, mother and father plant. Since F1 generation seedlings have the same combination of dominant and recessive genes, fruits can have nearly identical characteristics.
Things get more interesting the following season, when the first generation of seedlings produce new generation (F2) of seedlings. This time recessive genes kick in and the result is a vast amount of plants with different combinations of characteristics they received from their mother and father plants.
This way, it is possible to further promote peppers with good characteristics and throw away peppers that are either not appealing enough or have some kind of deficiency – sometimes they can even end up sterile or poorly fertile. When you take only seeds from good performing plants, you start creating new variety of chili peppers with features that you like the most. It’s important that next generations are self pollinated as well, so that the genetic material starts to stabilise.

First generations of seedlings (except the uniform F1 generation) show many different characteristics and those differences start to fade with each additional generation. After 8 generations of seedlings (F8), variety gets almost homozygous. Homozygous means, that the plant is having identical pairs of genes for any given pair of hereditary characteristics. Those plants are again mostly uniform and will show recessive gene characteristics only in small amount of seedlings. Only then after all the years, you can finally call your seedling a brand new chilli variety.:)

… And my Trinidad Moruga Scorpion chilli hybrid
In case of my seedlings I have no idea about what the mother and father plant looked like. Since I have bought Moruga chillies, I can presume, that the mother plant is Trinidad Moruga chilli. Based on characteristics, that will show up later in the process, I may be able to figure out the other parent. Most likely, the seeds have been cross pollinated continuously before I received them, so even the original plants might already have been hybrids.

Self pollinated F1 motherplant

Self pollinated parent plant — Self pollinated F1 parent plant

F2 seedlings

Seedling 1

Seedling 2

Seedling 2 with almost ripe orange pod — Almost ripe orange pod

Opened pods show some hot oil and quite thin wall

Ripe and unripe pods of the second seedling.

Seedling 3

Seedling 4

Seedling 5

Ripe pods - seedling no. 5 — Ripe pods – seedling no. 5

Seedling 6

Despite poor conditions, chillies started ripening in large numbers in the fall

Seedling 7

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Vole control

August 8, 2015 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

Voles love eating plants you like the most and they tend to multiply and spread like wildfire. 🙂 Anyone with vole problem knows, how hard it can be to tackle those little beasts and how impossible it is to keep them away from your vegetables and other plants they like to devour.

Vole control is quite important around here if you want to keep the plants they love the most. I have a secret weapon that manages to exterminate most of the voles nearby. She hunts them down and even eats most of them. It usually only takes a couple of minutes for her to track down occupied vole hole system, opens entrances around them where they can try to escape as she starts digging through their tunnel. When their hiding space gets smaller, they try to escape. Try.

Here’s a short video of her hunting and playing with her prey. Her favourite sport.

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Borinda fungosa – 2015 upsize

August 2, 2015 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

Young shoot managed to poke through the hard soil

Despite relatively cold winter, B. fungosa came out only slightly damaged and fully recovered in early spring. Even bamboos with more damage started shooting before fungosa, so I actually started to be a bit worried about it’s spring shooting. If it would decide to skip it and only start shooting in the fall, all the new growth would likely be lost during the following winter. It had grown a lot of new branches and leafed out really soon after winter, so I expected it to shoot soon as well. That did not happen, it took it’s time.

In early summer, it finally started shooting.

When in the mid June first shoots started to appear, temperatures were already summer-like, and it usually refused to like that kind of weather, especially in it’s new location, that is much more exposed to full sun than it’s previous growing place. Shoots appeared small at first, but soon started to get thicker and thicker, showing some decent upsize from last year. I watered it regularly to prevent it from drying out during heat waves, we’ve seen this year, and surprisingly, bamboo actually liked the amount of sun. Before, when it was smaller and younger, it became chlorotic and pale after even short exposure to heat and sun.

Shoots appeared small, but soon became thicker

Shoots grew through the dense clump. Shoots have soft growing tip, which is completely different than with most other bamboos. It can easily look like the tip is broken, but it’s just the soft culm sheath that can easily move through the obstacles and make space for the shoot to finally tower itself above old growth. When it began shooting, I expected it to stop after first batch of shoots, so they can mature and leaf out like bamboos usually do. Not Borinda fungosa – it shoots constantly through the early and mid summer, later with smaller (but not small) shoots. First wave of shoots is numerous, then they start appearing in lower numbers with more time between emerging new shoots.

Thick culms still covered with distinctive hairy Borinda sheaths.

When compared to phyllostachys, Borinda needs quite a bit more time for the shoots to mature. Hopefully, all the new culms will harden enough to withstand the next winter. Bamboo is getting more hardy to both, winter cold and summer heat. It used to suffer during both, summer and winter and only really thrived during spring and fall.