The Brazilian bachelor’s button plant

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The Brazilian bachelor's button flower.

About a year ago, I visited Kampong Buangkok – the last village on mainland Singapore – and one of the things that caught my gardener’s eye was a plant with light purple flowers growing somewhere along the edge of the village. I tried to get a photo of it with my phone camera, but it didn’t come out too well.

I guess I was fated to get acquainted with the plant after all, because a friend gave me cuttings of a plant from her garden, assuring me that it bore really sweet flowers that the bees loved. Well, you know me and my penchant for growing new plants – especially potential pollinator attractors – I accepted the cuttings and once they took, planted them out in the garden.

At that point, all I could tell was that the plant had nice strong succulent-looking stems, and leaves with interestingly serrated edges that smelled a little like pineapple when bruised. It took forever for the plant to establish itself, but when it did, it began to spread with a vengeance. Very soon, there was a nice little bush that began to bear alpine-like (to tropical little me) flower buds that reminded me of acorns.

The developing Brazilian bachelor's button flower bud.

The first flowers bloomed, revealing themselves as little lilac pompoms, to my delight. Close examination of fully bloomed flowers showed that the reason they resembled pompoms was because they were actually composite flowers with darker lilac flowers along the outer ring, and white or very pale lilac flowers near the centre.

Now that the plant had flowered, I was able to identify it as the Brazilian Bachelor’s Button or centratherum intermedium. It was only later that I identified it as the plant I had noticed at Kampong Buangkok, and what a coincidence that was!

One thing about the plant is, it tends to spread out quite rapidly. Now I understand why my friend had so many cuttings to give away! What remains to be seen is how well it can fit in with the rest of the garden and hopefully not become a nuisance plant.

Close up view of the Brazilian bachelor's button flower.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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Use what you’ve got

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Our newest crop of cucumbers growing.

I’m always searching for more space for my climbing plants. It’s just so perverse that so many of the plants I want to grow need climbing space that I don’t have available yet.

To speed things up, I decided to do one of my improvised trellises. Yes, I have to maintain my DIY Queen reputation, don’t I? :P

Anyway, I had a few cucumber seedlings that needed a permanent home, and rather than search for more poles to make a trellis, I decided to make use of a pair of light posts in the front garden. It’s a really good spot for growing vegetables because it gets sunlight throughout the day.

The posts are less than a metre apart, and very firmly grounded – which is more than I can say for several of my personal trellis efforts! – and I decided to stretch string between the two posts for the cucumber vines to attach themselves to. I did mention that string was my new best friend in making trellises these days, didn’t I?

Starting as low as possible, I tied one end of a ball of string to one post, stretched it across at a slightly inclined angle, and looped it around the opposite post, and kept repeating the stretch and loop process until I’d covered about 1.5 metres in height. In my experience, cucumber vines don’t grow that high, so that ought to be more than enough for them to grow on.

As I always mention when using string in a trellis, keep going backwards to pull the string taut so that it doesn’t sag and slip down when the plants are growing on it. You really don’t want a trellis to act like a pair of old socks that have lost their elasticity…

After setting that up and transplanting the cucumber seedlings, it was a matter of daily encouraging the tendrils to attach themselves to the string supports, and watering and fertilizing the plants until the flowers and fruits came along.

Oh yes – this trellis also makes a really attractive privacy screen!

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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White ladybug larvae!

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A familiar profile to me now - the ladybug nymph on the leaf stem of the comfrey plant.

I caught myself in a bit of a dilemma recently. You know how I have an immediate reaction to seeing white insects on my plants – they’ve usually proven to be pests like mealybugs and white flies – which are actually a little rampant at the moment. So, when I saw a few white insects scuttling around on my only comfrey plant, I went into immediate protective mode.

Something made me peer at the little white things before I started squishing them, thought, and I realized that they looked awfully like albino ladybug nymphs.

The familiar spiny protuberances, humped kind of back and fast scuttling clued me in, and that saved them from an early death.

Naturally, finding something new and good thrilled me, and of course I wanted to find out more about these white babies. I couldn’t observe them so well because the thing about ladybug larvae appearing on potted versus plants growing out in the garden is that they tend to disappear when they reach pupa stage. I suspect they find nice nooks like under the rims of the flower pots that are either too low down and heavy for us huge humans to examine easily.

In other words, I lost track of them… :(

So, I had to get online to try to find out more about these white larvae. I expected to find out that they developed into white or light coloured ladybugs, but that was not the case. While there are indeed white ladybugs, these white larvae of the Scymnus sp. or dusky ladybug develop into dark ladybugs – and I have seen such little beetles in the garden.

I also learned something else about white ladybug larvae – besides being covered in those alligator-like bumps, they could also have thinner, longer protuberances – kind of like this:

I find it so hard to believe that this fierce-looking, scorpion-like white insect is supposed to be a ladybug larvae, but that's what I've seen online. Above in the left is what I suspect to be a scymnus ladybug. They are on the underside of a papaya leaf.

Looks like a mealybug, doesn’t it?

I thought so too.

The undersides of my brinjal plant's leaves attract yellow aphids, and here we see the white ladybug larvae hungrily approaching an unwary aphid.

I’ve seen these insects on several plants that had mealybug and aphid infestations, and assumed that they were mealies in one of their growth stages. Well, from what I’ve read online, they’re the larva of the scymnus genus of ladybugs – and if you  look at the picture of the larvae above, you ‘ll notice a small beetle also in the shot. I may be wrong, but I think that’s one of the dusky ladybugs – really small and difficult to get in focus especially when you’re taking a photo from under a leaf with the light above it.

Well, like I’ve said, I’ve seen these white things together with other pests, and it now saddens me to admit that I’ve blitzed these larva together with the other pests with white oil spray. It didn’t strike me that they weren’t all pests that were destroying my plants. :(

The moral of all this? Know your pests and beneficial insects in all their life stages. I know that I will still have to condition myself not to jump to conclusions when I see clusters of insects on plants that are starting to show signs of losing good health. There is no such thing as a plant attracting only pests or beneficial insects; something always attracts something else in nature, and they all strive for dominance or balance. We just have to pay better attention and understand better.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.

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The winged beans perform again

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Scattered across the trellis were loads of these - flowers and growing beans!

If you’ve been a regular visitor here, you’ll know about my gripe with my winged bean vines. I grew 6 of them early last year and waited months and months before they started flowering, then a few more months before the first beans appeared – in sporadic ones and twos…

There were occasional good harvests that I crowed about – but they were few and far between.

And there were casualties along the way – there are only 2 plants left.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that there are fewer plants crowding the ground or whether it’s the weather at this time of year, but the vines suddenly burst into bloom just after the New Year, and we’ve just had the best harvest to date. Clusters of pretty bonnet-like lilac flowers were all over the trellis, soon followed by clusters of frilly green winged beans. The sight made me want to burst with joy!

Of course, nothing ever goes smoothly in a garden, and some sneaky black aphids managed to claim a few beans while I was waiting for the beans to grow bigger. Well, I’ve learnt to roll with the blows and am not getting too upset. After all, we got more than they did!

Best. Harvest. Yet. And with more beans still growing!

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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