Caterpillar season again

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It appears to be caterpillar season here once again. All the usual suspects have shown up on the usual plants – those green caterpillars on the caladiums, the baby hairy caterpillar horde on my vining plants, and so on. My rant this, time, is over a big hairy caterpillar that did this:

All those awkward looking stems were lushly adorned with leaves just 2 days ago!

…which endangers these:

These are just a few of the long beans that are currently developing on this plant. What a loss!

I’m quite irked because there are many long beans currently developing on this one plant, and with all those leaves now gone, the beans are starting to get bumpy and have slowed in growth. I guess we’ll harvest them young, because the plant has no way of photosynthesizing sufficiently to grow the beans to maturity.

The culprit of this crime was a large hairy caterpillar that was quickly executed. :(

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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The Keng Hwa chronicles: Life cycle of the fruit

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Our Keng Hwa plants were in bloom in late July to early August, and as always, my mum the “Keng Hwa queen” and I eagerly watched the spent flowers to see if they would simply drop off after they bloomed, or if the base of the flower stem would develop into a fruit.

You never can tell, because the top part of the flower stalk turns pink as the flower withers, and the bottom part attached to the leaf remains green until it finally decides whether to stay or go.

The Keng Hwa flower about 3 days after blooming – the flower withers while the base of it may or may not develop into a fruit.

If a fruit develops, the bottom of the leaf stalk will begin to swell while the rest of the stalk, together with the drying flower petals, will continue dying off until they finally detach from the top of the 1cm or so long fruit.

My mum decided to “help” one of the flowers along by snipping off most of the stem while the flower was drying up. I think her reasoning was to save the bottom part of the stem from being completely pulled off by the weight of the whole flower – which is why we ended up with one fruit with an “antennae” on it…

The fully-ripe Keng Hwa fruit … with the flower stem still attached!

The plants eventually grew one fruit each. I fully intended to pluck one when it was ripe (bright pink, like the dragonfruit) and to cut it open to see what the inside looked like, but my mum looked so sad each time I mentioned doing it that I lost the heart for it.

And so, the two fruits continued to ripen on the plants, going from pale green to light, then deep pink. Once they went past being ripe, they began to darken to magenta, then developed brown patches.

Now, one of the fruits is just at the edge of the porch roof, so it gets wet when it rains. If you’re familiar with roselle plants, you’ll know what over-ripe fruits left on plants that get rained on do – and the same thing happened with one of the fruits:

Several Keng Hwa sprouts bursting out of the now rotting fruit on the plant. The fruit has been wet by the frequent rain we’ve had over the past few weeks.

It won’t be long before this fruit is ready to fall off, but I think I’ll talk my mum into plucking it before that so that we can plant the little seedlings. She oughtn’t have any issues with doing that!

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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Reliable cucurbitas

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The short cucumber that is now our most-harvested fruit at the moment.

It seems that our garden harvest consists of lots of cucurbitaceae at the moment – cucurbita plants being gourds and squashes. Our biggest producers right now are the cucumber vines. There are just two plants, but they seem to be thriving mightily in the rainy weather we’re having. I’ve finally figured when to harvest them because I’ve become accustomed to their stout stature.

See all the fruits growing? Look above the half-grown cucumber along the white pole. Just imagine the whole plant with all these forming fruits!

Yes, like another productive cucurbita here, these cucumbers are short and squat. They appear to like the wet weather, because fewer fruits are aborting now, and the vines are happily spreading. It takes constant care to keep the plants trained onto their assigned trellises…

The mini snakegourds aren’t easy to photograph when you want to show them scattered around the trellis. However, there are three of them in this photo. Spot them? They’re still half-formed.

… just like my old disobedient plant, the mini green snakegourd. We have a single vine growing on an A-frame trellis, and it still keeps pushing the boundaries. I’m not allowing it a foothold on the fence out of respect for our neighbour, so it will have to resign itself to growing repeatedly over itself. With no help from us, it has been producing an increasing number of fruits. It is an Ol’ Faithful producer…

The small bittergourds remind me of christmas tree ornaments when they dangle like this!

Our mini bittergourd vine has been producing fruits, too, and we now have the new addition of a wild seedling that I discovered growing just under the mango tree. I guess I need to thank a bird for the new plant – that is how we first started growing the mini bittergourds, after all.

The new bittergourd plant. I’ve decided to leave it where it’s growing, and will probably have fun putting up one of my impromptu, add-on trellises for it to grow on.

The winter melon vines have also been popping several female flowers, but none have set fruit yet. The Weeds have been experiencing the same thing, but I think they have at least one fruit growing, unlike mine. I hope our plant decides to give us a surprise soon, and produces at least one fruit, too. (I mention this on the blog in the hope that it feels some shame and decides to do something about it – like the weather often does!)

I was quite pleased when the butternut pumpkin plant put out not one, but TWO male flowers one day. They’re pretty, aren’t they?

The butternut pumpkin vine has also been displaying at least one male flower on a daily (nightly) basis. It has grown into a lovely big vine with thick stems and huge leaves. No sign of female flowers yet, but the vine is starting to branch out. I’m going to keep it constrained to the current area, though. I simply poke in short bamboo sticks next to the vine to lean it in the direction I want to go in. I’ve found this less traumatic to the plant than lifting and moving the vine, which puts leaves in an odd position when the vine is re-aligned.

The size of the butternut pumpkin leaf has impressed me! I feel like I’m one step closer to Novice Gardener’s level of pumpkin growing now!

I’ve noticed that the newer section of the vine is putting out more roots – which is a good thing because the first 1-2 metres of it are now bare of leaves, and I’m afraid will die off.

For now, I’ll just say thank goodness for our cucurbitas. If not for them, we’d have hardly any fresh veggies to harvest right now. Let’s see if any of the other plants gets jealous and makes a stab for some blog-time…

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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The Mongolian giant sunflower seedling

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The transplanted Mongolian giant sunflower seedling loosely staked to not damage the stem. The idea is to just keep the plant upright until the stem hardens as it grows. Mind you, I buried about a third of the stem when I transplanted it. The true leaves are also beginning to emerge here.

I’ve got a pair of Mongolian giant sunflower seedlings growing at the moment. It may sound odd to talk about plants when they’re so young, but these two seedlings are growing so fast that I just have to talk about them!

The seeds germinated within 3 days of being sown, and once the stem straightened out with the seed leaves still encased in the seed coat, the stems started growing super fast. They grew more than 10cm over two days, and the seed leaves were so big and heavy that the seedlings became top heavy and started falling over. I staked them up, but they kept growing at such a rate that I decided they needed to be planted out as soon as possible so that the tap root wouldn’t be affected and stunt the growth.

Since the stems were by now around 15cm long – and still with only the seed leaves, mind you – I buried part of the stems when I transplanted them. They still need stakes to support them, though.

Extraordinary measures had to be taken to protect these plants, too. As mentioned previously, there are any number of hazards awaiting sunflower plants, let alone such young ones. I had to use snail bait as well as a recycled PET bottle with the bottom cut off to cover each seedling. My bottle-protectors, as I like to call them, serve several purposes:

  • they protect the plants inside from big snails (it’s possible for smaller snails to climb up the sides and through the open hole at the top, which has to remain open for the supporting stake to go through – but the space is limited)
  • they protect the young plants from heavy, pelting rain
  • when the rim is pushed deeper into the soil. they seem to keep out baby snails that like to burrow through soil – because I think they only go just below the soil surface. Who’s heard of deep-burrowing snails?

The seedling as protected as I could make it, with a stake to hold it upright, a bottle to protect it from rain and hungry snails, and a temporary plant trellis to fence it off. This is gardening at its most kiasu.

The drawback of the bottle-protectors is that they retain heat on hot days and could aversely affect the plants inside with high heat and humidity. Sometimes there’s so much condensation on the inside that you can’t make out your plants! So, I usually use these protectors at night, or when it rains. It means that you have to be extra cognizant and vigilant of the weather and time of day, and so far I haven’t lost any plants to this yet. However, at the rate these seedlings are growing, I think they will outgrow the protectors in a matter of days. I have never had such a fast growing sunflower before! The first true leaves are growing out and it’s anyone’s guess what will happen before these plants reach the end of their respective journeys, however long (or short) they will be.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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