Butternut pumpkin plant starts flowering

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The vine starts outside the right frame of this picture, travels to the left, where it loops back to the right, but then tries to detour up the mango tree. The flower is smack in the middle of it all. See it?

Ah, finally… The butternut pumpkin vine seems to have settled in to the permanent location under the mango tree. It has been promising flowers for about 3 weeks, growing buds but then aborting them. I knew that all I needed was patience, and I have been rewarded.

Yes, they’re male flowers, about 1 to 2 metres back from the tip of the vine. I’ve peeped along the length and have seen only boy buds so far. I guess the female bud will come when I’m least vigilant, so maybe I’ll not be such a mother hen over this plant and let it get its act together in peace.

Since the flower blooms early in the day and I didn’t visit the plant early, the flower in this photo is already starting to close shop.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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Sighted: the Asian toad

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The Asian toad – also known generally as the common garden toad here – has been spotted in other areas of the garden, at night. It’s the first time we managed to get a photo of it.

I suppose to my readers who live in more rural areas that have local wildlife, this post would sound really silly, but having grown up in a country that has modernized a lot in the past half century, our local fauna has become so scarce that seeing something that used to be common in our, or our parents’, childhood is kind of a big deal.

In Singlish, the word for this would be “suaku” – ignorant or naive. After all, who gets excited about seeing a toad in the garden?

Well, considering that they used to be rampant so many years ago, then disappeared as the native countryside gave way to construction, seeing one again is like a jolt that evokes long-forgotten childhood memories…

…like just how numerous the toads were, that they were literally underfoot. Yes, they used to hop into the porch and house, and occasionally got stepped on. It’s not a nice sensation – they’re soft and squishy – and thankfully never were killed that way because once you felt that soft thing under your foot, you’d have a literal knee-jerk reaction to lift your foot.

It also used to be easy to find tadpoles – black ones for the toads and green-gray ones for frogs. Then the puddle-prone areas and streams gave way to our modern, effective drainage system, and then they lost that habitat, too.

So, seeing this regular garden toad is a good sign to me. I like knowing that the native fauna is still out there, but I have to wonder how this fellow and the Banded bull frog arrived in our garden. There’s no water to breed in, so they must have travelled quite a distance to get here.

This is not the first time we’ve seen the Asian toad (Bufo melanosticus) in recent times. It was first noticed earlier this year near the outdoor fish tank – but that’s covered and raised, so unfortunately the toad can’t gain access to the water – and spotted again a couple of months later inside the heliconia patch.

We finally managed to take its photo because it went hopping across the driveway, in front of the car. Armed with a torchlight and camera, Curious Mama and I finally succeeded in getting its picture, in all its warty, amphibian splendour. So now, I guess there’s one thing left to say: Welcome back, Asian toad, welcome back.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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My self-seeding bangkwang plants

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Bangkwang plants have profuse clusters of flowers that appear to be easily pollinated, judging by the number of bean pods that are produced.

It’s hard to imagine there was a time when I was desperate for a sign of flowers and pods on my bangkwang plants. That was way back when I first started growing bangkwang, or jicama. Since then, I learned to save the seeds and grow more plants. Little did I know that the plants would decide to take matters into their own hands, so to speak.

I’m not referring just to the explosive popping open of the pods that mature on the vine. Those dried pods pack quite a pop when they decide to disperse their seeds. Not only do they split open, they also twist and curl, which sends the ripe seeds in all directions. Before I had many seeds, I used to wait for the pods to mature as much as possible before plucking them from the vine; on one occasion, the pod split and I had to go hunting in the surrounding area for the seeds. The farthest seed was over 3 metres away! And mind you, I didn’t manage to find all the seeds that had been sent flying – I counted the number of depressions in the pod and the number of seeds that I’d found, and they did not tally… That, of course, gave us another couple of wild plants, which were welcome.

Another way I’ve found the plants to be self-seeding is this:

We’re supposed to not let the plants grow too many pods, otherwise they will spend more energy on the pods than on the tuber that we want to eat. So, I do try to cull the pods after the plants finish flowering. There are times, however, when I don’t do this soon enough, and the pods grow to full size before I remove them. I usually discard the green pods in the vicinity to recycle them into the garden. Well, I’ve found that you don’t necessarily have to wait for the pods to turn brown to be able to grow plants from the seeds inside…

While weeding the bangkwang bed, I noticed a few clusters of new sprouts. Fairly sure I hadn’t sown new seeds, and definitely not in such close proximity to each other, I shifted the earth away from the sprouts to discover that each cluster of sprouts was growing from a single, slightly buried seed pod!

One of the pods that I unearthed, with the sprouting beans inside.

They were definitely from green pods because the pods were still straight, unlike pods that have split open and are twisted.

The bottom line is, we now have quite a number of unplanned new plants, so I have to start at least one more new bed. That’s pretty cool in my book!

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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Time to join the Corn Club

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My little Red Aztec corn plants awaiting transplant to a bigger, better home.

My gardening buddies, Weed and Novice Gardener, have been going on for many weeks about their corn plants, and I have to admit that I was somewhat envious of Weed’s healthy corn plants when I last visited his garden. I was holding out on growing corn after my laughable efforts two years ago trying to grow sweet corn, but since it’s part of my nature to rise to a challenge, I decided to try again when the Weeds kindly passed me some Red Aztec corn seeds.

I decided to sow the corn in planting cups first. Why? Because the last time we grew corn, my dogs decided they liked the taste of the young leaves, and ate them! And of course, I anticipated snails being a nuisance as well. So planting cups it was.

It also gives me time to properly prepare a planting bed that I intend to beef up as corn plants are heavy feeders. After about two and a half years of growing edible plants, I’d better know better this time! In case I don’t, I’ll plead in advance that this will be only my second time growing corn, so things could still go terribly wrong… :|

Anyway, it looks like I can now officially join the corn club, although I decline to use “cornilicious” references here. I get plenty of grief in real life about my corny sense of humour, so I think I’ll hold off inciting the online community for now…

Here’s wishing myself luck in having a proper corn harvest this time!

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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