Mountain Sweet Yellow

If there is one group of plants that I have no complaints about attempting in the Flint Hills, it's the melon and gourd families.  Our usual early summer moisture followed by the hot, dry late summer and falls of Kansas normally result in good crops of these rampant vines.  Aside from avoiding the damage of vine borers and squash bugs, and in some years I'll admit losing everything to the little demons, I usually don't even have to work very hard to gain a good harvest.

Mountain Sweet Yellow

 I've tried a number of different watermelon's and cantaloupes since I began gardening in Kansas, but I heartedly bless the impulse that resulted in me purchasing the seed for 'Mountain Sweet Yellow' watermelon from the Seed Savers Exchange (http://www.seedsavers.org/)  several years ago.  Mountain Sweet Yellow was an heirloom melon that was very popular in the 1840's in NorthEastern markets. When Seed Savers described it as "truly one of the jewels in SSE’s watermelon collection," I felt I had to give it a shot and well worth the effort it was. Mountain Sweet Yellow results in long, large, 20 pound or so melons with dark yellow flesh and black seeds that matures in 95-100 days.  Along with the decorative appearance comes a very high sugar content and a mild watermelon taste with overtones of honey.   From a single hill, I usually harvest 4-5 large melons before I give up and let the box turtles eat the rest and, of course, since its a seeded heirloom, the only cost was the original packet of seeds. 

Of other heirlooms, I've grown the fabled Moon and Stars Watermelon, also a very large melon and a good one, but although the devotees of Moon and Stars may consider this blasphemy, it is not nearly as tasty as Mountain Sweet Yellow.  I think the former stays popular because of the fascination by children with the unique appearance, but I've found the yellow flesh and black seeds of MSY to be just as enticing to children.  I did appreciate the taste and smaller size of  a watermelon called 'Blacktail Mountain' when I grew it.  Blacktail Mountain is a red-fleshed ice box style melon that matures faster than Mountain Sweet Yellow.  There's a great comprehensive book on watermelons by Amy Goldman, Melons for the Passionate Grower, in which she described Blacktail Mountain as the "quintessential watermelon." Blacktail Mountain was bred relatively recently (in the 1970's) by a then teenager, Glenn Drowns, trying to find a watermelon that would consistently mature in the short growing season of his native Idaho.  It did perform well here in Kansas, but had a slightly lower yield than my MSY.  Blacktail Mountain is also supposed to have one of the highest sugar contents ever tested, but I find Mountain Sweet Yellow to be sweeter to taste. 

Watermelon sweetness, for those who are interested, is measured by a refractometer in degrees of Brix (essentially sugars or more accurately soluble solids).  A good watermelon has a Brix of 10, while an exceptional watermelon might be 14 Brix.  Interestingly, because of the low glycemic diet craze, there are recent breeding efforts to produce a watermelon with a low sugar content.  It isn't enough for dieticians that watermelons are naturally high in carotenoids including the lycopene that we hear so much about, no, they have to mess with the taste.  Personally, given a choice, I'll take my watemelon as sweet as possible, thank you.  Darned nutritionists ruin everything.

Moon and Stars

Labeling; well, I tried

A recent post on Gardenweb.com reminded me to check up on an experiment I tried a summer back in my garden.  In 2009, when my garden was on the local annual Garden Tour, I put a little time into labeling most of the roses.  Knowing that the zinc/soft pencil labels are notorious for fading, I decided to spray some of the labels with Helmsman Spar Urethane, chosen because "it forms a protective barrier against rain and moisture" and "the enhanced ultraviolet absorbers found in Helmsman reduce the graying and fading effects of the sun."

Well, you can see the results below.  The three labels pictured were all created and put into the garden in Spring, 2009 and remained there, so they've been exposed to two Springs, two hot Kansas Summers and one very cold Kansas Winter. The urethane coating did decrease the fading, but there was a drawback, as you can see in the third picture;  at some point the urethane flaked off a number of the labels leaving them worse than before.  I'd say about 50% of the labels look like the first picture at this point and the other 50% look like the third; or worse.  We'll call this experiment a gigantic fail.

Coated Label at 1.5 years

Uncoated Label at 1.5 years

Oops;  flaking away...should say "Buck Rose" at the top

Back to the drawing board, eh?  Must make a note to redouble my efforts to keep plant locations listed on the computer....and backed up.

Survivor Lessons

Last weekend I was puttering around the garden, doing all the usual things, pulling weeds, deadheading roses, sobbing over some drought-stricken perennials, and then, stumbling dehydrated up the cement stairs from the back garden beds, I came unexpectedly face to face with a shining example of eternal truth.  The truth that, as said best by a character in the now ancient movie classic Jurassic Park, "Life always finds a way."

Growing in a quarter-inch deep deposit of wind-blown organic debris, surrounded below, and to three sides by limestone or cement, exposed to the burning southwestern sun, stood a small volunteer lavender plant in perfect health.  Never mind that we hadn't seen any appreciable rain for a month, never mind not a sprinkle for a week, this little baby plant had germinated and grown on nothing but air, limestone, and a little organic dust.  About one and one-half inch tall and wide, its entire time on this planet must have been as precarious as a trapeze artist without a net.  One wrong step by a dog, a too-forceful gust of hot wind, a wandering herbivore, and the time of this plant would have been over. 

There are many lessons here for all of us, lessons both of gardening and of how to live our lives.  I'm sure that others can take their own thoughts from the image above, but I, for one, was struck first by this blatant demonstration about wants and needs; that we must, for our own sakes, find an environment that contains everything needed to prosper, including shelter, moisture, food and sunlight.  And yet the best survivors don't really ask or expect much more than that, as this little plant was telling me.  Lavender is surely adapted well to the Kansas climate, as many Mediterranean plants are, but scratching out a living on my cement steps was not something I would have predicted for it.

The little trooper also shows us a lesson about going with the flow. I don't know how long it has been growing, probably no more than a few weeks, but it started life in the middle of the hottest, driest days of summer and then found the strength and moisture, from dew, from translocation through the concrete, or from the very air, to keep growing. It scoffed at the burning sun and the 110 temperatures. It held fast to the rock despite the searing Kansas summer winds. It protected itself by drawing around it the little fuzzy gray-green coat common in lavenders.

Can we be as strong, we gardeners, we humans?  To grow without over-ambitious expectations, to survive in the face of adversity, to cling to the wonder of life? Are we all ready to take the chance, to take the leap of our lives and then to hang on with all our God-given gifts and just be thankful for the sunlight?  I suppose, for my little lavender friend and for each of us, that time will give us our answer.    

White Tower

My Sweet Autumn Clematis bloomed in September this year instead of late August, keeping me waiting a bit for the annual wrapup of fragrancy in my garden, but bloom it finally did.   I worried about its health all through the spring, but it nevertheless returned to sweeten the September air.

Although most of the summer it merely provides iron-clad green foliage, and after flowering silvery, plume-like seed heads will decorate it, every gardener should grow Sweet Autumn Clematis merely for the few weeks of unmatched fragrance it provides.  But talk about your confused Latin nomenclature!  Sweet Autumn Clematis has been variably listed, and can still be purchased as Clematis terniflora, C. paniculata, C. maximowicziana or C. dioscoreifolia.  The species most commonly grown in the United States, and listed by the USDA as C. terniflora, is native to Japan, although one source says that C. paniculata is a separate but identical species native to New Zealand. 

Whatever you want to call it, I grow Sweet Autumn Clematis on an 8 foot tall wire cylinder in the center of my garden, pictured above as taken on a recent misty morning.  I question the oft-repeated information that C. terniflora is hardy to Zone 4, because my history with the plant has been to grow one, lose one, have a volunteer come up in another spot, and then had that volunteer cover the wire tower for three years running until this past winter, admittedly a bad one, when it was killed back to the ground.  I waited patiently this spring, hoping to see signs of life and knowing that clematis often take some time to put leaves on their seemingly dead vines, and just as I was about to give up and was ready to find and plant a new one, some nice green shoots popped up from the ground in the center of the tower. Luckily for me and my garden, Sweet Autumn Clematis grows 20 feet in a single season and blooms on new growth, and it recovered 2/3rds of the trellis again before blooming this year.  In the Flint Hills, it seems to be completely free from disease and the flowers, though small at one inch across, are so fragrant with a rich vanilla scent that this single vine perfumes my entire garden for weeks.  To stand downwind of this central white pillar is to overdose on the scent of heaven.

Although I understand that the Internet is not always a reliable source, it sometimes pays to do a little reading anyway, and in my readings about this vine, I discovered that clematis is in the buttercup family (a neat little factoid for cocktail parties that I never attend anyway) and was called "pepper vine" by Western pioneers and used as a pepper substitute since true black pepper was a rare and expensive commodity for them.  I don't know which clematis would have been carried on the wagons westward, but the entire genus supposedly contains essential oils and compounds that irritate the skin and mucous membranes and can cause bleeding into the gastrointestinal tract if ingested in large amounts.  Thankfully, since I don't like black pepper anyway and the long-suffering Mrs. ProfessorRoush has indulged me by limiting its use in her cooking, I won't be tempted, come the Revolution, to try this dangerous substitute.

It just occurred to me that I've blogged on two white fall-blooming plants in a row.  Maybe I should start a White Garden and create a prairie Sissinghurst out here in the middle of Kansas.  What a fantasy, me and Vita (Sackville-West), gardening together at last.