An upcycle find that had plans to be used as extra storage on the Howdy Farm ended up not being needed. We rescued a shelf that was going to be thrown out by a Hort professor, but since there was no immediate need for it, it stayed outside as a year passed by. So, to the trash it inevitably had to go. Demoing it was a lot of fun. Rest in peace old shelf, your fullest potential was never realized.
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This is a true travesty, but it was not unexpected… Dahlias are a tropical flower that can be either vining or a fairly short flower to be used in a bedding situation. The seed package said that they can flower within 70 days. We started the seeds in early September and planted them about three weeks later, and they looked like this. Here are the dahlias a few weeks later. It was interesting to see the difference between all of the seedlings. The seeds that I got were called a “hybrid mix”, and they were serious about the “mix”! If your curious, the white stuff is an organic rose food fertilizer mix. It has plenty of phosphorus and potassium to make the dahlias flower and make big roots! The plants were growing great! In fact at least 5 had huge flower buds on them, and they were about to bloom. Then, November 13th, 14th, and 15th happened… We tried our best to protect the dahlias, and you can see our efforts down below. But for three nights it dipped below the freezing point, getting down to 28.2 degrees on the 14th. Remember when I said that dahlias were tropical? Well it showed when I took off the cover. R.I.P. dahlias... I tried. A new hope...
Dahlias are like potatoes- the make tubers to store energy. The tubers didn't freeze and they did exactly what I was hoping for! You can see in the picture below, they are coming back! My hope is their metabolism slows down over winter and that they don't expend too much energy on growth until it stops freezing. Maybe I will provide a little "Darwinism" and allow only the strong to survive. Come visit the farm in the spring to see if they survived! This season the persimmon trees had struggles with pests. Birds kept on biting them, and only taking one bite out! Because of the damage to the fruit they were causing, the persimmons were falling off the tree early and were ugly! As a response to damage fruit produces ethylene, a plant hormone that causes the fruit to ripen and mature at a quicker rate. Therefore, the persimmons were falling off earlier than they should have. So, in order to save the crop we had to pick early and blet them, allowing them to ripen off the tree. This practice is commonly done on persimmons, pears, tomatoes, and bananas. This Fuyu variety of persimmon is a less astringent variety so technically bletting isn’t necessary, but because of the presence of the bird pests we had to harvest them this way this season.
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AuthorI'm a Biological and Agricultural Engineering student that is adding on a Horticulture minor to indulge my inner plant geek! Archives
December 2018
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The Howdy Farm at Texas A&M University | John's Blog |