Japanese Quince

Every year about now I put on a few extra sweaters, check the weather forecast for snow, and go outside to look for.....flowers??!  Yes, that's right: flowers!

Japanese quince flower and flower buds.

It's time for Japanese quince shrubs to flower, and they are a welcome sight on these gray winter days.  Our outdoor classroom's Japanese quince shrubs are by the sidewalk near the entrance to the parking lot.  You can't miss them right now, as they are covered in blooms.

One of our two Japanese quince shrubs.

Japanese quince shrubs have an extremely unusual strategy for finding pollinators.  Their flowers are bee-pollinated, but there are absolutely no bees out today!  However, if you've lived in Middle Tennessee long enough, you've learned that we tend to have the odd warm day here and there throughout the winter.  When the weather warms up, beehives send out scouts to see if anything is blooming.  And for warm January days, Japanese quince have a monopoly on the blooming business, so any bees that are out will pollinate the Japanese quince.

Flower buds on a Japanese quince.

You may have already figured this out, but Japanese quinces are from Japan.  They were brought to the United States as an ornamental and edible plant centuries ago.  In the US, they are a slightly old-fashioned but well-loved garden plant.  You've already discovered their ability to brighten a dark winter day, but they also produce useful fruit, called a quince.  Quinces are relatives of apples and pears, and some types of quinces are well-loved in Asian and European cooking.  The quinces of our Japanese quince shrubs are small, hard and bitter, but they can be used to make excellent jams and jellies.  If these flowers are pollinated, we'll have some quince fruits later in the spring or early summer.  Watch out - Japanese quince shrubs have a few thorns to protect their quinces.

A sedum blooming in January.

There is another strange bloomer at the outdoor classroom right now.  It's called sedum, and it's growing right in the middle of the waterfall above the pond.  Sedums don't usually bloom until later in February or March, so I'm not sure what this little plant is up to.  But plants have variations just like people do.  Where people might have different hair colors, plants might have different blooming times.  If January turns out to be a good time for this sedum to bloom,  it will make lots of seeds and pass the early-blooming trait on to the next generation of sedums.  Next year there will be more early-bloomers.

Why Do Sunflowers Follow the Sun?

Blooming sunflower.

It feels good to look at, doesn't it?  Something about bright yellow and radial symmetry is so pleasing to the eyes and mind.  Perhaps the visual buzz we get from gazing on sunflowers is due to the arrangement of the flower parts in what is known as Fibbonaci spirals, which I will not attempt to explain to you, but which you can learn about here in a fascinating animation.  No matter how much you understand Fibbonaci spirals, sunflowers are captivating.

The top picture shows a recently-opened sunflower inflorescence, or group of flowers.  Each dot in the face of the sunflower is actually a single flower, and the picture above shows sunflowers at the stage of pollination.  After pollen has been transported from the male parts of the flower to the female parts of the flower, the female parts of the flower begin to grow into what we know of as sunflower seeds.  In the two photographs below, you can see a mature sunflower inflorescence transitioning to sunflower seeds.

Sunflower finishing blooming and turning to seed.

Sunflower seeds not yet turned black arranged in a Fibbonaci spiral, allowing for maximum packing of seeds.

Above, you can see whitish green sunflower seeds packed together with their pointy end in.   The Fibbonaci spiral arrangement allows the plant to pack as many seeds as possible into the space available.  As this sunflower matures, the seeds will turn striped white and black like what we're accustomed to seeing in the grocery store or birdfeeder.  For a more detailed description of sunflower floral structures, see my older post on aster-type flowers, written when I wrote catchier though less-internet-searchable titles for my posts.

Sunflowers also do that amazing sun-following trick that makes these plants seem to possess some mystical powers.  Well, if you'd like to maintain your sunflower mysticism, I suggest you skip the rest of the text in this post and just look at the pretty pictures.

Sunflowers facing the sun.

What's really going on here is something called heliotropism, and lots of plants do it.  Heliotropism means moving toward the sun.  If you've ever repositioned yourself periodically during an afternoon of misguided youthful tanning in order to get even sun exposure on all parts of your previously cancer-free skin, you've done heliotropism yourself.  The puzzle with sunflowers is, why do the flowers need to face the sun?  To even out tan lines? To look good in a white dress?  To appear thinner?  To fit in with their friends?  Read on.

The truth is, the stems of all actively growing sunflower parts - flowers and leaves - grow to face the sun in order to maximize photosynthesis.  During the day, the stems elongate on the side away from the sun, tilting leaves and immature flowers toward the sun throughout the day and ending up facing west at sunset.  When there's no light (so...night time), the other side of the stem grows, pushing the leaves and flowers back to the east where they will be facing the sun at sunrise.  Growing leaves and immature flowers are green and actively photosynthesizing, and heliotropism provides them with 10-15% more sunlight than just sitting still.

Take a look at the picture below.  On the right, you can see an immature sunflower inflorescence covered in green bracts, which are obviously photosynthesizing since they are filled with chlorophyll and appear green.  The younger sunflower has immature leaves held up and facing the sun as well.  The lower leaves on the younger sunflower, as well as all parts on the older sunflower, have matured, and though they are generally facing up, they are not facing the sun.  The older sunflower is drooping from the weight of the developing seeds.

Young sunflower parts following the sun, old sunflower parts stuck in place.

So just-opened sunflowers like the gorgeous ones in the vase below (if they weren't cut off from their stalks) are still growing some, so they still face the sun.  As soon as they mature, they usually end up facing east and staying there.

Bouquet of sunflowers

Surprises of Fall

Fall came so quickly this year.  Today is the first day of fall, but we have had fall weather for the past several weeks.  Spending entire days every week interacting with the earth and plants has made me notice the season's changes much more acutely this year.  Here are the things I've noticed most as the weather has changed:

• The bees and wasps are already gone.  The flowers are still going strong, but that cloud of buzzing has disappeared.  There are still a few slow bumblebees here and there. 
• The spiders are out in force.  Many blooms have their own resident flower spider, and there are lots of webs strung up between the plants.  We had the biggest garden spider I've ever seen in the hoop house. 
  

  

  Garden Spider Source
  

• It feels strange to eat cherry tomatoes when it's cool and cloudy.  The tomatoes taste the same, it's just not as heavenly to pop them in my mouth when I walk by the tomatoes.  Now I want to nibble the turnip leaves.
• The smell of tomatoes rotting in the field is almost intoxicating.  It's difficult to describe why this is so wonderful, but there's a toasty, dusty, cheesy, roasted tomato smell all around the tomato rows from the unusable tomatoes that makes my head spin.  Rotting squash smell great in the field too.  Don't try this at home - it doesn't work without sunshine and dirt.
• The crops are all different now.  Instead of tomatoes, squash and melons, we have turnips (the best vegetable), chard and beets.  It happened so fast.
• The weeds have slowed down a lot, thank goodness.  Even though I can see the scattered crab grass seeds everywhere, and I know what's ahead for next summer, the pressure's backed off a bit for now.
• It's easy to get a LOT done now that it's not 100 degrees.  In the extreme heat, work slows down due to the body's physiological constraints.  These crisp, cool days mean that I can work fast and easily, and everything feels good.
• I only go fill my water bottle once or twice a day now, instead of four or five times.
• Ironically, the work is starting to taper off even as our capacity to do it increases.  Since fewer crops grow during the winter, a lot of the fields are lying fallow, and we have planted cover crops.  Here is the melon field, all disked in and planted with a mixture of vetch, radish and rye for the winter:

  

  This field is done for the year.
  

• The farm is looking more neat and tidy.  With things growing more slowly, there is time to organize and clean up.  June and July felt like a race to keep up with the creeping jungle of crops and weeds, and now it feels like we are getting ahead.

I only have one or two more days to work on the farm, then I'm moving to the heart of Chicago for a while.  I expect the contrast to be a little jarring.  I'll be reporting on what biological phenomena I observe in the city.  In the mean time, I'm savoring the last few hours of fresh air, big skies and working on the earth here in Middle Tennessee. 

A Time to Sow

Seasons are changing already on the farm.  Crops are maturing, exhausting themselves and giving way to insects, and it's time to plow them under and start anew.  The chard, beets, onions and lettuce were past the point of diminishing returns, so last week we demolished them and and set up twelve new beds, which are already starting to grow.  We'll soon have new chard, beans, lettuce, beets, turnips and carrots.

To change over the beds, we remove the irrigation system (see below), and the farm owner plows the crops under.  Then I spread organic fertilizer on the row, and the farm owner plows again.  Maybe after a few more years I'll get to learn how to drive the tractor, but for now, I stick to raking the biggest of the dirt clods and weeds out after the plow goes through.  The beds are perfect at this point - fluffy, weed-free and ready to be planted.

There are two ways we plant new beds:  one is transplanting seedlings into the soil that have been started in the greenhouse, and the other method is directly planting seeds into the soil.  The method of planting depends on the type of plant.  Those with a long taproot, like carrots or beets must be direct-sowed, and others like squash or kale or most flowers can be started in the greenhouse and transplanted.  I started hundreds of seeds in the last few weeks for transplanting, but we won't get to those until next week.  Last week we were direct-sowing. 

There is an ingenious little machine on the farm for direct-sowing.  It's called the Earth Way Precision Walk-Behind Garden Seeder.  Here is a picture of the whole machine and of the seed chamber filled with chard seeds:

The front wheel has a groove for making a seed furrow.  The wheel inside the chamber scoops 1-2 seeds at a time, and you can easily replace the wheel with a different-sized chamber for different seeds.  The seeds fall down a chute into the furrow in the soil.  There is a chain dragging behind the chute for pulling the soil back in place.  The back wheel is flat for pressing the soil down over the seeds.  Genius!  It worked very well, too, except for the carrot seeds, which had a coating on them for supposedly making them easier to sow evenly. 

We usually make 4 rows per bed.  Since this was my first time seeding, the rows were a little wonky.  I know they'll look a little strange as they start to sprout, but we won't notice the crookedness once the plants get big.

After we seed, we lay irrigation tape over the rows of seeds.  It has holes every twelve inches to drip water directly onto the soil.  Drip tape distributes water very efficiently, and it wastes much less than sprinklers.  The irrigation tape can be reused many times, though I learned the hard way that wound-up balls of used drip tape make great places for wasps to nest!  Fortunately, I wasn't stung, but many poor wasps lost their home. 

Direct-sowing is quick and easy compared to transplanting, but there are some trade-offs.  First of all, the seeds are often planted too close together, and then they must be thinned.  Also, sometimes the direct-seeder malfunctions and entire swaths of the rows don't get planted, which you don't notice until the seeds sprout.  When growing seeds for transplanting, every seed usually germinates.  Expensive seeds aren't wasted, and every bit of the bed ends up with actual plants growing on it.

I seeded on Thursday and I don't go back to the farm until Tuesday.  There has been lots of rain and sunshine, so I bet the seeds are coming up.  Everything seems to grow to quickly on the farm.

Sound Exchange

The sounds changed even in the car on my way out of the city, well, I changed the sound anyway. For some reason, NPR's reports on the daily movements of Al Quaeda grated more than usual, and I switched to music. My poor little car radio has been waiting for years to play something other than news.

As I neared the little farm where I'll be working this summer, I opened the windows and let the country smells and sounds in. The air shifted as I got off the highway. Southern country air is thick, dense and sweet in the summer. When you step out of air conditioning, it feels a little syrupy for the first few breaths until your lungs relax. Southern city air is also thick and dense in summer, but it has a sticky sour quality to it, perhaps from the additional particulates or ozone.

It's not technically summer yet, but you can be fooled into thinking it's summer in the daytime heat. At night, the air is still cool and dry - a sure sign of spring.

The farm itself turned out to be everything I had imagined a picturesque organic farm to be. It has gorgeous rows of greens and flowers, edges of grasses and rural weeds, a sturdy old barn leftover from the last farm, two hoop houses and the owners' house complete with skylights.

I quickly fell into the old familiar rhythms of farm work. In college, I worked on the state of Florida's research farm assisting a plant geneticist. The job was long days of transplanting, mixing soil, watering, fertilizing and spraying pesticides. There is a kind of zone that the body goes into when actively working all day in the heat. It is almost surprising to be quick and strong in intense heat. It was satisfying to revisit those sensations from a younger age with the perspective I have now.

Since I enjoy the work and the atmosphere, the stretching of time that happens with a pleasing repetitive task gives way to thoughts. It was my first day, so there was a lot of conversation with the farm owner and the other worker. I hope that will continue, but I also know we'll all fade into long stretches of nothing but farm sounds and our own thoughts. The contrast with my old job in these aspects is almost comical. The pace of high school teaching is like a car race - constant, hectic, loud and inconsiderate. I enjoyed the excitement of quick decisions and rapid-fire intellectual problem solving, but there was never time to reflect or converse at length with colleagues, and the repetitive work required all one's attention, or one would be embarrassedly fixing idiotic grading errors the students noticed. Time passes not in minutes but in weeks at school. Each glance at the calendar requires the crossing-out of a shocking number of boxes.

I wasn't sure I'd still be up to the task of laboring all day in the sun, but I made it through easily. Next time, I'll bring a little more water, as water becomes much more appealing than even my favorite dessert when I'm sweating like that. I'll also bring my own big straw hat and a handkerchief - two essential items of comfort. One provides an umbrella of shade, and the other provides passing moments of dry skin. Sweat cools best when there is just a little of it on the skin, but for some reason, my sweat glands seems to increase their output in a linear fashion with the temperature, so I need to mop it off to have a few moments of cooling as the next batch of sweat starts to pour out.

As I drove home, I was thankful to have completed my first First of the next phase of life. Quitting my teaching job required giving notice in March, telling students and colleagues in April, and doing things for the last time since I knew I would be leaving. It's been months of sad goodbyes and well-wishing. I am satisfied with the work I did, and I hate to lose that truly wonderful community. Since it had to happen, I must admit I've been a little antsy to get on with it. Yesterday, I finally cleared out my classroom and surrendered my keys to the school, and from now on, my days are about building my next life. I know I'll find ways to weave threads of my teaching life into my future life. My nomadic childhood taught me that old friendships must be maintained intentionally, so I'll put in the effort to make it happen. But now, I'm doing everything for the first time again - first day on the new job, first blog post, first time designing my future with intention.