May Lotito

How is your passion flower doing this year? Is it the native perennial P. incarnata? I picked some wild fruits and they were all hollow with dry seeds, maybe not filling up due to drought?

So these seeds intended for fiber production can still grow bushy like mine. I am wondering if it has to do with the soil. Many plants are grown best in specific regions and change outside of the range. My plants tend to be very branchy, I wasn't able to use my bamboo or willow without manually rubbing buds off early in the season. This year I got a glimpse of what might be related to controlling the branch architecture, maybe through affecting auxin gradient and will look into that further next year.

Here are my black seed Sunflowers that I think analogous to flax in term of flowering pattern.

My goji bushes have so many more canes this year I just assembled an octagonal cage out of bamboo sticks to keep the canes from stacking. Recently the berries are ripening and I use a cereal box for harvesting. It's a sweet burden to pick these tiny berries!

I also made temporary trellis for the chayote vines out of cheap 1×3 and 1x2. I shape the end of 1x3 pointy with table saw and hammer it in the ground. Tie 1×2s with fabric strips and lay lightweight wire mesh over.  I will dismantle and resue the wood next year, cutting away rotten sections since they are quite long.

Hi, fellow growers up north, I am curious if your sunchokes bloom before first frost? If not, is the shortening of day length and cooler temperature sufficient to trigger tuber bulking? Mine just done flowering and the tuber will start to fill and plants gradually die back the following month.  Christopher's sunchokes don't seem to bloom yet. Is there a variety difference for planting in high latitude area?

My indigo patch is blooming so I cut half down and extract dye the traditional way. It took three days of soaking and one day for extraction. The indigo paste can be dried for storage or used for dyeing process.

Local big box store carried selections of fruit trees from Chestnut Hill, including American persimmon, American Chestnut and mulberry. I snapped this picture in spring and the calyx on immature persimmon fruit was already quite large. Does it mean this variety of American persimmon will have bigger fruits? My local wild trees have tiny fruits with proportionally small calyx on them. Has anyone tried fruit trees from this nursery? They are mainly for drawing in deers for hunting, not for human consumption.
 

Use the diluted Epsom salt for annuals is generally beneficial as it adds two secondary macro nutrients if in balance with other nutrients. It is not recommended to give to perennials at this time of the year as they are already into senescence, preparing for winter dormancy. Plants mainly get sulfur from organic forms in soil so the availability will follow the curve of OM degradation and in late summer it is at the lowest point. Adding sulfate ions now will disrupt the natural process and cause the plants to start new growths that won't have time to harden off before winter.

Online pictures showing dwarf mulberries loaded with fruits are impressive. I'd like to try some in the future.

My local wild red mulberries aren't too small, maybe 1" long and if I use a tarp and beat the tree with a stick, it won't take a lot of time to harvest also.

Late winter is dry and windy here but spring is very wet. Since mulberries fruit from the laterals in late April and ripen in early June, too much rain falls can make fruits flavorless and the trees having more fungal diseases. I've seen a few berries popcorn like on the ever bearing mulberry but never on wild rubra. Another killer is the twig blight, which also spreads rapidly in cool and damp climate.

Do you know the reason why the wild mulberries won't fruit well? No bloom? Late freeze kill? Small fruits? Usually wild ones are tougher and I've seen trees loaded with fruits especially in fertile and sunny spots. Both of my dwarf everbearing and Pakistani mulberries are easy to root.  Either as spring root suckers or summer cuttings or through air layering. I don't know how about winter cuttings. So far I only harvested a small handful of mulberries from the everbearing tree due to late freeze every year. They may not be a good choice if your weather pattern is similar.

My local feed and seed store has the 50# bag for $42 or $1.50 if buy by the pound. I bought small grains from that store before for direct broadcasting of cover crops. Usually wheat, rye and oat are $12-16 for $50#. I haven't tried winter pea before because the seeds are bigger and the ground is usually too hard by the end of the year for the seeds to take roots. Do you plan on tilling the soil for dedicated cover crop plot? I'd like to have them growing amidst the grassy yard but there is no way to break up the ground to sow the seeds in.