May Lotito

My

Thom Bri wrote:Double-tip ears.

This is a rare case of fasciation .  

I got 7 squashes maturing in this 4x6 area. Sweet potato vines are being trained to go up the trellis and fall veggie seedlings are sprouting under the cover. It's been scorchingly hot with less than 1" of rain in August and the heat wave will continue for another 2 weeks. Planting multiple vines and harvesting 1 fruit each works well when I have a short favorable growing window.

Is it earlier than usual to see acorns dropping now? Maybe these are damaged ones and the good ones are still up in the trees? Greg showed a picture of acorn flour here and the nuts definitely looked dark brown. permies.com/t/154413/SALE-high-quality-cold-leached#1209578
He also mentioned some details I guess would be critical for making quality flour: separate acorns by species, cold leaching, change water seven times, etc.

The tall one is horseweed.
https://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/weeds/plants/horseweed.html

I agree with the ID of bush clover Sericea lespedeza and its parasitic dodder. Lespedeza has very high tannin so some animals will eat it to get rid parasites in the guts. Otherwise, they don't like the bitterness from tannin, especially older plants. Younger leaves early in the season are more palatable to herbivores. It was introduced to control erosion and provide fodder early last century and has became invasive in many places.

I see lots of cloudless sulfur butterflies (Phoebis sennae) in the garden. They have a special affection to the red canna. It's interesting that the mature caterpillar is yellow and the chrysalis is yellow as well.

There are several dark-colored butterflies that look similar. Check this out for identification.
https://usinggeorgianativeplants.blogspot.com/2020/08/confusing-dark-swallowtails.html?m=1

I found a board painted with kakishibu two years ago and took some pictures. The two batches of dyes were fermented several weeks each as shown in the posts above. One was more gel like and didn't stick to the surface well. The coating peeled off at places. Another one was more of a sticky liquid and I applied several coatings and put the board in the sun a couple times. I quite like the mahogany color and it seems to be somewhat water resistant too.

Wild persimmon trees produced very small and seedy fruits in my area and no one is interested in eating them. Collecting green fruits for kakishibu is good way to make use of the resources.

What time do you plan on sowing oats? They need 5 to 8 weeks before first frost to get established. The challenge for me is that in recent years, we tend to get summer drought and the top 1 ft of soil is bone dry. We don't see a period of slow and steady rain later in fall, making it too late to sow oat but rye would be fine. I can try fencing off a smaller area and water with a hose to help the seeds germinate. Oats cost $12 in a 50 lbs bag from feed store so it's very economical if I just broadcast a large area.

I find out they like calcareous soil. In my place, they are hard to grow and won't resend. One year, I gave a plant lots of compost made from local plant materials, it grew huge and branched out excessively. Then it produced one flower and got killed by frost the next day.