Happy Mystery Monday!

Can you guess what is pictured in photo #1?

The answer to last week’s mystery is milkweed, Asclepias, pictured in photo #2.

Unlike most flowers, milkweed does not produce loose pollen, but waxy, sticky balls of pollen called pollinia. Each milkweed blossom has a small slit leading down a chamber to the pollinia. When insects land on the droopy milkweed flowers, clinging to the petals as they feed on nectar, a foot can slip into the slit and come in contact with pollinia. When an insect pulls its foot out of the slit, it brings the pollinium with it. Should that same foot slip into another milkweed flower’s slit, the pollen can be transferred, facilitating fertilization.

Milkweed plants typically produce a lot of nectar. The nectar replenishes overnight, gratifying nocturnal moths. The remaining nectar is ready for the first diurnal visitors in the morning.

To access nectar, floral visitors prop themselves on one of the five flower hoods, sliding their tongues down the side of the hood where the nectar is held. They must be careful not to slip their leg down into the flower between the slits. Sometimes insects get stuck in a slit and are never able to free themselves. Some insects are not robust enough to remove their legs from the anther slits with the attached pollinia and are trapped to die there if they don’t lose their appendage first. Other times, they must tear off their own limbs to escape. Even if an insect does manage to pry its leg out of the trap door, some insects are unable to remove the pollinia.

One or two pollinia will slow an insect down, but too many can make it difficult to move. Despite the potential harm of visiting a milkweed flower, for many insects, this is a reliable source of nectar that is worth the risk.

Mystery Monday is sponsored by the Spy Newspapers and Adkins Arboretum.

Magnolia is a large genus of 210–340 species of the family Magnolioideae. They’re a native evergreen tree or shrub with a straight trunk, conical crown, and very fragrant, large, white flowers. Their flowers are waxy and their oblong leaves are shiny and green with silvery undersides.

Yes, it’s July, and it’s hot (it’s summer after all), but we’ve actually had rain (she half-whispers lest the mention jinx it). So, the ground is friable and a young gardener’s fancy turns to MORE BEANS! And other stuff. You know, the mid-summer renewal for fall harvest.

“A lot of people think about ‘getting their garden in’ once in May and that’s it,” says Jon Traunfeld, Director of the Home and Garden Information Center at University of Maryland here. But there’s a second planting time that can be just as rewarding as the first if we take advantage of it. “There’s still plenty of time to plant warm season crops,” he says. “Bush beans, green beans, cucumbers, squash. Also in late July, there are the fall crops. People can sow seeds for things like beets and kale and mustards, radishes, directly in the ground.”

For those of us who are less than perfect gardeners (sigh, we know who we are) that second shot can be a big help. The extended harvest offers maximum return on investment of money (plants and seeds) and time (all that weeding and worrying), and maybe we’ll also have something to ‘put by.’ Yet even if there’s not enough to freeze or can, fall harvest can be a very satisfying time. But it takes planning – and planting – now.

“I just seeded some more green beans and wax beans this week,” says Theresa Mycek, Production Manager at Unity Nursery nursery in Church Hill. “We also just put some zucchini and yellow summer squash seeds in the high tunnel.”

Even without the protection of a high tunnel, Traunfeld notes that the changing climate has altered our gardening parameters. 

“There’s so much opportunity,” he says. “That’s one of the upsides of warming weather. You can plant things through mid-to-late August. And we may be able to overwinter things like arugula, spinach, and kale, and sometimes collards. With a single row cover [to protect them from frost] they come back gangbusters in early spring.”

“When I worked at Colchester,” agrees Mycek, who for 13 years was the grower and manager of a five-acre Community Sustained Agriculture (CSA) project in Georgetown, MD, “starting in August we’d direct-seed radish and fall brassicas. So, if you want to do Pak choi, turnips, radish, watermelon radish, broccoli rabe are all good seeds to put straight into the ground now.”

Even things that we think of as early spring crops can keep producing, especially if protected. “A lot of these crops – kale, lettuces, spinach, the Asian greens – will take a heavy frost and will overwinter,” says Traunfeld. 

While the luscious but delicate butterheads of spring can’t take much heat or cold, there is now a tougher i.e. more resilient lettuce variety, Batavian summer crisp, which has slightly thicker, more water-retentive leaves that do well at this time, and also does well in summer.

 “I saw some in a community garden yesterday [July 16th],” Traunfeld says. “They’re big and ruffly, and they will grow in warm weather and can really take the heat.”

You can also start transplants of some of the brassicas now for harvest next spring. Traunfeld says that a former colleague used to start broccoli seedlings in early August each year.

“She put ‘em out in the garden in September,” he remembers. “She just wanted them to get well established but not put on a head. And they came to life in spring and had beautiful heads.”

Starting transplants in mid-late summer means paying attention to soil temp. Instead of it being too cool as it can be in spring, now soil can be too warm for some of those seeds to germinate. Seed packets usually specify a variety’s optimum germination temp.

“The leafy greens, lettuces, you can’t germinate them easily in heat,” Traunfeld says. “You may want to germinate it inside or outside under something [like row cover or in shade or indirect sunlight].” The difference between soil temperature in direct sun and shade can be as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

When you plant out your seedlings, mulch them to mitigate soil temps and retain moisture for roots. Row cover can do double duty to help prevent moisture loss in their leaves and to hide new seedlings from pests. Then remember to keep them moist but not sodden.

 “[The starts] can tolerate the heat if they’re young,” Mycek says. “But you have to be on top of watering.” 

When planning late-summer seeding of any kind, bear in mind the waning light. Most things require specific amounts of daylight to reach maturity. 

“If they are planning to sow beets, for example, which have a 55-day maturity date, and you’re thinking: when should you plant before frost? you’d count back from frost,” Traunfeld says. “But we’re going into a period when sun is diminishing, so you’d plant two weeks earlier than you’d think – middle-to-end of July.”

It’s all work, but it’s rewarding. In addition to the satisfaction of fall harvest, the second planting is something of a reminder about the fact that food does not grow in the grocery store or on autopilot. It takes attention and care.

“When you grow your own food, you think wasting food is a sin,” says Kent County Master Gardener, Barbra Flook, who grows greens for the table nearly year-round. “And there’s something [empowering] about knowing what it takes to produce it in a relatively safe manner.”

And it’s satisfying. There’s nothing quite like going out to the garden on a cool misty November day to cut kale for the soup pot or pick the last of the haricots verts (slim little French beans) for dinner. Lovely.

True Leaf Batavian Lettuce

Heat tolerant lettuce mix

Johnny’s Summer Crisp Lettuce

University of Maryland Home and Garden Center

Longtime journalist and essayist Nancy Taylor Robson is also the author of four books: Woman in The Wheelhouse; award-winning Course of the Waterman; A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, a Modern Love Story; and OK Now What? A Caregiver’s Guide to What Matters, which she wrote with Sue Collins, RN. 

Mystery Monday is sponsored by the Spy Newspapers and Adkins Arboretum.