This year we'll be paring the number of vegetables and fruits down from what we had last year. We're doing this because we had too many plants in the plots, and way too many vine and crawling plants that a number of plants got crowded out. We had in the old garden:
That includes three vine plants, and two--melons and cucumbers--were very close to each other, and got very crowded and overlapped. The eggplants didn't work, and the squash were crowded out by the water melons and tomatoes. This year, we're limiting it to two vine plants, the melons and the watermelons, because they turned out so well. We're keeping the tomatoes, and probably doing a couple more plants. My father says he'll turn the soil over in a couple of days, and the plants will probably be put in the upcoming weekend. I'll tell you the final plants we'll be raising then.
Sometimes the most unassuming plant can make the best decoration.
Turns out winter collards produce some very nice yellow flowers on very tall stems. These are at least five feet tall, if not taller than me now. My mother is rather pleased with how they look. We're enjoying them until we get around to cleaning out the plots again for this year's spring and summer plants.
I took these photos a couple weeks ago, and I thought I'd like to share them because they represent part of something I've realized over the last few years, something that began when I took systematic botany (I had to look at a copy of transcript to get the right class name). In the systematic botany class I took, we were taught a mix of taxonomy, which is the system of classification to identify species of organisms and to further identify their genetic/evolutionary history to other species, and plant identification. We moved from understanding how they worked, which you learned in basic biology and is further developed in later biology classes, to being able to identify them. We had to collect a certain amount and preserve them, which resulted in me traipsing all over the Auburn campus and beyond looking for strange plants. A few things stuck with me, and I'll discuss them in later posts, but what mainly stayed with me was the ability to find, identify, and name a plant I've probably seen all my life but hadn't bothered to figure it out. A lot of wildflowers were named for me that semester, and a few were able to stick with me.
While I honestly can't recall if the periwinkle was one of those that I managed to find for my collection at the time, it is one that I've seen a lot every spring along the roadsides and open fields. I didn't have a ruler with me to make measurements, so I'm not sure if these were Bigleaf Periwinkles or just plain Periwinkles, but part of me is leaning for the latter. According to eNature, they're not native to Alabama, but are escaped introduced plants, like a number of wildflowers probably are. I don't know why, but I've always liked this little guy. Maybe it's the nice shade of blue-purple, or how they're like small morning glories. Who knows, but now I definitely know the name of the flower, and that's a plus.