Pawpaw seed update: Had strange experience—with one of my sprouting seeds, I had to *cut* the little seedling's emerging leaves...
Pawpaw seed update:
Had strange experience—with one of my sprouting seeds, I had to *cut* the little seedling’s emerging leaves out of the seed. The baby plant had fully lifted the seed out of the ground but it looked like the leaves couldn’t split the seed open.
The baby plant seems fine now, I’m surprised my surgery didn’t kill it.
My hypothesis is that the seed is supposed to soften and decompose through dampness, but these seeds were too dry.
Makes me wonder if pawpaw seeds are said to lose viability when they dry out because they don’t sprout, or because the seedling gets stuck and can’t emerge.
Also wondering if I should take an xacto knife and cut the existing seeds along their length so the baby plant can split them open.
Information on the propagation of plants and seeds is soooooo lacking on the internet and often not even accurate
I still don’t know what the deal with “red oaks need to stratify, white oaks sprout in fall immediately” is. It seems to me like every acorn sprouts a taproot immediately as soon as they’re damp and covered up with leaves.
I checked some of the pawpaw seeds I left outside over the winter and it looks like with some of them the seed’s outside has naturally split lengthwise. Interesting…
Meanwhile a bunch of my acorns have been dug up by birds or squirrels…after sprouting! WTF!
But I have 4 oak sprouts that are budding little leaves so I’m optimistic that there will be more
It’s so crazy how much info about plants can only be learned by Going Outside.
For example, common wisdom appears to hold that most perennials die back to the rootstock in winter, but i’ve observed that in many Asteraceae, they just hang onto the basal rosette of leaves all winter long and regrow leaves when frost kills them.
It’s not an “unseasonable weather” thing—it got EXTREMELY cold here for a while, and plenty of my plants did show the expected behavior, but asters seem to keep some leaves throughout winter. Frost tolerance varies a lot. Frost asters legitimately do not give a fuck about cold, I don’t know why, they just don’t freeze. Yarrow also hangs onto leaves throughout winter but doesn’t actively grow, and leaves unprotected by weeds get frostbit.
Red deadnettle (non-native) grows the leaf part in fall and literally just hangs out all winter until blooming in early spring and dying back over the summer. That’s so weird! Deadnettle is effectively “dormant” over summer instead of winter.
I can’t think of a native plant that does this exactly, that’s the weird part.
It’s really crazy how plants have different forms of foliage situationally. The basal leaves on Frost Aster that persist over winter look nothing at all like the dense, bushy foliage of the plant that abruptly starts growing up in midsummer, and the leaves that sprout off the initial vertical stem are different too. Chicory looks just like dandelion until in May or so, it starts to grow these tall, woody stems.
And you know how elementary school teaches you about “seed leaves” looking different from regular leaves? Well, it’s even more complicated, because many trees have these “transitional” leaves that don’t look like the adult leaves OR the seed leaves.
Baby sycamores don’t have the palmate leaves of adults. You have to look at the leaf edges and the way the leaves face to identify them, it’s like a sycamore leaf with only one central vein. Baby tulip poplar leaves have no pointed tips. They look like a pair of butt cheeks.
It’s interesting how these two trees are very ancient families, living fossils dating from the Cretaceous period, and with trees that evolved more recently, like maples, the early leaves look almost just like the adult ones. Is this an ancient trait that mostly disappeared in modern plants? It’s so interesting…
Painstakingly relaying my pawpaw growing experiences to Farmer Family Friend, because he has given me many priceless insights of a similar sort. This is how humans did science before we had science, huh.
Farming, gardening, and growing is nothing but endless hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, repeat.
Along with astronomy, our symbiosis with plants is the cradle of science. Nature constantly controls and manipulates variables in an infinite, repeating cycle as the seasons and weather change.
Farmer Family Friend is 100% the smartest person I know (even if he nearly sets himself on fire more often than the average person). The guy has straight-up invented and built/crafted so many tools, devices, and systems, he knows all the trees and transplants trees with the skill and delicacy of a surgeon, he knows all the birds and plants and bugs, and has so many outrageous anecdotes that you never quite know how much is exaggeration and embellishment
“Old lady with a big garden” and “extremely talkative working class guy” are together the backbone of society
“People trust personal anecdotes more than impersonal statistics” is a feature, not a bug, of human nature. With some topics nowadays, *I* will trust personal anecdotes more than impersonal statistics
It’s been a really mind-expanding thing to learn the ways of the plants—it’s changed the way I think about the concepts of intelligence and knowledge.
I’ve been on team “oral tradition is just as valid as written record, stop being a little bitch about Indigenous history” for a long time, but now that’s evolved into “We still rely on knowledge maintained exclusively by unbroken chains of personal transmission from teacher to learner, we just culturally can’t SEE it.”
Some knowledge literally cannot be transmitted using written words. Martial arts and dance would not exist if we actually depended entirely on writing to transmit learning. The knowledge of how correctly executing a technique feels in your body has to be experienced.
Knowing the plants is also like this—the “knowledge” is mostly a collection of inputs from the senses, instead of capital-F Facts, or at least the Facts are so tangled up in more obscure “senses” that the two cannot function independently. To understand soil you have to touch it. The amount of information our language neatly boxes under “how a thing feels” is really incredible—by touching the soil, you can tell how dense it is, how well it holds together, how wet it is, what its temperature is, what its texture and structural qualities are like.
If you touch a leaf, you take in so much information about it—about the surface of the leaf, the structure and texture of the leaf. How easily your fingertips slide over the surface, whether it feels soft and fuzzy or prickly or greasy or smooth.
But there’s also the smell of the leaf. The sound of the leaf. The movement of the leaf—and if you’re not Experiencing, it’s not at all intuitive that plants move, but of course they move, constantly, stirred by wind or the disturbance of animals, and they all have a distinct movement. Light interacts differently with plants. The dapples of dappled shade are diverse.
The characteristics of every leaf dropped in fall are different. Leaves crunch differently. They curl differently. They rot differently. They pile up differently, they get wet differently. They travel on the wind different distances from the tree, and are gathered up by thickets of weeds differently.
The mathematics of the plant world is so deeply beautiful. We couldn’t help but invent geometry. You have heard that plants arrange their leaves differently, but this is only half of the truth—the arrangement is actually movement and iteration. As a plant sprouts and grows, it generates new leaves. Some plants unfurl a pair of leaves, and then a second, perpendicular pair, and so on. Some sprout up leaves in an elegant spiral up the stem. Some zigzag. For example, maples pair, sycamores spiral, and redbuds zigzag. As plants grow, they branch; a tree is an enormously complicated fractal, a sketch of the lines of its movement, a testimony to its history.
It’s so goddamn hard to learn to identify plants with a book because plants have to be experienced. A picture doesn’t move, it doesn’t have sounds or texture, it isn’t played with by the light. From a picture, an American sycamore is confusable with a maple; in reality they are nothing alike. The heavy, leathery rattle of the sycamore’s leaves is nothing like the clean rushing rustle of the maple.
Tree-of-heaven and black walnut look almost the same, but they are impossible to confuse: tear off a handful of leaves. The cloying, spicy muskiness of the walnut is unique and unmistakable, as is the oily reek of tree-of-heaven, like peanut butter mixed with the smell of a moldy basement.
The English language isn’t good at talking about this stuff. I learn to distinguish similar plants on vibes, and have to think very hard to figure out what i’m recognizing.