Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Oct. 28

Hi! We had to turn the heat on for the first time last night here in the South Central San Joaquin Valley. How's the weather treating you and your garden?

With Halloween coming up, I thought it was time to post some carnivorous plants from Tony Litwin in Florida. It's also time for fall leaves and such.

Hope all is well with you. Here are some more plant pics, one of which is a terrestrial orchid that showed up one day in my bogs. It's called a Calopagon and only shows up in the spring and comes in blue as well as white flowers. Also I don't know if I ever told you this, but when the first Europeans arrived in the Carolina's and saw the Flytrap for the first time, they called it a Tippitiwhichit which was Shakespearean slang for the female genitalia. What's weird is that in some places in rural North Carolina it's still called that...Go figure! Anyway I hope you enjoy the pics.

Interesting background on these fascinating plants!

Edible Gardening/Putting Things By

Planning for next year? We've had some discussions about sweet potatoes. How to grow sweet potatoes in soil bags.

May work better in some climate than others. Detailed instructions at the link.
There's a video.

Art

Hi, KT ... This is a flower which has occasionally (from what I hear) been the subject of heated misunderstanding. I've always known it as a 'marigold', but there are others who insist vehemently that a marigold is 'different', and this is what's called a "buttercup". Sorry, but I remember real buttercups that used to grow freely each spring in our back yard when I was but an Wee Tykelet, and they didn't look anything like this. They were smaller, lighter in color, with blues and pinks predominating, and they were much more "delicate" in structure. This one's a tank by comparison. All that aside, I don't really care that much because both were pretty (and still are) but in diff'rent ways. The 'marigold' in the photo was demised long ago in 2022, but does that really matter? Its image still lives on, and that's half the game right there, yes? An old Indian saying tells us no man is truly dead until his name is lost to memory ... couldn't the same be said of flowers? Enjoy, and use as you deem fit for task and purpose ...

(Dr_No)

I don't think it's a marigold.

Ah, Nature

Science:

Quantitatively, spider silk is 5 times stronger than steel of the same diameter and almost as strong as Kevlar, the toughest man-made polymer (tensile strength of roughly 1.3 GPa).

See this single line resisting a furiously determined waps.pic.twitter.com/InneuRjBQA

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 26, 2023

Some of these caterpillars are toxic:

A good rule of thumb is not to play with fuzzy caterpillars.

Pyrophorus nyctophanus, aka the headlight beetle

[📹 Bart Coppens]pic.twitter.com/JUCOvAHrwl

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 15, 2023

Fascinating.

Someone's Adventure

Mt. Lemmon (Arizona). Credit "Outdoors"

Puttering

Gardens of The Horde

Anything going on in your yard or garden?

Hope everyone has a nice weekend.

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Week in Review

What has changed since last week's thread? Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Oct. 21

Any thoughts or questions?

I closed the comments on this post so you wouldn't get banned for commenting on a week-old post, but don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 01:28 PM

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