I have been really puzzled by the seedlings coming up in my big pot. This is the pot I planted in the first video and showed again in the second. It has yard soil in it. I suspected at first they were tomatillos. But as they grew larger, I quickly realized I was wrong. It is not like me to be so stumped by a seedling, especially one from my own yard. What a mystery! But this morning, my brain finally clicked. You know that feeling of a lightbulb going off? That is what happened. And it is no wonder I didn't recognize this plant because I have not seen it as a seedling for 20 years! It is cleome. Lots and lots and lots of cleome seedlings are filling my pot and outcompeting everything else. I still have my 2 wild lettuce and 2 chickweeds, but in this battle, its the cleome that is winning. How did cleome get into this pot?
Cleome is a beautiful ornamental, annual flower. It has large, complex pink and white blossoms. In good conditions, with lots of rain, it can grow almost 10 feet tall. It is not native to California and it does not grow here without lots of care and attention. I don't really know how it is coming up in my pot. I have a few hypotheses, but first need to tell you a bit of back story.
Cob-weaver is always collecting flower seeds. We carry around envelops in the car for this. When we go hiking in the fall, we come back with lots of seeds in our pockets. She collected cleome seeds almost 3 summers ago when we visited the grandparents in Maryland. We tried to plant some last summer, but only a few came up under the grow light. They were weak and spindly. Most did not come up. The ones that did flowered but they were tiny, under 6 inches tall. As is my usual practice, I dumped the old potting soil out from the seed pack and saved it for replanting something else.
Hypotheses:
- Could that soil have been dumped into the big pot and these are seeds sprouting from last year?
- Did I dump out the rest of the cleome seeds from my stored envelope of seeds, thinking they were too old, into this pot, and forget about them?
- Did the cleome seeds mix with the marigold seeds that Cob-weaver collected at the same time, and when I dumped all the rest of the marigold seeds, I also unknowingly dumped in cleome seeds? That would mean cleome seed is a lot hardier than marigold.
- Do you have a hypothesis?
I love watching aphids almost as much as I love watching ants. Ants are often with aphids and there is a good reason for this. If you have aphids in your garden, I invite you to go and find out what the ants are doing with them. You'll have to watch for a long time to figure out this puzzle. I'll be writing about it soon here in my journal, but I wanted to give you a chance to discover it first on your own. It's really cool, I promise.
Farmer Ladybug 🐞
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