s o l a r c y c l e a f r i c a – A s s o c i a t i o n

Seeing fresh red leaves on your rose bush (Rosa) might be a signal that the bush is healthy and growing, depending on the time of year. When green leaves start to turn red, however, it’s likely a indication of a larger problem that could be harmful or fatal to the plant. Roses rise in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 3 through 10, depending on the number.

Growing Powerful

When you notice fresh leaves appearing on the stems of a rose bush, it’s typical for those leaves to be red or burgundy. They frequently stay this color until they get close to full dimension, when they start turning green — often from the inside out, sometimes making it look as if they have reddish tips. This is actually the normal growing process for many rose bushes, and it ensures the bush is healthful.

Nipped from Jack Frost

If green leaves start looking reddish or reddish-brown around the edges in late spring or fall, then it’s possible they’ve been damaged by frost. Frost sometimes shows up suddenly after the rose bush has started to climb in the spring, or sooner than anticipated in the autumn. This won’t necessarily damage the plant; a single frost that nips the edges of the leaves isn’t likely to kill the rose bush. Repeated spring frosts might be a problem, but in the autumn, your bush likely goes dormant as the weather cools and loses its leaves until spring.

Deadly Disease

At the height of the growing season, red tips on leaves which already turned green likely are a indication of rose rosette disease. This illness will destroy the plant, as there are no treatments for rose rosette disease as of November 2013. The illness started in wild roses subsequently traveled into cultivated roses. It turns out the leaves red, or a mixture of red, yellow and green, while creating the stems fragile and unusually thorny. The leaves also may look curly or twisted.

How It Spreads

Grafting roses can disperse the rose rosette disease, however, the most frequent culprits are tiny bugs: eriophyid mites. The mites are nearly microscopic in size, therefore it’s unlikely you’d notice them — you’ll observe the rose rosette symptoms first. The mites are also difficult to control as routine insecticides have little to no impact on them. The mites do not have wings, so they usually stay contained to a small region, but they often are blown to other plants from the wind. When you suspect rose rosette disease — along with its normal accompaniment of mites — it’s best to dig the plant up and set it in a fragile trash bag for disposal with your trash. Do not add it into your compost pile. Disposing of this plant helps remove the disease along with the mites, hopefully before any nearby roses become infected.

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Sunny hillsides are ideal for growing berries. Not only does this type of location provide ample sunshine, but in addition it allows for adequate drainage so that dirt never becomes soggy. When selecting berry plants, home gardeners have a selection of varieties to choose from. All provide not just appealing landscaping, but also delicious fruit.

Brambles

Blackberries and boysenberries grow as trailing vines known as brambles. Requiring little more than sun and well-drained dirt of any type to thrive, they are great for planting on hillsides. Blackberry varieties, such as the thornless “Black Satin” along with also the thorny “Shawnee” produce dark, hot fruit throughout the summer in U.S. Department of Agriculture zones 6 through 8. Boysenberries, a cross between a blackberry and a loganberry, produce juicy reddish-purple fruit mid-season at USDA zones 5 through 10 and can also be offered in a thornless variety.

Blueberries

Blueberries, that are indigenous to North America, are acceptable for growing on sunny hillsides. Contrary to lowbush blueberries, which grow best in colder climates, the highbush and rabbiteye varieties are adapted to grow in warm areas. Highbush blueberries grow up to 10 feet tall in USDA zones 6 through 9, producing clusters of round, sweet strawberries in the summer. Rabbiteyes, found in USDA zones 7 through 9, are marginally larger than the highbush variety, reaching up to 15 feet tall with no pruning. Such as brambles, they prosper in the sunshine and in well-drained soil that’s well-irrigated throughout the growing season.

Strawberries

The creeping custom of strawberries is well-suited to growing on a hillside. The June-bearing number produces fruit in late spring to early summer, whilst everbearing and day-neutral strawberries possess more harvesting seasons, extending to the fall. Thriving in full sun in USDA zones 3 through 10, they prefer slightly acidic, well-drained loose dirt. One of many June-bearing varieties, “Camarosa” and “Cavendish” produce big fruit and are cold-hardy. The “Tristar” and “Fort Laramie” everbearing varieties make large, especially delicious berries.

Tips

Pick berries of all kinds whenever they are ripe — if it is simple to remove the berry from the vine, it is ready to pick. Frequent harvesting is ideal as this promotes constant fruit production. Once picked, strawberries have a brief shelf life and can quickly become moldy. Your crop will last longer if placed in plastic baggies in small amounts with air left inside to allow them to “breathe .” Put unrefrigerated berries in a basket nested in a different basket, which also allows air to reach the fruit and prevent mold.

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When you look at a sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), what you see will be a enlarged underground root which has little indentations where new growth may begin. Should you maintain a sweet potato about for a long time, shoots will begin to emerge from these areas, and if you plant the sweet potato, then you’ll find a sweet potato vine. If you are lucky, you may get to see it blossom. The flowers look like small morning glories. Sweet potatoes do not usually flower often out the tropics.

Edible Sweet Potato

Christopher Columbus introduced sweet potatoes to Europeans on his fourth voyage from the West Indies. Early Spanish explorers took sweet potato to the Philippines and Portuguese explorers disperse it farther into Asia and Malaysia. They are in the morning glory family, Convolvulaceae, together with funnel-shaped flowers coloured white to lavender, depending on the cultivar. There are plenty of varieties which differ from the colour and moistness of the flesh. Flesh colors are white, orange, purple and red. Flesh consistency is either dry-fleshed or moist-fleshed. Sweet potatoes are an important crop in Asia, Africa, Malaysia, and South and Central America, and they rank as the sixth most important food crop in the world.

Flowers

Sweet potato flowers are made of five fused petals. They have a deep, tubular throat topped by a sloping apartment rim known as the blossom’s limb. The limb is usually white, and the throat is pale to deep lavender. In some varieties, the blossom is entirely lavender. The five male flower parts, the pollen-bearing stamens, are fused to the inside of the blossom’s throat. The female flower part, the pistil, rises from the bottom of the blossom and is situated in the throat. The base of the blossom contains abundant nectar from yellow glands, a reward for pollinating bees. Cupping the blossom’s bottom on the exterior are the green sepals. The blossoms are 1 to 2 1/2 inches long and 1 to 2 inches broad.

Flowering

You want to get up early to see sweet potato flowers at their very best. They start right after daybreak, and have usually disappeared by noon. They only stay open for a single morning. The chief pollinators are honeybees and bumblebees. Flowers occur in clusters of one to 22, sprouting from where leaves join the stem. Sweet potatoes blossom best when days are short during winter. Where freezing temperatures occur, this means putting the plant in a greenhouse or indoors for the winter. The breeds of creamy sweet potatoes most commonly grown in america do not produce flowers frequently. You can encourage flowering by putting the sweet potato in a container to limit root growth and by not fertilizing the plant using a high-nitrogen formula, which promotes vegetative growth at the expense of flowering.

Cultivation

Sweet potatoes are a tropical plant, growing in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 9 through 11, with winter protection needed in USDA zone 9. It is a summer annual crop in USDA zones 8 and lower. Because flowering is uncommon, seeds for sweet potatoes aren’t accessible except for breeding purposes. The plants are grown from slips instead, which can be rooted stem-bearing pieces of sweet potato roots. Vegetative propagation ensures you get the cultivar you desire. Most sweet potatoes produce large, vining plants which require a large growing region. Several cultivars, known as bush varieties, have shorter vines for smaller gardens or containers. Sweet potatoes require a few months of warm weather for the best production of roots. Roots require a curing period following harvest.

Ornamental Sweet Potatoes

You can get varieties of sweet potatoes selected for attractive foliage instead of edible roots. Ornamental sweet potatoes have vibrant 3-inch leaves, mainly heart-shaped but a few deeply lobed. The eaves can be yellow-green, light green, red or deep purple to nearly black. They make great ground covers cascading plants for containers or for spilling over partitions. The vines produce big, white-fleshed roots which are edible, but not too delicious. If the plants produce flowers, then they are tucked among the leaves and pale pink. Ornamental sweet potatoes also grow in USDA zones 9 through 11, but are grown as annuals in cooler climates. Several cultivars are “Sweet Caroline” with a wide array of leaf colors, “Illusion Garnet Lace” with greatly cut burgundy leaves, and “Illusion Midnight” with nearly black leaves.

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Plants can self-pollinate when they feature both male and female components, allowing them to copy without pollen from another plant, whereas other kinds of plants need pollen from another plant of the very same species or cultivar. Genetic diversity improves plant stock and several plants with the potential to self-pollinate have developed plans that prefer pollination from outdoors.

Self-Pollination

Pollination occurs when pollen is transported from where it was formed in the stamen, or male portion of the flower, to a receptive surface in the pistil, or female part. Most plants need an outside agent to transfer the pollen, such as wind, bees, butterflies and birds, but some species are self-pollinating. At self-pollinated plants, the pollen is transferred between its stamen and pistil, without relying on a different organism for transport.

Characteristics of Self-Pollinating Plants

Most self-pollinating plants have small, inconspicuous flowers that fall pollen right onto the stigma, part of the pistil formation. Their independence from other beings makes them flexible and hardy; several weeds are self-pollinating. These kinds of plants need less energy to produce attractants for pollinators, and can grow in areas in which the pollinators can’t survive, such as the Arctic and high elevations. Self-pollinated plants have a tendency to copy uniform, but not equal, offspring.

Plants with Male and Female Flowers

More potential to self-pollinate exists when flowers have stamens and pistils, but plans within the plants prefer cross-pollination, pollen carried in another plant’s flower. Monoecious plants have separate male staminate and feminine pistilate flowers that mature at various times, increasing the potential for cross-pollination. Oaks, birches, corn and pumpkin are monoecious plants. Dichogamous plants, such as fireweed, possess a stamen and pistil in precisely the exact same flower, but in addition they mature at different rates.

Self-Pollination in Fruit Trees

Fruit trees are called self-pollinating when the blossoms can be fertilized from the other blossom on precisely the exact same tree or another tree of the identical cultivar or a different cultivar of the very same species. The pollen is usually transferred by bees. Sour cherries, apricots and peaches are self-pollinating in this way. Apart from fruit tree species need to be fertilized with pollen from a different cultivar, even if the flowers have female and male components, as a “self-recognition” response blocks pollen from fertilizing a flower on precisely the exact same plant.

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Pineapples (Ananas comosus) are indigenous to southern Brazil and Paraguay but also prosper in the warm Mediterranean areas of the southern and coastal United States. Pineapple plants are herbaceous perennials that grow to between 2 1/2 and 5 feet tall. While growing pineapples is not so difficult, harvesting the fruit can be tricky. Determining when a pineapple fruit is ripe enough to harvest is dependent mainly on the color and size of the fruit.

Regarding Pineapple Fruit

Pineapple fruit is a seedless fruit called a syncarp, meaning it is generated in the fusion of several small flowers into a single, large fruit. When pineapple fruits are mature, the individual fruitlets on the peel or skin flatten, and the peel begins to change color from green to yellow, starting at the base of this fruit and moving into the top. Mature pineapples can be hefty, weighing as much as 5 to 10 pounds.

When to Harvest

For optimum sweetness and quality, pineapple fruit should not be picked until one-third or more of the peel or shell has turned from green to yellow. Ideally, you should select the fruit through the late mature green stage, when the fruit has reached full size and adulthood but hasn’t turned yellow, then allow the harvested fruit to ripen off the plant at room temperature. Do not refrigerate your pineapple fruit until it’s ripened. If pineapple is refrigerated at the immature green stage, it can result in chilling injury and improper ripening. Ripeness can likewise be determined by massaging your finger against the side of the fruit. Ripened pineapples produce a dull, solid sound if you do this, but immature fruit produce a hollow thud.

Ripening Time

The time that it takes a particular plant to produce ripe fruit that is ready for harvest is based upon the amount, the developing climate, care and the technique of propagation. For example, propagation by cutting can take up to 24 weeks to produce ripe fruit, while suckers and slips take require less time. Generally, the initial harvest of pineapple fruit from your plant will require 18 to 20 weeks of development before it’s ready to harvest. The second crop typically requires slightly less time.

Greatest Time to Eat

Because pineapples are prepared to harvest slightly before they are ready to eat, then it can be difficult to determine if it has ripened into the stage that provides the very best quality and flavor. The physical appearance of the fruit frequently provides several key clues to its readiness for eating. When your pineapple fruit turns almost entirely yellow and gives off a sweet scent, it’s typically prepared to eat. The pulp of a ripe pineapple is yellow to golden yellow, juicy and has a flavor that is sweet.

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