Sky factory 3 magic bean6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() Native Americans consumed almost every part of the plant. ![]() Thought of as an ornamental in this country, runners were used as a food source in many parts of the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. Sow in April to May for harvesting July to September.Īnother exceptional climber and dual purpose vegetable/ornamental plant is the scarlet runner bean, with its towering vines and sweet-pealike clusters of crimson flowers blooming prolifically all summer long. ![]() Properly stored, the seed can remain viable eight to ten years. If you want to save seeds, choose the ripest fruits, the little melons that have dropped to the ground. They are a special treat that combines an edible harvest with a beautiful addition to the ornamental garden. They have become quite popular at farmers’ markets and restaurants as a specialty item, crazy and unusual. Pickles are their traditional use but sliced and salted like its cousin the cucumber, added to a salad, salsa or even sauteed in oil and garlic, your imagination is the limit. By late summer (70 days to maturity) the vines are covered with edible, cucumber-like, tart fruits, sort of a cross between a cucumber and a lime. Mouse melon is not affected by drought, pests or disease, and it is effortless to grow. Alternatively, the roots can be dug and stored during winter to be replanted in spring. It self-seeds yearly, so even if you’ve forgotten to plant it or are late to plant, it will reappear, most likely exactly where it left off last season. It is quite attractive in hanging baskets as well. It is an adorable plant that covers a lot of ground, slowly but surely. Although slow-growing while establishing themselves, the plant can eventually grow up to ten feet. Miniature “watermelons” dangle like hanging ornaments from below the leaves. While the rest of the summer plants are producing fruits, then wildly sprawling out of control, the mouse melon’s tiny, dainty leaves and fine stems are twining delicately up trellises, walls, fences and fading garden plants. Native to Central America and Mexico, the mouse melon was first classified by French botanist Charles Victor Naudin in 1866, but is believed to have been used for both medicine and food since ancient times. Although it is in the family Cucurbitaceae, as are slicing cucumbers, only one species within that family is considered a proper salad cucumber, Cucumis sativus, while the mouse melon belong to another genus entirely, Melothria scabra. Despite its sour cucumber-like taste and watermelon look, it surprisingly is neither a watermelon nor a true cucumber. Even the slightest touch of a hair passing over the tendril will spring it into action. The tiny mouse melon, sometimes referred to as dolly watermelon, or Mexican sour gherkin because of its diminutive size and dark green stripes on a light background, waves its tiny tendrils in the breeze searching for a foothold to the sky. But rather than twisting only in one direction, which is impossible without twisting the plant at the other end, the two halves of the coiled section curl up in opposite directions, separated by an uncoiled stretch, thus creating a twist-less spring! All in all this incredible feat of nature has secured success for these late blooming gifts of the season. The tendril then shortens by coiling up into a corkscrew, pulling up the rest of the plant. Once it finds a support on which to secure itself, the end of the tendril grabs on. When first formed, a tendril is almost straight, and while growing it slowly waves around in a little-understood process called circumnutation. Some climbers twine their stems in a clockwise direction, others counterclockwise, and still others have tendrils that develop into springs, like a car suspension unit. The technique the plants use to winch themselves upwards is well known, but the underlying mechanism is somewhat of a mystery. This may appear simple but climbing plants have been puzzling biologists for centuries. They climb and twine over other plants to reach sunlight without wasting energy on growing their own self-supporting stems. Their strategy of surviving the onslaught of competing, ramped summer growth and retaining a piece of garden real estate is simple: they climb. It comes from three climbing vines that are just coming into their glory as the rest of the garden slips away. There wasn’t much that could withstand the relentless heat and drought or survive in the shadow of the incessant summer weeds, but in my garden, with little more care than the planting of the seed, if that, late summer always brings a plentiful, and unique, edible bounty. When the summer garden begins to wane and the weeds that once triumphed begin to wither away, the garden victors raise their heads high above the wilting, shrinking scoundrels.
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