I was so excited to see the blossoms of the Asclepias speciosa, showy milkweed, family Asclepiadaceae, pop open this morning as I was slurping my coffee. Enough botanical Latin for one blog? I would say so. These velvety leaved plants bolt up with their tight corsage bouquets of flowers every June. Hopefully very soon, Monarch butterflies will sniff out the new growth and lay eggs. The caterpillars emerging eat leaves voraciously, chomping down sequential rows like us attacking an ear of corn. Growing bigger and brighter and fatter by the day, one individual will have to go down to save that generation. The "vertebrate predators," meaning hungry birds, pick one off for a breakfast snack, and quickly learn that the ingested morsel is a packet of bitter alkaloids concentrated from their diet. Never again will that bird bother the rest of the gorging gang, who will soon pupate and metamorphosize to stunning butterflies.
The other novel thing about milkweed is that the stems contain usable bast fiber, from the phloem or inner bark of the stem. Brilliant white, it can be collected in the fall after the plant goes dormant for the winter. Separating these strong fibers from the xylem and outer bark is called retting, and easier with milkweed than with linen. After about 100 years of dedicated gardening and collecting, I might be about to gather enough for a doily!
Meet the spring Petaluma surprises. I was assuming that nothing would show up after a very light rainy season and decades of intense horse pasturing. Boy, was I wrong. Look at these beauties:
and check out the future orchard:
and the raspberry patch
We have sequential house guests visiting us in June. Wonder if we can entice some serious gardening and weed pulling out of each one. We'll supply the tools. And Windy and Mocha will watch.
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