And what a beautiful November day in the 60's! Can you imagine?
Who would have thought there would still be such time to work in the soil in the garden!
So I did.... reworked a portion of a garden and dug and discarded some of my homemade asiatic hybrids. At least for me, I just can't dig bulbs without my camera at hand, and what did I find?
Last fall I was digging for something
and then realized I was near or at where I had a Lilium amabile bulb. I carefully searched what I had dug, and found nothing, so I said to myself "Phew! Lucky I missed it and didn't damage the bulb!". Well somehow I did jostle it, and this is what happened:
I never realized how tight this species's bulbs are - almost like a solid bulb. They would be good candidates for eating, if they are tasty, because they would be easy to clean. I guess when I had examined the bulbs in years past, the thought of edibility was not even in the back of my mind. But, when I look at those older pics in my Lilium archive, they do indeed show the very tightly clasped scales. Now, each one of those stem bulblets will have a new growing space, in the interest of culinary testing.
And another bulb that was "in my way" while renovating: a Griesbach tetra seedling. I was very surprised at the huge size of this bulb (5 inch diameter), since the stem only had four flowers (a record for this particular seedling). The pic looks sort of goofy, like it was taken with a wide angle lens, but no. It's actually take with a 120mm equivalent telephoto, so there is no distortion.
I've never been impressed by this one, with so few flowers at 5.5ft, and the colors are not well defined. I thought I would eat some of the bulb to test the edibility of these dark colored bulbs, and cook some more of it after cold storage to see if the bitterness is lessened. But now, when I pull up my records and looked at the flower pics of the plant again, I am kinda having second thoughts....
What do you think?
