X-pot report, 2015

[blueadzuki]

Well, time for the first thread of the annual report on the X-pot (the pot I set aside each year for planting some of my found seeds I literally cannot identify to see if seeing the plant gives me a clue)

This year maybe a dozen or so of the sowed seeds have come up, as well as five or six sprouts of sprat barley (the sprat originally had the pot, but when it had not come up for several months I assumed the birds had eaten all the seed and planted over them. It then turned out that 1. the birds had missed a half dozen or so and 2. sprat barley just takes WAY longer to germinate than regular vulgare. And at last one of those plants has reached the point where it has flowers





Unlike a lot of the plants I now DO have a guess as to what this might be. It certainly isn't our species, but I think this may be some sort of relation to the field weed/wildflower known as Bladder Campion. In other words, that it is some sort of Silene . The petals are the wrong color (it's a little washed out in the photo (bad lighting) but they are pink, not white) and possibly the wrong number (most don't have very good protrusion, but based on the most symmetrical, it looks like the petal number is four, not five. but since they are all a bit messed up, maybe they are five with very bad expression) but the general layout, flowers on the tip of a massive calx etc. do argue for being somewhere in the pink/carnation family.

[kyredneck]

Ohhhhhhh, 'A' pot, not a landrace pot.

[blueadzuki]

Well, I'm dealing with a small amount of seed, a pot's really all I usually need. Plus since I have no clue what any of them are, and they all came to me as things I found in other things, I work under the assumption that any of them could potentially be truly noxious weeds, and those are a heck of a lot easier to control when pot bound (old rule of thumb, "never put into the ground that which you are not sure you can get out of the ground if you have to." or "don't plant what you can't kill")

but if you are asking if it's and ordinal thing (if there was an "A" pot, a "B" pot, etc.) then no. It's the X pot in the old scientific sence of using "X" to denote an unknown factor, as in X-ray (so called because the guy who discovered it didn't know how it worked) The box I store the seed in is my X-box (before that they were a series of glass screw tops containers I called "The X vials".). Last year, when I had two of them, they were X1 and X2 (I had so much of one thing I decided it needed a pot of it's own.

[steev]

I've yet to find anything to plant that I can't kill; this year, it was many grains; yes, I am a cereal killer. Bwaaaah, ha, ha!

[blueadzuki]

More flowers have opened, including one that is perfect, and it turns out they DO have 5 petals then.

Oh and one of the other plants near it is budding. Not the same thing (there was only one seed that looked like that, but based on the shape, probably closely related.)

[blueadzuki]

Turns out the other two are EXACTLY he same thing, so I can give a better flower picture

[ferdzy]

Pretty! Looks like a member of the silene family, but I couldn't say which.

[blueadzuki]

I doubt it' going to turn out to be one any of us are familiar with. Random seed found in a bag that was grown outside this country (and I can't even remember which bag, and so have no which country) That means you are dealing with a pool of nearly every member of the family on Earth. That's probably thousands of possible candidates, if not tens of thousands. I suspect that the first chance I have a chance to find out will be the day when I have grown enough that can sacrifice one in flower, press it, mount it, and send it off to the ag-extension (and hope I don't wind up in legal trouble for growing potential weeds.)

I just did a little web searching. There are species of Campion with pink flowers (quite a lot, really. Red flowered ones, too) but this doesn't seem to be any of those. Like White campion, those are all pubescent; this is glabrous to glaucous (it's a bit hard to see, but while the flowers look like a Silene, the leaves actually look more like another member of the family, the carnation.)

[steev]

Does it smell like carnation?

[blueadzuki]

The top of the biggest plant and one of the smaller finally snapped off under it's own weight, so I decided it was time to collect the seed (the stem's been yellowing for weeks). Got a goodly amount nearly all fully ripe . Though that is actually another mark for it being a near silene, not a true silene. The seed is enormous and nearly spherical (it looks a lot like mustard seed) while campion seed is usually smaller and reniform (kidney shaped). I also don't think the pods had that mechasim to open at the top (the pods themselves were still green, so I can't be sure. If the last ome stays upright, I'll try and let it dry all the way to find out.)