Archives for February 2023

Milkweed Rhizomes Are Sprouting

February 28, 2023 by 1 Comment

A week and a half ago, I planted 30 milkweed rhizomes. And I also have 33 milkweed rhizomes that overwintered in large planters. I now have sprouts from both types of rhizomes.

Normally, I don’t see any milkweeds emerge until mid-March. I’m guessing that the unusually warm spring we are experiencing has spurred them to arise earlier than usual. As in previous years, the first sprouts have come from smaller rhizomes and in smaller planters, which I assume have smaller rhizomes than the large planters. The milkweeds from larger rhizomes lag behind the smaller ones, initially. But they catch up and grow larger than them by early in the growing season.

Two milkweeds that sprouted from rhizomes on February 22nd.

I’m always amazed at how quickly milkweeds grow when they sprout from rhizomes. The rhizome is a thickened section of root that stores starch. That starch can be used for rapid growth in the early spring. In the wild this allows the milkweeds to — at least temporarily — be taller than the surrounding plants and thus have access to sunlight. Milkweeds grown some seeds grow more slowly, and need to sprout in a location where they aren’t immediately shaded by other plants. This difference in early growth makes sense because the milkweed seed has far less starch in it than the rhizome.

The same milkweeds as above, one week later.

I’m in USDA Zone 8B, so I would expect that gardeners in Zone 7 should see their milkweeds sprouting soon. Farther north than that, it is hard to predict as the northern part of the country is still in the midst of winter. Journey North — a website devoted to tracking monarchs and other organisms — shows that I am not alone in seeing milkweeds already.

If you have been following this site, you know that I’m growing these milkweeds in order to raise monarch butterflies. I will also need other flowering plants to attract the monarchs. Already, a few native perennials are flowering in or around my garden. These include spiderworts, baby blue eyes, and oxalis. And I already have flower bud on my gaillardia plants. I hope to raise 240 monarch butterflies this year,. And so far — with the emergence of some of the milkweeds — I’m off to a good start.

Spiderwort (left) and oxalis (right). Both are dependable early bloomers.

 

Filed Under: Gardening, Milkweeds and Monarchs

Planting Milkweed Rhizomes

February 18, 2023 by 1 Comment

I planted 30 milkweed rhizomes on Thursday (February 16th), a major step in my 2023 monarch butterfly raising project. Rhizomes are thickened underground stems that store starch for plants. Rhizomes can send down roots and send up stems. In the late fall, all of the above ground foliage on milkweed plants dies. The milkweed rhizomes then overwinter underground. In the spring, they provide the energy for the plant to sprout. Some types of milkweed also spread via their rhizomes. The underground stems grow horizontally and, over the years, the plant will form a clump with many above ground stems. 

In fall of 2022, I had 66 milkweed plants growing in planters of various volumes, from around 25 gallons down to small, 6” planters that only hold about a quart. I decided to leave the rhizomes in “large” planters — which I defined as 3 gallons or larger — in their potting soil. This is what I’ve done most years. 

Left: Milkweed rhizomes wrapped in damp paper towels and stored in a ziplock bag. Right: Milkweed rhizomes unwrapped and ready to be planted.

However, over the winter, I tipped out all of the small planters and fished out the rhizomes. There were 30 such containers. I wrapped the rhizomes in moist paper towels and put them in ziplock bags. The bags were kept in the refrigerator. I have done this successfully a few times in previous years, so I knew it would work. 

The reason I did this was to move the milkweeds to larger planters. Moving them as rhizomes, I believe, is better than waiting for them to sprout and moving them as growing plants. 

Left: Five-gallon planters holding the rhizomes. You can also see some of the 2-gallon planters on the right edge of this photo. Right: Three-gallon planters holding milkweed rhizomes.

The rhizomes themselves ranged in size. I planted the 6 largest in 5-gallon planters. I planted the next 5 largest in 3-gallon planers. The rest went into 2-gallon planters, so some may not have gotten a larger container. Most did, however, as some of my planters were quite small. 

Planting the rhizomes was easy, I just sunk a trowel into the potting soil and pushed some soil aside. I placed the rhizome vertically into the hole created by the trowel and then removed the trowel. If the top of the rhizome was sticking out of the soil, as it usually did, I added a little more potting mix to the top of the planter. 

The temperature inside the refrigerator was around 40 °F. The low temperatures Thursday and Friday night were in the low 30s °F. So the rhizomes got a final couple night’s worth of cold temperatures. Now, they will start to warm as the forecast calls for a lot of days in the 70s–80 °F and nights in the 50–60s °F coming up. If the last 10 years are any indication, the milkweeds should start sprouting in mid-March — right around the time of the average last frost. 

Soon, I will have milkweed plants.

Filed Under: Gardening, Milkweeds and Monarchs Tagged With: , ,

Blending Sour Beers (I)

February 13, 2023 by Leave a Comment

A great sour beer is a thing of beauty. However, there is always an element of luck when brewing a sour beer. Multiple microorganisms in a batch can sometimes act in unusual ways. Additionally, sour beers often change over time, becoming drier and more sour. One way to produce a great sour beer is to brew multiple batches and blend them.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that you can’t save bad beer by blending it with good beer. If you blend two gallons of great beer with one gallon of bad beer, you’ve got three gallons of bad beer. Sour beers may have a funk that can be lessened to the point of being acceptable — particularly in lambic-style sour beers — but if a sour beer is undrinkable, pour it. Aways remember that the goal of a blend is to produce a beer that is better than either of the two (or more) component beers considered individually.

There are no rules to blending beers, no equations to instruct you on how to blend. (There are equations that will help you target a final ABV or characteristic of the beer.) However, there are some strategies that have been tried and generally work well. Looking at how lambic producers blend their sour beers is informative.

Traditional lambic producers have a brewery full of barrels to select from when blending their beers. The traditional blended lambic is a gueuze, made from one, two, and three year old lambics. [If you follow the plan in this article you will have three 5.0-gallon (19-L) buckets of lambic.] One-year-old lambic will still have some carbohydrates not fermented by the microorganisms. As such, it will likely still show a small amount of body and sweetness. It will be the least sour of the three. In contrast, in the three-year-old lambic, the microorganisms will have completely utilized the carbohydrates (or very nearly so). It will be the most dry and acidic. The two-year-old lambic will have a character intermediate between these two.

The simplest blend, and the one that maximizes your volume, is to simply blend the full volume of all three together. This would give you 15 gallon (57 L) of gueuze. However, the best tasting blend is unlikely to be an even blend of three. If you enjoy a very acidic and dry lambic, your blend should be dominated by the third year old lambic. For example, you may want to blend all 5.0 gallons (19 L) of the three year old lambic with 2.5 gallons (9.4 L) of the two year old lambic and only a little over 1.0 gallon (3.8 L) of the young lambic. This would yield between 8.5 and 9.0 gallons (32–34 L) of gueuze. The leftover lambic could be used for fruit lambics or racked to a carboy and stored for future use in other blends. (If you do this, make sure there is as little headspace in the carboy as possible.)

For a mellower lambic, you may want to blend all of the two-year-old lambic with smaller amounts of the young lambic and enough three-year-old lambic to hit your preferred level of acidity. You can take samples and make test mixes to determine your favorite blend. The level of funk in each of three beers may also lead you to change their proportions. Although you have a wide variety of options, a gueuze blend should never be dominated by the young lambic. It will not be sour enough and it will age unpredictably in the bottles.

Once blended, the gueuze should sit for about a year in bottles (or kegs) before it is consumed. Gueuze is traditionally bottle conditioned, with enough added sugar to highly carbonate the beer. It is almost as highly carbonated as Champagne. Given that your blend will include some young lambic, carbonation can be tricky as you will not know how much unfermented carbohydrates are in your blend. You may want to hedge your bets a bit and add a little less sugar for priming than you need to hit your target CO2 level. Or, you can simply be aware of the possibility of over carbonation and drink the beer soon.

In an upcoming article, I’ll discuss sour beers other than lambics and explain the nuts of bolts aspects of blending.

Filed Under: Beer, Homebrewing Tagged With: , , ,

My 2023 Monarch Raising Project (III: Disease)

February 1, 2023 by 1 Comment

[During the spring of this year, I hope to raise and release 240 monarchs. This is the third post in a series about my monarch butterfly raising project. The first post in this series dealt with growing milkweeds, the host plants for the monarch butterfly. The second post dealt with native flowers to attract the butterflies. This post is about dealing with the possibility of disease.]

In order to raise and release 240 monarchs butterflies, I will need to grow a large amount of milkweed in a fairly small space. I will also have too rear the butterflies in close quarters inside my butterfly enclosures. Anytime any species is found at a high density, the possibility for a disease to spread through the population is present. 

In order to minimize the possibility of a disease outbreak, I will need to do two things — monitor the plant and butterfly populations for diseased individuals and isolate them. It would be great if I could prevent all of the diseases that affect milkweeds or monarchs from arriving, but that isn’t possible. Insects arriving in the garden bring many diseases. Spraying insecticide to kill these insects is not an option because that would also kill the monarchs. Likewise, netting the plants would keep insects off them, but that would include the monarchs. So, I can’t prevent the arrival of insect-borne diseases. With that being the case, I need a plan to deal with insect-borne diseases, should any arrive. I can prevent fungal diseases by avoiding overhead watering and pruning the plants to increase airflow around them, if needed. 

One piece of good news is that I’ve never had a problem before. By the end of every season, my milkweeds are infested with milkweed aphids and milkweed bugs. And sometimes, their leaves get a bit mottled (suggesting some sort of disease). However, every spring the milkweed returns and is healthy. I’ve also never detected any problems with disease among the monarchs. I’ve had tachnid fly infestations, but I deal with that by raising the caterpillars in netted enclosures. 

My plan for dealing with disease is to monitor the plants and the butterflies (larvae and adults) for potential problems. If I detect a problem, I will isolate (or destroy) the diseased individuals. If a plant looks ill, I can simply remove it from the garden — hopefully before whatever it had spreads to other nearby plants. Likewise, if I see a caterpillar that looks ill, I can remove it from its enclosure and not add any new monarchs to that enclosure. I have several, so I can rotate through them and sanitize used enclosures before using them again. 

To make disease less able to spread quickly, I will also physically spread out my milkweed plants as best I can. This may not help much if an insect-borne disease arrives, as insects could easily fly from one side of my yard to the other. But it will help with any disease which spreads faster with physical proximity. I will also raise the monarch caterpillars in as many different enclosures as is feasible. That way, if an individual becomes diseased, the disease could only be spread within its enclosure — which could be sanitized before being used again. 

Other than tachnid flies, one of the biggest threats to monarchs is the protozoan Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (often simply referred to as OE). Given the seriousness of OE, I’ll devote an entire post to how I will deal with this, should it arrive in my garden. One of the major things gardeners can do to avoid an OE infestation is not grow non-native milkweed. All of my plants are natives, so that’s not a problem. But, the disease is still worthy of serious consideration. 

At the time I am posting this, it is about 5 weeks away from the milkweeds sprouting and maybe 6 or 7 weeks from the monarchs arriving at my garden in central Texas. I have a lot of milkweed seed cold conditioning (stratifying) right now and I also have several milkweed rhizomes in my refrigerator. These are in addition to the milkweeds in my container garden planters. Things should start heating up in early March. If you’re interested, I hope you follow me on my quest to 240.

Filed Under: Gardening, Milkweeds and Monarchs Tagged With: , , ,