Today, Friday, December 27, 2019, we had some critical memorable milestones!
- Mark made a new seat for the weight bench
- Swamp baby baby (in the 2019 garage banana patch) put out a flower
- Pip pup air layering success
- New scanner for art
I'm particularly thrilled about the air layering success, as today's identification of the first roots is the critical initial step to creating air layered papaya plants with fruit and leaves at human levels.
Here's the story behind each of the four milestones...
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| After four years of using our olympic weight bench, the seat plywood interior had dissolved from the moisture and humidity. No problem, a new weight bench cost only $149 on Amazon. Here's the new one. |
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| New weight bench.... lovely and not rotten :D |
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| We used the new seat from the new weight bench to create two patterns: a shape pattern and a hole pattern. Then Mark cut out the seat from 3/4" birch plywood. Here's the new seat. Now we just need to add upholstery and a nice vinyl cover, and we'll have two perfect weight benches in use. |
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| This is the old rotten seat with the underside peeled back to release the rotten wood and show the foam. |
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| Swamp King is one of the original 2016 tissue culture cavendish bananas I bought to get this madness going. I harvested the pups from Swamp King in December 2017 - this is one of them, named Swamp Baby Baby. I put Swamp Baby Baby in the ground by the garage within the last nine months. And today - flower! |
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| I think the garage looks beautiful with the bananas in front. |
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| Tada! The flower. |
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| The label from the harvesting of the pup. |
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| Now, on to Pip. A few years ago, two papaya trees sprouted up behind the nursery: Pip (female) and Pop (male). Pip has been incredibly prolific and her fruit is delicious, but she's REALLY tall now plus she's covered with branches. The branches have fruit, but the whole system is overloaded and can't really mature edible fruit until I cut off the excess branches. I've been studying air layer using sphagnum peat moss in a bag over a cut into the arms like Pip has. In September, I launched a bunch of air layering, figuring it wouldn't work since we were going into fall and winter. This is Pip and all of her arms... she has about 8. |
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| A lower view of Pips multiple arms/branches. |
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| The air layering section on Pip, which is essentially just the branches I can reach from the ground. The others are 10' plus up in the trunk. |
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| The air layering is simple. Cut into the branch, wrap plastic filled with moss around the wounded section, and wrap around. Florida takes care of the watering and humidity (this would never have worked in So. Cal!). |
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| And here they are: FIRST ROOTS. They're big, healthy, and meaty. |
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| Another view of the thick roots. |
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| I love that the papaya trees are a habitat. Here's a little tree frog living up high, eating bugs. |
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| Close up of the froggy. |
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| Another happy guest... anole enjoying the papaya habitat. |
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| And finally - my new scanner! I love it - my art will look perfect. |
