the mellow tigger's musings

I spent about half an hour today on the back door steps, slowly pulling prickly spines out of a t-shirt that I wore a few days ago when I went on a gardening spree, cutting down some vines that were choking off some trees. It seemed like everywhere those vines touched me, I ended up with painful tiny spines sticking in my skin and shirt. I think I salvaged it well enough that I won't have to throw away an otherwise good t-shirt.

According to the Pl@ntNet app, the only likely candidate for it is Sicyos angulatus. A common name for it is "oneseed bur cucumber". I agree that "bur" is the right word to use here.

Next year, I'll try to cull them a lot sooner, before they choke the small apple or weeping mulberry tree, before they grow flower buds that are dangerous to mammals like me. Here's a picture from my back yard today. As always, click to embiggen. Zoom in close enough on that cluster of buds, and you can feel the hurt. Their one saving grace is that they don't have hooks that I can tell. They are mostly just straight spines, but those spines break off very easily from the plant, embedding in skin and clothes at the slightest touch.

Considering how quickly the CO2 level increases in my house, now that I have convenient CO2 monitors to measure it, I began wondering why it changed so fast when I have plenty of houseplants at the windows downstairs. Sure, not all of them get direct sunlight, so they're not at peak efficiency, but why don't they make more of a dent in the carbon dioxide buildup?

That question led me to this recent YouTube video. It poses the question, "How many plants do you need to breathe?" The channel's author then builds an airtight room to test that question. The video is about half an hour long, and you could skip to the end for more of an "answer" (there's not an exact answer yet), but the journey is educational and worth the time to view it.

Basically, I wouldn't be able to grow enough plants to meet my own personal needs. It's a very disappointing answer, far from what we thought NASA said. It might be possible, though, to redesign houses with some kind of bioreactor that could do a fair job of scrubbing the air for a single person. It really calls attention to how much biosphere we need as a species. We should definitely do more to protect the forests (trees) and oceans (algae) that allow us to continue living here.

After work today, I spent an hour in the back yard digging out some crown vetch and cup plants that had completely overshadowed this plant (pictured at right) and the blueberries. The purple is not as sharp this year as that photo from 2022. I mentioned then that I think this plant is Heliopsis. I still can't find any record of when/where I bought it, but I remember for certain that I dug that hole and planted it intentionally.

When I check on the PlantNet with separate photos of the flowers and the leaves, it gives only about a 70% confidence in its identification of Heliopsis helianthoides. I searched in google images for a while, and the nearest match that I can make is Heliopsis helianthoides, variety "Burning Hearts", as pictured in these photos.

Does anyone have a better guess?

I'm happy to report that even though the transplanted blueberries were even more deeply overshadowed than these plants, one of the blueberries somehow managed to produce 2 whole fruits. Not much, but so much more than I expected for their condition this summer. Good on them for enduring my neglect while I painted the house instead.

I'm also happy to report that after getting the neighbor's tree limb cut down last year (which was hanging far over my yard, bending down on my electricity and fiber optic internet cable, and letting squirrels run onto my roof) that one of the bayberry plants has really shot up now that it's getting full sun for most of the day. I don't know if it's female. I still haven't seen blooms or fruit on any of them. I really do want to someday make my own bayberry candle at home.