RE: Tall Tales.....

There seems to be a genetic component to the tall leaves. I've always had
short leaves (which leads me to think that it's cultural), but this year one
plant has extremely tall (for me, anyway) leaves - the 1005 Mombert.

Strangely, the wind (which toppled many of my sunflowers yesterday...)
has not affected this plant much. It is also very dense. I avoided a lot of
pruning early on so as to help the plant in hopes of combating the wind.
But my other plants received the same treatment, and yet still have short
stems.

Regards, Cliff

http://idahopumpkin.tripod.com


From: vince <anaid_tecuod@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: pumpkins@hort.net
To: pumpkins@hort.net
Subject: Tall Tales.....
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 10:32:56 -0700 (PDT)

I don't like tall leaf stems.  They are a problem - making
leaves more vulnerable to wind damage and sucking energy from
the plant to elevate themselves in the world.  My 1230 Daletas
plant last year had short stems and the leaves survived the
buffeting by the wind much better than my taller plant.

I think the leaves that do the tall stem thing are sun seekers
- that try to one-up their neighbors to pig out on borrowed
rays.  So extra tall leaves probably mean that your vines are
too close together and the leaves are crowding each other....

This year I was meaning to address this problem by spacing my
vines farther apart.  So I hacked and whacked secondaries with
great resolve. I figured that if you have 24" leaves - the
vines should be spaced 24" apart...

Then I noticed that my leaves this year were as tall as ever -
taller than some of my tales...  Medusa (1230 Daletas) is
particularly tall.  How Tall?? I don't know.  I do know that I
just put 12" extenders on the three-foot risers of my watering
system and some leaves are already threatening to overtake
them.

I measured the leaf diameters of the leaves on the first
secondary on Medusa and found the problem.  The largest leaf is
34" in diameter! This leaf alone covers over 6 square feet!!!
The two next to it are 33" in diameter.  In fact, every leaf on
this vine is over 30" in diameter.  That's Medusa for you - big
leaves... bigger attitude.

So my vine spacing is off again... No surprise.  AG's don't
particularly like to cooperate with their growers and generally
pull off stunts like this to harass those poor fools who think
they can tame them.....

But my other plant, Little Lilu (1048 Companion), that's
another story. The perfect plant... Absolute Perfection. She'll
do almost anything I ask - she gave me 30 pounds last night -
something I've been begging her for... She surely doesn't like
me posting her weight on the web. But, she graciously tolerates
my enthusiasm because she's the perfect little lady....

http://zunino.net/diana/chronicles/of_lilu.htm

vince
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