UC Gardening Blogs
It’s Fire Blight Season!
If you are noticing droopy, dried-out flower clusters on your pears, Asian pears, quince, apples or...
Rose Garden Corral - May 2024
In the Master Gardener's Rose Cycle, May is when we fertilize with organic products, start...
Scotch Bonnet Jean
When I first married into my husband's family, I was new to the Capsicum chinense family, but I thought I knew to what Scotch Bonnet was. A “Yank,” in a family ofyardies. For years I would buy Scotch Bonnet plants, and for years, brother-in-law would say “no.”
I did not know of “landraces,” that there were red and yellow Scotch bonnets, I did not know there were named cultivars. Since then, I have learned C. Capsicum can be a bit promiscuous, and as my father-in-law might say, may do some “mingling.”
One year, my mother-in-law harvested and gave me a pepper. We talked about its shape, its size, its color, not just the heat but the flavor, and especially the fragrance.
That year I scraped out the seeds, let the seeds dry, and saved them for the next season. I sprouted it, potted it up, and grew it on. I grow a lot of peppers, and understood it might have “mingled,” but I was excited to see the next generation.
What a beautiful plant! What amazing peppers! I over-wintered that plant through freezes, floods, triple digits, and wildfires. Some years I was not sure it would come back. Especially last year.
But it did!Phew! That was close. But I was not taking chances. I saved seed and grew another generation.
Scotch Bonnet OG 2
An Incredible Salute to Entomologist Lynn Kimsey
When a noted entomologist retires, what do you do? Give them a 21-insect net salute. That's what...
UC Davis distinguished professor emerita Lynn Kimsey walks under the archway of a 21-insect net salute. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Back in 1986, Professor Richard "Doc" Bohart was given a 21-insect net salute when the museum he founded became "The Bohart Museum of Entomology." Lynn Kimsey, then a postdoctoral fellow, is in the left foreground.
Noted entomologist Richard "Doc" Bohart walks beneath the archway of a 21-insect net salute in this 1986 image. The museum he founded in 1946 was dedicated to him in 1986.
USC Biologist on 'Trends of Bee Biodiversity in North America'
Bee biodiversity? It promises to be an interesting seminar. Assistant professor Laura...
A yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, sipping nectar from an Amethyst Sea Holly, Eryngium amethystinum, in Sonoma. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)