indoor colony

on 20 december 2020 i found this native berry plant with a battered bloom...still relentlessly trying to reproduce in the unseasonable warmth that month...

so i brought it in and palced it in the basement uner the lights...

and a couple of weeks into its stay it was verdant and growing robustly...

i discovered a flower bud on both the sixteenth and seventeenth of this month...

by the twenty-second and twenty-third respectively they had bloomed...

on the twenty-fourth i discovered a third bud which had begun to bloom by yesterday...

and today it is well on its way to being fully open...

i pollinated the first two with a cotton swab ( and made a stab at the third ) and the calyces are beginning to close around the red tinged blooms...we may have berries in a bit...we will be keeping an eye on it over the coming days...

not content to rely on the single mechanism of seed, the plants have begun to produce stolons as well as they work to establish daughter plants...ther will be a colony soon enough...one way or another.

cycles-27 april to 2 june

late april, eaely may and the plants bloom...

as the blooms are pollinated the petals fall off...

and the calyces begin to close around the embryo...

as the berry develops the calyces retract...

and a berry matures.

don't get too comfortable, time's passing by you know

the new york imports have been green all winter...however in the past two weeks they have turned up the volume and are wasting no time...blooms everywhere you care to look in the beds...

and in those two weeks blooms have opened...been pollinated...lost their petals...and the calyces have begun to close around the ovary in the first step towards berryhood...plant reproductive behaviors are no monochromatic however...

we aren't just talking blooms and berries here...we have stolons all over the beds as well...including this one that is plotting an escape from the bed altogether...joining the daughters that escaped last season around the perimeter of the bed...more as this berries continues to ripen.

rain

2.2. inches or rain has fallen here in the past three days...heavily at times...

and some of the blooms have been suffering for it...

while others have come though without a scratch...

there are clusters of unopened berries-to-be across the beds so i am thinking the rain poses no existential threat to the berries...they are spring bloomers...they are accustomed to rain...

i have begun to photograph four specific blooms in a bed in an effort to accomplish what the name of this blog infers...chronicling the process of a bloom becoming a berry...we will see how this works out...a lot depends on the blooms in this...i'm just watching...so far they are still blooms...changes as they arise.

buds and blooms proliferate

two of the three beds of strawberries have come to life with blooms and buds...earlier than i expected...then again it has been a busy year in between season and the start date from 2019 may have escaped my memory...the native berries shod be blooming next month and, unlike these, will bloom and bear fruit into october.