Purple Loosestrife update

Remember when we started our pots of purple loosestrife for the beetle rearing project? On March 20, they looked something like this:

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Not too exciting, are they? Some dirt, some dead sticks, and a little bit of fertilizer.

Well, with a little bit of time and some careful monitoring, the plants took off! Now, a month and a half later on May 2, our plants look like this:

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We have a number of shoots that are already about a foot tall, and as you can see they all look very healthy. Taking almost daily growth measurements of these plants really shows how fast purple loosestrife can grow! They grow more slowly when it's chilly and raining, but a couple weeks ago when it was warm, some plants grew from 3 inches tall to almost 8 inches in just  four days! Can you image if you were able to grow an inch a day?

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As soon as the shoots grow to be a foot tall, we start pinching off the apical meritstem, which is the area of cells at the very top of the shoots. The apical meristem is what causes the plants to grow taller, but we want them to be as bushy as possible to feed our beetles. By pinching off the top bud, we force the plants to grow more leaves along its stem.   The same thing happens to your shrubs or bushes at home! That's part of the reason why we prune them.  If no one pruned their rose bushes, the rose stems would grow very long, there wouldn't be as many leaves, and you wouldn't get as many flowers.

Speaking of the beetles, over-wintered adults have emerged! We found some in the wetlands on Monday, munching away on purple loosestrife leaves. Now we just have to wait until our potted loosestrife plants are tall enough, and then we can start collecting the beetles!