2015 Krigia Project

On the day before Christmas, while the other family members were secreted away wrapping gifts, I took a trip to check on the progress of Potato Dandelion, Krigia dandelion, tubers planted out during August.  Many tubers were planted in this woodland site that mimics the original site of Krigia dandelion on the property.  As with the other woodland site, leaves completely covered the woodland floor.

Beneath the leaves were young Krigia sprouts.  Most of these plants displayed abnormally elongated growth resulting from their effort to find a way through the leaves to reach sunlight.  This growth pattern is typical of woodland grown plants.  Plants eventually find their way through the leaf cover, but rarely have an enough stored energy left to produce a flower.  The plants are able to survive and even generate new tubers, but spring blooms are unusual.

Knowing that Potato Dandelions have a tough time growing beneath the leaf cover or competing with other vegetation, I planted tubers in some barren areas bordering the woodland.  These sites generally have bare soil showing throughout the year.

The plants are doing quite well in this barren environment.  South facing slopes and a lack of ground cover allow these plants to receive an abundance of sunlight.  No leggy growth here.  Plants are forming tight whorls and the leaves are developing lobes, both signs that these plants will flower in the spring.  Several references refer to Krigia dandelion growing in prairies, rocky glades and woodland borders, so this may be the ideal location for this plant.  The unknown factor is the heat tolerance of the dormant tubers.  Temperature monitors set at a depth of two centimeters, have recorded summer soil temperatures as high as 125°F on these sites.  The majority of tubers that I have uncovered have been at or just below that level.  I guess I’ll have to wait until next fall to see how many plants make it through the summer.

Mild, wet weather has allowed the container grown Potato Dandelions to demonstrate some amazing growth.  Plants have nearly filled the pot.

Large plants have grown from the tubers planted in August.  I planted nine tubers in this pot.  You can almost identify the nine locations in the previous photo.

New growth includes a plethora of subterranean rhizomes that are responsible for the emergence of these smaller plants.  These young plants are unlikely to produce flowers in the coming year, but they will leave behind tubers that can give rise to flowering plants the following season.  This pot should yield hundreds of tubers next summer.

The plants are showing no signs of developing flower buds.  I am assuming that flower development is governed by photoperiod and that lengthening of daylight periods next April will trigger the creation of flower buds.  This species is roughly at its northern limits at Blue Jay Barrens.  The weather we have experienced so far this year is probably more typical of what the species encounters in its more southern haunts.  There’s still plenty of time for cold weather to appear though.   I’m sure I’ll have an opportunity to watch this plant endure some rapid temperature fluctuations over the next couple of months.

Potato Dandelion Harvest and Redistribution

My container grown Potato Dandelions, Krigia dandelion, yielded a record crop of tubers this year.  The half pound of tubers contained in this cereal bowl all came from a pot with an eight inch inside diameter.  My calculations estimated six tubers produced for every square inch of soil surface.

Total harvest for the year was 1.2 pounds of tubers.  I calculated that the average tuber weight was 0.78 grams.  That means there were about 700 tubers produced this year.

Tuber size ranged from about one inch down to one tenth of an inch.  The larger tubers will sprout multiple shoots next spring, while the smaller will yield only one shoot each.

Into the eight inch pot, I planted five large tubers and four small.  This equals what I put into the pot last August, and that multiplied into nearly 300 in the course of a single growing season.  I hope these do as well.

I’ve dedicated a couple more containers to Potato Dandelion production.  This pot has a 23 inch inside diameter, giving it eight times the growing room of the smaller pot.  That means it has the potential of producing nearly four pounds of tubers.  I would find that truly remarkable.

As I did last year, I planted the extra tubers into suitable locations in the woods.   Since I had more tubers to work with than I had anticipated, I planted about half of the tubers in areas away from the planned ridge top.  I moved down the hill and began planting at the edge of the tree line just above the barrens openings.  I made scattered plantings from there on up to the ridge top.

I chose planting sites that had friable soil, had little competing plant growth, were away from major animal pathways, and had a high probability of receiving plenty of early spring sunlight.

Once a site was selected, I cleared away the surface litter in a 10-12 inch long swath across the slope.

I then used the pointed end of an old two prong weeding hoe to dig twin grooves about 2 inches deep.  Into the grooves I planted 16 to 20 tubers.  For those who might misconstrue the condition of the tool as a sign of neglect on my part, be advised that I found the hoe half buried in the yard about a year after we moved here.  A thick layer of concrete on the head and lower portion of the handle suggested that the tool had been used for mixing concrete prior to its disposal.  The tool is in much better shape now than it was the day I found it.

Next, I returned the removed soil and firmed it into place.

Finally, I replaced the original surface litter.  You can’t even tell that anything had been done here.

In the vicinity of the plants that performed so well after last year’s tuber planting, I planted three small blocks of tubers.  These blocks were located near easily identifiable features that will make it easy for me to monitor their progress.  Hopefully, next spring will begin with Potato Dandelion flowers scattered through the woods.

Blooming Season Potato Dandelions - Three Days Later

It seemed likely to me that the Potato Dandelion flower buds seen a few days ago would be open today, so I made a trip into the woods to check.  I was suitably impressed by what I found.  All but one of the buds had opened.  On my previous visit to this site, the plant in the foreground of the above photo had three stalks topped by buds.  This morning there were two stalks with flowers.  The third stalk had disappeared completely.  I’m hoping the predator that removed that stalk has had its fill of Potato Dandelions.

The yellow bloom atop the tall stalk made it easy to find the plants.  I even found another cluster of plants that I hadn’t noticed before.

The ground wasn’t quite as bare around the new found cluster.  The leaf litter was only about one leaf thick though, so the plants had no trouble thrusting their leaves into the light.

I went down to the other end of the ridge to check on the original Potato Dandelion site.  This section of woods suffered a lot of damage from grazing cattle, and things are struggling to recover from that negative impact.  The cattle have been gone for over 30 years, but the Whitetail Deer are doing their best to take up where the cattle left off.  The deer have left a well developed browse line through the entire woods and are changing the composition of the forest understory with their overbrowsing of preferred food plants.

I was pleased to find blooming Potato Dandelions at the original site.  Four out of five years will find zero plants blooming here.  I noticed that the long term snow pack that existed in the woods this past winter had significantly compressed the leaf litter.  This may have made it easier for the plants to get their leaves out into the sunlight.

Whatever the reason, I counted 11 flowers at the time of my visit.  The only time this site has come near this number of blooming plants is when I’ve physically removed the leaf litter prior to the emergence of the plants.  It will be interesting to see if any of these flowers produce viable seeds.

This is how the plants look during a normal year.  Plenty of elongated leaves fall limply across the leaf litter like they were subjects in a Salvador Dali painting.

It looks like the flower count is destined to increase.  I found many plants that were just beginning to send up flower stalks.  When you are used to most years passing without a single Potato Dandelion flower, a year with an extended blooming season could prove to be quite overwhelming.

Blooming Season Potato Dandelions

Sunlight is a key factor in determining whether or not a Potato Dandelion, Krigia dandelion, will bloom.  Woodland populations receive much of their sunlight prior to emergence of leaves on the deciduous trees.  Even in mid-May, the tree leaves have not developed enough to completely block the sun.

Fallen leaves from previous years can also keep sunlight from reaching the developing plants.  Those plants that must push their way up through the leaf litter rarely bloom.  That’s one reason why I transplanted Krigia tubers into areas of sparse leaf litter.  Strong winds pushing over the ridge tops consistently push leaves away from certain areas.  It’s in these areas that the Potato Dandelions should prosper.  I should they could thrive if animals stopped eating them.  In this grouping of four plants, all have suffered some degree of damage from hungry plant predators.

This is the most common condition.  Leaves and flower stalks severely trimmed back.

This specimen lost nothing but a flower bud.  Since the flowers rarely produce any viable seed at Blue Jay Barrens, the loss of the flower does no harm to the plant.  As long as the plant is healthy, the roots will produce a nice collection of new tubers.

When I planted Potato Dandelion tubers into this location last summer, I placed them in groups of three or four.  This set of three plants represents the most successful grouping I could find this week.  All three have managed to grow without any predation.

The tuber planted here must have had exceptional vigor to produce three flower stalks.  The tubers produced from these three plants could easily result in 30 to 40 plants on this spot next year.

Judging by the amount of leaves being produced, the container bound Potato Dandelions are going to provide me with plenty of tubers to transplant to the woods later this summer.  These plants were caged a few weeks ago after some browsing animal ate all of the leaves.  The damage occurred prior to the development of flower buds, so there was no reduction in the number of blooms produced.

The original source of tubers for my container grown specimens was the ridgetop woodland at Blue Jay Barrens where the plants were found to be naturally growing.  By transplanting container grown tubers onto that same woodland ridge, I hope to expand the size of the population as insurance against some disaster destroying the original population.  I manage the plants and animals found naturally at Blue Jay Barrens and have made it a strict policy to not introduce any species from outside the property boundaries.  With luck, someday I’ll have clumps of these little beauties enhancing the entire 1500 feet of the ridge instead of just the current 100 feet.

Mid-Season Potato Dandelions

The container grown Potato Dandelions, Krigia dandelion, are growing so rapidly that their image changes daily.  As long as I employ methods to exclude predators from the container, the plants flourish.  The abundance of leaves provides energy for the production of flowers and underground tubers.  A single plant may produce a dozen or more tubers during the spring growing season.  At this rate of reproduction, it doesn’t take long to build up a large population.

I thought this would be a good time to check on the progress of Potato Dandelion plants growing from tubers planted last fall into this ridgetop site.  This most closely matches the site of the original Blue Jay Barrens population of the rare Potato Dandelion.

A combination of wind and rainfall runoff patterns create patches of bare ground in this area.  Plants growing in these bare spots receive enough sunlight to stimulate production of flowers.

Some of the plants are looking quite healthy.  All of this growth has arisen from a single bean sized tuber.

Other plants have suffered damage from foraging Wild Turkeys.  Turkeys also create patches of bare ground, but at a cost to the plants.

I originally planted some tubers at the base of this cedar.  Turkeys chose this location as a place to take dust baths, and created two large wallows.  What once looked similar to the area in the right foreground, is now devoid of plants.

Potato Dandelions at the original site struggle to put their leaves up through the leaf litter.

The extra effort necessary to push leaves up through the leaf litter is enough to cause these plants to fail to flower.  I will occasionally clear the fallen leaves from a small area and allow the plants to produce flowers.  It’s nice to see the plants bloom, but since the flowers don’t seem to produce any viable seed, the activity give little benefit to the population as a whole.  The non-flowering plants still produce many new tubers, so the population continues to expand.

There may be other populations of the plant at Blue Jay Barrens, but there is only a narrow window in the spring when the plants are easy to see and finding them is complicated by the presence of the White Trout Lily, Erythronium albidum.

White Trout Lily is probably the most abundant woodland spring flower growing in the uplands at Blue Jay Barrens.  The shape and color pattern of the young Trout Lily leaf is remarkably similar to that of the Potato Dandelion.  That’s the Trout Lily on the right.  With hundreds of Trout Lily leaves in view at any one time, it’s easy to see how a random Potato Dandelion leaf could escape notice.

As long as my container grown plants continue to produce plenty of tubers, I will transplant the excess into suitable locations.  It doesn’t look like I’m in danger of having a shortage.

Potato Dandelion Transplants

I was in the woods yesterday and decided to go by and check on the Potato Dandelion, Krigia dandelion, tubers that I transplanted last August.  At least a few of the tubers survived and have developed clusters of leaves.

Cold weather causes the leaves to blush a bright lavender.  When temperatures begin to moderate, green blotches will develop that give the leaves a pattern similar to early Trout Lily leaves.  I think this coloration causes the plants to be overlooked by the casual observer.

I planted over 50 tubers along this ridgetop, but only found a small number of plants yesterday.  The bare ground chosen to receive the tubers in August has since been covered by fallen leaves.  By late April the Krigia plants will have developed enough for the leaves to be easily seen above the forest leaf litter.

In addition to planting tubers in the woods, I introduced a few into a new container.  These plants are growing in a 22 inch diameter container that had been filled with recycled potting soil.  First growth appeared in late September.  Growth was rapid until the sub-freezing weather arrived.

Leaves show signs of stress from exposure to cold, dry air.  Each warm spell allows the plant to increase the size of the youngest leaves emerging from the center of the rosette.

This is the seven inch diameter pot that housed the stray Potato Dandelions found growing in the burned shed site last April.  After sifting out the large tubers last August, I returned the soil to the pot.  There were enough small tubers left in the soil to produce this growth.

A few drops of water, left by the rain a few days ago, remain frozen on the leaves.  I’ve seen these plants receive much worse damage than this and still recover with the return of warm weather.  So much about this species suggests that it should thrive in this area, but it still remains a rarity in Ohio.

This 18 inch diameter container has been producing Potato Dandelions for many years.  Somehow, this pot has become contaminated with Chickweed.  After harvesting the tubers in August, I’ll add a couple inches of fresh soil to this container.  That should reduce the possibility of Chickweed next year.

Leaf damage is not quite as bad in this container, even though there are still ice crystals sitting on the leaves.

Most of the plants show minimal damage.  All three pots are situated in different locations and this pot was in a position that allowed snow blowing from the barn roof to cover most of the plants.  The snow protected the leaves from the dry air, which seems to be the major cause of leaf damage.  I hope to have an abundance of tubers for transplanting next summer.  Given time, I should be able to find other suitable locations in which this plant can thrive at Blue Jay Barrens.