esrosedotblog

HOLY POLLINATION!

The carob trees are at it again.

We have a male and a female. It used to be two males and a female. One male died, the other carries on.

The male tree gets all pollinated and the air transmits the pollen to the female who then makes a seed pod which grows and grows and eventually, in the summer, dumps into the yard with about a million other seed pods or beans that other pollens pollenated. This is one mother of a mother.

The thing is that, at any stage, the process is annoying.

At this stage we smell the pollen. A deep musky odor that is unmistakable.

When we walk around the neighborhood we can smell other male carob trees rutting.

A hundred feet away.

The odor is overwhelming. Almost too much to go out in the yard.

I sat out there with a friend this morning and got a stuffed nose and minor headache.

When I was a kid we had barberry bushes and that was the same smell and effect.

The bees are going nuts out there. I don't see the humming birds going for it but I would be surprised if they are not.

After this stinking, pollination phase, I must say, it is rather quiet. Peaceful.

Until the pod/bean teen years, about April, when the baby pods have grown up, turned brown and begin to fall. The beans stop falling just about last week. When the new pollination begins.

There are millions.

"Why have a carob tree"?, you might say.

And I would tell you that these came with the property.

But there is a value. They are quite beautiful. They have dense shade and are very stable in an uncertain desert wind zone. There are not a lot of trees that will prosper here.

But our old mom tree is showing signs of age. She is too big for her roots and it takes more water than we are able to give her to keep all the limbs alive. We prune but not enough.

It won't be long until enough outer limbs die off that it will start a trend and we will have to take her down.

This might take a few years or, perhaps, she will hang on longer. Time will tell. We would not cut her down now. The shade is just too valuable. And there would be a huge empty space out front.

We have wondered why anyone in sound horticultural mind would plant a male next to a female and we are told that there is no way to tell gender when they are young. Some people believe that they morph to the other sex as they approach maturity.

Does that mean that if you planted one alone it would become a hermaphrodite? I don't know.

I haven't mentioned that the carob bean is a very desirable food source. You will know it from your carob treats. In Mexico the tree is used in pastures for horse feed. The beans grow and fall and there are the horses. Voila!

In our house, Franklin is the bean eater. He munches them. Less than he used to. They are very digestible. The literature says that they are nutritionally similar to a small bite of a Mars bar.

I haven't tried it.

Labels: horticulture, life, nature