Sunday, August 18, 2013

Century Plant Triplets--6th Week Subtle Continued Growth, Gauging Heights

The pixstrip shows the agave triplets pics from April 2 and April 8. At first glance, they don't seem to have changed much. (Click for larger older/newer side-by-side image.) The shot-put-ball-like blooms seem to show the biggest difference.

Gauging heights seeped into this article from curiosity over another set of century plant triplets.

During a Google search for "century plant bloom", I spotted the image, which also included a man and woman, good for providing relative height comparison. I estimated the century plants' height to be about 15 feet, based on approximately three times the height of the couple.

In my Century Plant Triplets--3rd Week Higher Up article, I'd mentioned using the nearby bike route street sign for a dimensional gauge. For my set of triplets, Righty's height looks to be about 20 feet here. (Click to see my image with 10 signs stacked near Righty.)

FWIW, a few weeks ago, when I went to measure the physical sign height to verify that sign's dimensions, I recalled I had to stretch my arm upward to reach the bottom of the sign. My height and arm totals seven feet, give or take an inch.

While I was playing with this pixstrip composition, I noticed that the distance between the two upper wires happened to be about the height of the street sign. Observations about the previous to newer week:
  • Lefty looks to have peaked in vertical growth.
  • Peewee grew about another half a foot.
  • Righty grew about another foot.
  • All three plants' bloom clusters at the end of their "arms" look a bit more robust.
  • Peewee and Righty look to be fistbumping at one spot.
My thoughts of the pic for that day:
Barely sprinkly weather. Very similar to the pic from April 2, but branches spread out a little wider, bloomer clusters a bit bigger.
It's apparent that my thoughts on April 8 were nowhere in the neighborhood of heights like my thoughts today. Running across the century plant triplets that I found online nudged me to infer measurements and methodologies for the two sets of century plant triplets and distance between two wires.

Index to my agave posts, from the time I first spotted the set of triplets in early March to mid-June, about 3 1/2 months.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

2 comments:

pitterjoe said...

weed
In drier climates, the flowers in your garden will need a lot of water. This can be hard to keep up with, expensive and hard on the environment. Xeriscaping is a popular alternative to traditional plants.

whilldtkwriter said...

I've been seeing more and more arid-tolerant landscaping in the last few years. Nice to know the landscaping is appropriate, but a little disturbing to think the long-term trend looks to be desert conditions.