greg mosser

too bad! did it used to have a graphic of crazy colored bacteria? i just had a dig-around there and it looks like i was trying to be semi-active there some 12 years ago. have been admittedly forgetting about it long enough that i hadn’t connected your name from there, christopher!

the case would be fine on a pruned branch, too! i’ve propped pruned bits with mantis cases back up in the tree a few times. they’ll hatch anyway!

pretty sure it’s a praying mantis egg case from last year. as in, hatched out already last year.

freshly laid mantis egg cases are much smoother on the outer edges, ‘cause it’s basically extruded foam.

yep. vinyl, cassettes, cds, and also streaming. lots of full albums and sometimes individual songs or playlists. not going to try to list artists or even genres as we are a musical polyglot family and there are just too many ways to go…but options include afrobeat, sludge metal, folk, soul, and homemade experimental stuff, just for a taste.

winter/early spring pruning definitely encourages new growth - but you can counteract that by following up with some thinning during a june prune, which does the opposite. you probably do want more airflow in that tree.

m111 makes an almost-standard size tree, maybe 25 feet tall, if you let it.  i’m not entirely clear how one would prune for natural shape, especially when starting at so young. i might be tempted to give a few years between prunings while it’s little.

aside from that, if it was me, i’d probably weight or spread the side prongs on such ‘forks’ down into horizontal fruiting branches in places where they’re far enough away from fruiting branches below. though i’m not sure if that would be considered a natural shape.

will respond via pm!

hi! i assume they would, but might need supplemental water if you get long dry summers. i’ll get back to you about shipping via pm.

right now 3 varietals, though most likely we’ll add one or two more every year. lots of multiflora on the property - i may start playing around with grafting varieties onto multiflora this spring.

one of wife’s favorites right now is the single yellow english rose called ‘tottering by gently’…maybe slightly more for its name than anything else, though the flower is quite nice. an aspirational name?

i’m part of a nut orchard group. we got chestnut seed from a former president of the northern nut growers association, who was at the time three generations in on a big open-pollinated chestnut breeding project that included all 7 of the world chestnut species. each time he started a new orchard he would take seed from his favorite trees in the previous orchard. he was mainly going for trees that conform to a more chinese/korean tree shape (the easier for dealing with in an orchard setting) but he also selected a number of ‘timber-type’ trees that act much more like an american chestnut. definitely not pure genetics, but totally blight resistant and really nice to see such tall chestnuts doing their thing!

we were expecting some of the first nuts from our chestnuts (and the ones we have at home too) last year, but the brood XIV cicadas really knocked them back pretty hard. soon!

also a fan of bernd’s books!