Christopher Weeks

side-topic: Where I live, every county has a GIS land-explorer website where you can look up a parcel and then play with all the layers to learn things about the topography, soil-strata, aerial-picture history, easements, etc. But I know some states make that harder for privacy purposes. If you have something like that and haven't done so already, see what it can tell you.

The yellowjackets have started arguing with us when we go to pick raspberries -- which we need to do every morning for the next two weeks or so. So, I got a hose, and shoved it almost into the mouth of their nearby nest that I know about, and turned it on. Boy-howdy do they not like that! It's been running for about 24 hours now. I went out an hour ago to check on it and there's a fat toad sitting in the streaming cold (~42F/6C) water and eating the bugs the come to it. I coined the name yellowsnackets for the toad.

Maybe goats are a better fit than sheep or cows on that land. Or maybe deer and wild turkey?

Start small. Girdle all the trees (unless one of them feels like a keeper) in a 50x50 area, next year grow runner beans up the small ones. Cut all the trees in a 30' circle and plant two apples and two chestnuts near the center. Whatever of them lives will be awesome in ten years.

Alder Burns wrote:Fun fact....almost any nightshade will graft onto any other!

Yeah, one of my goals here is to step up my invasive horticulture skills by creating multiple long approach-grafts between these pseudolulo and tomato plants to see if I can force organelle transfer across the graft boundary and develop something weird. Anything that was obviously different would be interesting enough to justify the experiment even if it wasn't really desirable.

Stephen B. Thomas wrote:Most of the time, they're under eaves of roofs, or within the folds of a tarp that's bunched-up over a pile of wood or something. Those are the ones I can move while we're in-season and the bugs are active.

Where I live, the ones that create grey, spherical paper nests on branches or eaves -- we call those hornets and they are black and white(ish). The ones that burrow underground are black and yellow and we call them yellowjackets. (I understand that both groups are just different hornets to an entomologist.)

I was wondering how you glued them to a new tree branch after moving. :-)

Stephen, are yours underground? How do you move them?

Oh, that's interesting, Reed! Mine are smaller than I'm used to, but I was assuming it's early and the season and they haven't fattened up -- but I honestly don't know anything about their lifecycle or whether that's reasonable. I had to wait and see one land on a raspberry before I could positively identify them as yellowjackets. And I got a single sting in the raspberry patch two days ago -- I didn't see what got me, but one of these guys flew away from the area right after it happened. I rubbed it with plantain immediately and it stung for an hour, but so little that I question whether it was really a yellowjacket that got me, and only raised a tiny white welt, with no itching to follow. My wife is also allergic (or was before therapy, she's supposed to be immune now, but we haven't tested it) so we take them a little more seriously than we might otherwise.

They definitely get aggressive in the autumn.

This is neat work and a cool old thread! I especially like the variety of forms in this one:


(from https://www.jacindamartinez.com/work/fashion)

It looks like there is a single other mention of this plant on Permies, but search only turns it up if you exclude the genus: https://permies.com/wiki/51209/Breed-Vegetable-Varieties-Carol-Deppe#452605

Also, I've got some germinating but they'll have to adapt to indoor growing conditions...

We're not running a strawberry farm, so yield doesn't really trouble us much. We have two 2x8 beds and we get what we get -- enough to snack on here and there and one good batch of ice cream each summer. We don't really mulch systematically anymore, but we do chop and drop whatever comes up taller than the strawberry plants. Our biggest pest for them is chipmunks and it's the only place in the garden where we use a plastic net over the bed to discourage them, which works well.

I'm also letting a patch of wild strawberry run riot between two young apple trees -- the berries they make are itty bitty but pack big flavor.