Anna Hutchins

I went shopping for cherries and a microphone stand today.

Bought a bing. Bought a boom.

Timothy Norton wrote:

I also have recently received a chainmail scrubber for my cast iron and it works amazingly on my pans, especially when things get accidently burnt.

I'm coming back to say that I did buy a chain mail scrubber and it does work great.

Also in other news, I still have not managed to get a thick season on this pan. But I use it for things that don't need to come off perfectly so that's fine. The weirdest thing I've had happen with this pan is as follows.   I saw a cooking tip on a YouTube video claiming that baking soda makes meat (and veggies) brown better because of the change in pH. Well I wanted to try it of course.  I think it instantly removed the seasoning from my cast iron because the onions that I was cooking suddenly turned bright yellow!  I wish I'd been smart enough to take a picture! The only thing I can figure is that it took like years of embedded color from various curries off. So avoid super high pH as well as low ph I guess!

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:I bought orach from experimental farm network. This is my second year of growing it. I left some bare ground where I let themself seed. But oddly, I have no seedlings this year. What I DO have is what appears to be growth from last year's roots. First pics from April 11. Second set, today. Anyone else have what appears to be perennial orach? Maybe it a short lived one?

Joylynn, I'm almost positive that that is a hardy hibiscus of some kind, especially with that big bloom. Those are perennials and they can sometimes come up from seed.

Another possibility to consider: we had an extremely strange spring here in the midwest. We got into the high 80s in March and then it got down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit and that outright killed a lot of things like my honeyberries. If the autumn olives broke dormancy earlier than the other trees and you had a sudden temperature swing maybe it only affected the autumn olives.  Again I don't know what your spring was like.  I'm just guessing since I know how weird ours was.

While it's hard to know for sure what happened, I've seen Japanese maples (and other plants) show similar damage if they get underwatered even once... Of if it was in a tray and sat in water.  Living in a small pot can be brutal. If it got watered a couple hours late one day and it went really dry you could get damage like that. I can't guarantee that's what it was but some sort of watering issue is my first guess.  If you're sure you've been keeping it evenly moist, not too wet not too dry, getting a little too much sun would be my second guess but you seem like you have a fairly mild climate compared to mine so that's why it's my second guess.

I know this thread is really old, but I just wanted to confirm that I'm almost positive Denise is right in her diagnosis. I think those little dots are actually round bugs called scale.  Once they're adults they never move again and just drink sap from your tree.  If there's not very many of them the best thing to do is just squish them. Some ladybugs like twice stabbed ladybugs will eat them, so if you just blanket spray sometimes you kill really unusual ladybugs.

https://hortsense.cahnrs.wsu.edu/fact-sheet/apple-lecanium-scale/

While I don't recognize the exact variety of bush honeysuckle, I'm sure it's one of the extremely invasive ones. In the midwest we have something called the Amber honeysuckle, (Lonicera maackii), that will actually form a true monoculture under trees and kill all natives where it's established. They are bad news.  Normally most non natives have some benefits and aren't as bad as people say, but honeysuckles are an exception.

Anyways, I have a tiny property and I literally just prune them off with normal pruners. If you keep doing that they eventually starve and die.

M.J. Wayne wrote:Not sure what this is...
(Southern Missouri between Black, and Current Rivers).

I'm pretty sure that's a dobsonfly.  We were just looking at pictures of those in my daughter's bug book.  The larva are aquatic and the pincers are for mating, not biting.  I've never seen one in person so I'm jealous.

Thanks for sharing! I love gnarled, sprawling, ancient trees. There's something greater than the sum of their parts there.  They're not just bigger, with wider trunks and branch spread.  They have gravitas and personality thrown in.  Maybe you can just feel their age.