Christopher Weeks

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.

I don't know that the colonizing-inward would really be a problem. Just keep tossing dead weeds in the middle. If the comfrey can grow through it, then you have more dynamic accumulation taking place and next year maybe you'll toss down even more weeds.

I've been noticing that comfrey planted in a clump and left to grow, invariably topples over outward. I wonder if you could just plant one of those, wait for the topple and then pile the center up with your dead weeds and mulch and whatever, causing the comfrey to colonize outward and allow the cavity at the center. Though that wouldn't have the earthworks element on display in Nancy's diagram.

I like referring to our seasons based on the insect pests: https://permies.com/forums/posts/preList/249159/2315003

But this year we have -way- more yellow jackets than usual. It's the time of year when they're kind of cuddly for murder-flies, but come fall, this is going to be a nightmare.

We've been on this property since 2020 and I've had to deal with two nests, one by the fire-pit where they stung my daughter's foot and one in a hugelish garden bed that I set up around a stump (but that one feels like I invited them). But I know of two in the ground this year and there must be more that I don't know about.

Do you have years like that? Anyone know what causes it? We had a pretty mild winter. And our mosquito load was light this year with the dragonflies out before I even noticed the mosquitoes -- so that's another bit of weird.

This is an enthusiastic thread but there’s reality to deal with too!