May Lotito

I'd like to sprout some plum seeds and found the shells too thick to crack. I ended up using a pair of dykes cutter. Cut in the middle of the pit and the kernel will come out intact.

I look up the Audubon field guide for bushes in the pea family. Maybe you can narrow down a bit.

My paw paw tree is blooming and I counted 18 flowers. I hand pollinate the flowers and they seem to be taking except the very first one. I don't know what variety this tree is but even if you have one tree, it won't hurt to try. Timing is critical since the male and female parts of the flower don't mature the same time. I collect pollens from flowers that are mahogany in color and the petals starting to flare, and pollinate flowers beginning to change color from green to red.

Goji's native habitat is in semi arid desert like climate, so they prefer alkaline soil as in Western US. I make sure to amend my soil with wood ash and other minerals and the bushes produce abundantly. Some training or trellising is required as the branches are very flexible and tend to arch and layer in ground to spread. My chickens always go crazy for the berries and leaves. Since they are good foragers and won't touch nutrient poor food, I believe goji berries are beneficial. Fresh berries taste bitter but once sun dried, they turn sweeter. I usually put the berries in breakfast oatmeal porridge.

I only ran across a couple twigs like that in the past and pruned them off and put in the burn pile. Some popular yt channels mention that flagging twigs are signs of pest damage. As for my pears, I am going to bag the remaining healthy ones and test a couple things on the infected ones.

Do you check the dead twigs for oriental moths? We got down to 27 or 28F without freeze injury in pear trees, but I already found boring holes in a few of the fruitlets!

You don't have to worry about it. Red color comes from iron oxide, the same for red clay soil. Black color is from something cheap and carbon based so it will burn away if you make char.

Although maple trees shed tens of thousands of seeds all these years, I rarely see any saplings growing more than a foot tall in areas unattended at tall. I guess landscape maples can't survive the native high acidic high aluminum low fertility soil where eastern red cedars and oaks are abundant. Garden soil is rich and more neutral in pH and the maples seedlings are happier.

I noticed the appearance of aphids after heavy storm too, at the same time plants are showing sulfur deficiency symptoms. S and B exist as anions and leach easily down past the root zone in high rainfall. Usually in corns, I see S deficiency associated with aphid the sap sucker and boron deficiency with earworm the tissue muncher. For soil amendment I use gypsum and borax. If you have other cabbages, maybe you can give one some Epsom salt and see if that reduces aphid loads.

Did the plant receive lots of nitrogen recently? If the N:S ratio is high, amino acids will build up and attract aphids. The spray will set them back for a while but they will keep rebouncing.

I am now more inclined to the opinion that plants getting balanced nutrition are healthy and pest free. Here is what John Kempf talked about aphidshttps://permies.com/t/146343/prevent-manage-aphids-insects-managing

Although I don't have experience of adding S/Mg/B to get rid of aphid infestation, I had the other way round. Once I made organic liquid fertilizer from some sick looking plants and used on my healthy ones. Within a week, all had attracted some sorts of sap suckers on corresponding hosts! Lady bugs showed up later to clean the aphids up but the plants already lost quite some growth potentials.