"Doddering Old Fool"

Sorry to disappoint the politically inclined, this is not about any particular politician. It is about the plant "dodder".

Today was a work-day at the property. Kubota joined me. His job (construction) is slowing down and his crew had two days off last week. He had today off and asked if he could join me.

Mrs ERJ is leery of my using a chainsaw alone. At one level, I am touched. At the other level, chainsaw accidents happen so fast that having a second person is of marginal value although I supposed if I got clobbered on the head by a falling limb and was knocked silly MAYBE a second person would be helpful.

So...with Kubota there, I was taking out dead and "dotty" trees. The image below is one that I used as a boundary sample. If the tree was worse than this one, it is coming down and being replaced.

Pretty rough looking tree. I will probably take this out AFTER we harvest the apples.

While working in the orchard I saw one patch of dodder.

The first patch I found was in the orchard. The dodder is the yellow-orange patch in the lower-left quadrant of the image.

Dodder is a parasitic, seed-bearing plant. It looks like yellow spaghetti drizzled over the canopy of the plants it is sucking the life from.

"Dodder" means to bob or wobble back-and-forth, to tremble and shake. Since that kind of head-motion is sometimes associated with strokes, Parkinson's Disease and other neurological issues, it is often accompanied by verbal impairment and sometimes cognitive impairment. Those neurological issues are much more common in older people than people in their hale youth.

So it almost inevitable that "doddering", "old" and "fool" would get linked together so frequently as to be almost inseparable.

The second patch was in a stand of Goldenrod (Solidago). Looking through lists of preferred host plants, this might be Cuscuta coryli

And, for the record, dodder not only looks like cooked spaghetti, it is also limp and floppy and simply sprawls over its hosts. The ends of the strands (which seem to grow very, very quickly) bob in the slightest of breeze.

I found the second stand when I was spraying some patches of goldenrod for future planting.

Part of where I went was along the path I had trampled through the goldenrod dragging brush and making a brush-pile. What was notable is that deer are already using it as evidenced by the amount of deer crap in the 150 feet that went through the goldenrod. Even the tiny reduction in effort of walking along a trampled path vs. walking through standing goldenrod was enough to funnel deer traffic. 

That could be very useful in terms of guiding deer to places where you can get a better "look" at them or to a place where you have a more favorable shot. Example: If you can shift deer traffic so instead of passing 50 yards from a deer stand it passes 25 yards from it, then the stand suddenly becomes much more useful for bow hunting.

For the record, Kubota worked his butt off mowing. There were a couple of times he launched off the lawn tractor when he got buzzed by a bumblebee. Given what happened a few days ago, I understand that. Not only did he insist that I not pay him, but during a break he borrowed the truck and drove into town to get a can of Kodiac. He brought me back a 24 oz can of cold beer.

Also for the record, there are "holes" in the upper-orchard for 16 replacement trees. When fully populated, the upper orchard has room for four rows of thirteen trees planted on 15' by 25' centers.