Hazelnuts, Diversity, Lumpers vs Splitters and Hops

Hazelnuts

For future reference: The squirrels wiped out my entire crop of Yamhill Hazelnuts in two days. Quicksilver adores squirrels and I have been strongly discouraged from controlling their population.

I knew better. As soon as I have the slightest information that squirrels think the hazelnuts are ripe, I need to harvest them all.

Yamhill is one of my earliest ripening hazelnuts.

I was able to pick a few hundred Jefferson for seed-nuts. A goodly number of them were undoubtedly pollinated by Yamhill.

Michigan laws prohibit me from moving a "stem" of un-inspected nursery plants from one plot of land to another. Fines can be as high as $500 per stem, per Michigan law. That law does not apply to seeds. The take-home is that I can plant seed-nuts at the property I am managing but I cannot legally move seedlings from Eaton Rapids to the property that is forty-minutes drive-time away.

Ecosystem Diversity

Monday and Tuesday were unusual. Southern Belle was cog at her church's summer Vacation Bible School so we were tasked with watching Quicksilver.

Mrs ERJ tumbled into a person-in-crisis who needed transportation. Kubota was still having weird side-effects from his encounter with a stinging bug and the anaphylactic shock issues.

Bottom-line, I was pinned down and hardly twitched a muscle.

Wednesday dawned with promise but the Kracken kept throwing its tentacles. I was pinned down until 5PM.

I went for a walk in Delhi Township on their "Ram Trail". I went with the specific intention of scoping out specimen of "Viburnum" species that I might happen to sidle up to and have some seeds fall into my pocket.

Alas, my hopes were dashed. The local talent in Eaton Rapids exceeded what grew beside the trails in Delhi Township. Live and learn.

For what it is worth, locally we are blessed with large numbers of native Nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) and planted Highbush Cranberry (Viburnum trilobum/opulus) and a few V. acerifolium. In some places you can find Southern Arrowwood (V. dentatum). Other than that, most viburnum are Asian and European species/hybrids.

Lumpers vs. Splitters

For the record, I am a "Lumper".

Lumpers paint with a large paint-brush and we don't let ourselves become paralyzed by minutia.

A splitter will lock-up trying to figure out how many separate species of Oak and Hawthorne and Sedges are on a piece of property. The lumper will lump them all together and make a statement something like "A census of the property determined that there are over 45 oak trees that are over 4" diameter-at-breast height on the property."

The trap that "splitters" fall into is they can be beguiled into believing the illusion that a parcel is a paragon of resilience and floristic-quality-diversity when it is actually quite fragile.

Suppose you planted all eleven species of oak that are listed as "native" to Michigan. How "resilient" is your woodlot if all eleven species are highly susceptible to the same diseases and insects?

Referencing back to the previous bit about Viburnums, I will probably just collect seeds and cuttings from some local V. opulus and call it a day.

Any beer brewers in the audience?

It recently occurred to me that hops might be a useful addition to the various hedges and windbreaks that I am managing.

While I could plant "found" hops and assume they were native, my frugality pushes me toward planting fairly modern hop cultivars with good disease resistance.

The cement is still wet so I haven't made any decisions, but I am leaning toward Centennial, Citra and Nugget. So the question to the home-brewers is, if you found yourself stranded on Gilligan's Island, would you feel "crippled" if you were restricted to those three hop varieties. The second part of the question is: If you were to replace one of the three with something else, which one would you replace and what would you replace it with?

Moth traps

Posted for future reference

If you have kids or grandkids who are getting twitchy as the summer drags on, this might be worth checking out.