As reported earlier, Mrs ERJ will be rendering aid to a person who is undergoing surgery today, first sitting with her husband and later running and fetching.
Without adult supervision, I will be eating white-bread with no added fiber, meat that has been fried in grease and covered with barbecue sauce and sipping forbidden beverages, soda-pop made with high fructose corn syrup. In a short amount of time I will be putting a Two Hearted Ale into the refrigerator for later tonight.
June weather
After a very dry May (for my area) June has been wet with significant amounts of rain every second or third day. By significant, I mean that it makes the dirt too wet to till or hoe without risking breaking down its structure.
This week is no exception. The weather-guessers are predicting over an inch of rain starting tomorrow at noon with a teaser of about 0.2" today starting at 1:00 p.m.
News detox
I only looked at the news once even though my week of detox ended three days ago. I scanned the headlines and thought "Nope. I am good."
It is startling how much the reader's lens is tilted by the choice of words in the headline. "Trump rages fill-in-blank" preps the reader to expect a rogue elephant bent on destruction, all decisions irrational and totally directed by emotion. "Disadvantaged youth fill-in-blank" preps the reader to be sympathetic to "the plight" of some young person who made very, very bad decisions.
Grafts
Three of the four North Platte Persian Walnuts pushed their buds. Like a ninny, I didn't get the first one covered and a deer ate the shoot.
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| Bucket was placed in the background to provide contrast so you can see the shoots pushing out of the graft. |
I quickly put paper lunch bags over the remaining grafts near ground level. Two of them have "pushed" since then. Today I installed cages around the tree.
Encouraging mulberry seedlings
According to Lucky, there have been articles in sites that discuss Deer Management topics.
One of them suggested that if you wanted more mulberry trees in a certain location, that you can simply remove the ground vegetation and place one of the same kinds of cages you use to protect trees from deer browsing.
That seemed simple enough.
Some birds are likely to "loaf" on the side branches of the bamboo after gorging on the mulberries. As they take flight, birds typically de-ballast (i.e. poop) thereby depositing seeds and fertilizer on the bare ground.
Mulberries are a pioneer species. Their seeds are small and cannot punch through a lot of overburden. They like bare dirt. They like sun.
I don't NEED hundreds of mulberry seedlings but it does give me a source of understock if I decide to graft a bunch of them.
Random pictures
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| Bur oak acorns |
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| Black walnuts on a Sparks 147 branch. |
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| Hungarian hot peppers. We are not a "hot" pepper family but this variety grows well and is productive. Its heat approximates Jalapenos peppers. |
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| I grafted this pecan last year. It suffered a lot of die-back this past winter. I expect it to do better this coming winter. For one thing, it will have a longer growing season because it will not be sulking for a month before the buds push. |
Something that might be worth trying for the deer is adding some cheap solar powered post lights around the plots. It might just be my imagination, but it seems to me that when I added a bunch of these to my deck, I had fewer deer walking thru my back yard at night. YMMV, IANAL, etc.
ReplyDeleteAs a kid growing up in the southern end of the San Joaquin valley in California, we had fruitless mulberry trees in the front yard. When pruned properly they made fantastic shade trees. Most people would just cut all the branches back to the trunk for a quick prune job. In the far back yard was the fruit bearing mulberry trees that produced large amounts of berrys. My Aunt & mother would make mulberry preserves & cobbler after all us kids picked the berries. Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteHere in Michigan on the St. Joseph river we have a type of red mulberry trees that grows in the wooded area on the boundary between the neighbors & our's property line. We both do our part to prune the trees lightly each year & remove the unwanted invasive vines from around the trees. I just try to beat the birds for some good mulberry snacking when the fruit is ripe.
ReplyDeleteCorrection, that is Michiana not Michigan. I'm located on the Indiana side of the Indiana Michigan state line.
DeleteThere is a huge amount of variation in fruit quality between mulberry trees.
DeleteAccording to Lucky in Kentucky, he never met a red mulberry (Morus rubrum) that he didn't like. He also likes the hybrids between rubrum x alba. Most M. alba have little flavor...no sweet and no tart. They ripen all their fruit in one big dump whereas the hybrids continue to set fruit as the shoot extends and there are lots of leaves making sugar to support them.
The quality of the mulberries improves a great deal south of I-94. Alas, I am north of that and good, wild mulberries are rare.
I don't know about how good your "weather guessers" are there but up here they can't predict with any degree of accuracy what time it will be at noon tomorrow. ---ken
ReplyDelete