Project: One photo a day (but not necessarily every day)

[72gmc]

I’m a fan of local/visiting celebrity photo walls in diners.

[j44ke]

A lot of work on the overgrowth of privet completed. Moving towards more of a woodlands than a bramble with trees. Still more to be done, but at least you can see the ground. The rise in center used to be a small apple orchard. Still a few apple trees there, but they've had a hard life. Hopefully removing the privet will help them recover.

[Mabouya]

Hopefully removing the privet will help them recover.

See the quote below from Wikipedia - I hope there are other options nearby for the butterfly larvae (and the birds).

"A plant may produce thousands of fruits, most of which are eaten by birds. Privet is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including the common emerald, common marbled carpet, copper underwing, engrailed, mottled beauty, scalloped hazel, small angle shades, v-pug, privet hawk moth and willow beauty."

[open roader]

A lot of work on the overgrowth of privet completed. Moving towards more of a woodlands than a bramble with trees. Still more to be done, but at least you can see the ground. The rise in center used to be a small apple orchard. Still a few apple trees there, but they've had a hard life. Hopefully removing the privet will help them recover.

Jorn - the little house in the woods; looks completely divine and very exotic from the viewpoint of a dried up antipodean. What pinus species do have on your block - I'm very familiar with the forests of the PNW but never clapped eyes on anything Appelachian.

[j44ke]

See the quote below from Wikipedia - I hope there are other options nearby for the butterfly larvae (and the birds).

"A plant may produce thousands of fruits, most of which are eaten by birds. Privet is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including the common emerald, common marbled carpet, copper underwing, engrailed, mottled beauty, scalloped hazel, small angle shades, v-pug, privet hawk moth and willow beauty."

I don't think any of these moths occur in the US, so I expect that the article is referring to species located where these privets are native. The privet sp. we are yanking out are a few Chinese privet (Ligustrum sinense) and then mostly Common privet (Ligustrum vulgare), neither of which are native and are both classified as invasive. The thicket they produce when allowed to go wild is super dense, to the point where they are difficult to push through. The nutritional value of the Common privet berries is not high, and while every little bit helps, Common privet overwhelms other food-bearing native plants with its incredibly dense growth - dense to the point where it is actually difficult to get through it without a pair of loppers. It grows fast, reproduces from seed and roots, and its limbs have spine-like hooks that allow branches to interlock with each other. It makes a quick and hardy hedge - poor man's boxwood - but at least in the US, not much else. We'll be replanting with native species that produce plenty of resources for local fauna, just as we've done up the hill at our house.

[j44ke]

Jorn - the little house in the woods; looks completely divine and very exotic from the viewpoint of a dried up antipodean. What pinus species do have on your block - I'm very familiar with the forests of the PNW but never clapped eyes on anything Appelachian.

Thanks! Most of what we have is Northern white pine (Pinus strobus.) That was the apex plant the English found when they arrived on the shores of North America. 180 - 200' tall, 6-8 feet in diameter and in some places growing only 10 feet apart so that it was difficult to walk through the forests. Very few if any of those pines exist today. It took only about a quarter of a century for the British to cut them down and send them all back to England to build the British Navy.

The other conifer in this photo is Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis.) They are lovely trees. They grow in interrelated groups that can take as long as 150 years to develop underground before saplings start to appear. They are one of the trees studied to understand chemical signaling, and there are famously ancient hemlock stumps that still send out whatever chemical messages hemlocks send to other hemlocks. There is a parasitic pest called the woolly adelgid, a type of scale insect, that kills hemlocks, but fortunately the trees in our area seem free of that infestation.

There is also a Norwegian spruce here - that's an introduced species but is considered native-ish as it was introduced along with European settlers. We also have Red spruce but we are a little low or south for Red spruce to flourish. We are replanting Eastern tamarack (Larix laricina,) the American larch, that turns yellow in the fall and loses its foliage in winter. There were two huge tamaracks on the property that the previous owners cut down, so we are going to start over.

[rccardr]

A lot of work on the overgrowth of privet completed. Moving towards more of a woodlands than a bramble with trees. Still more to be done, but at least you can see the ground. The rise in center used to be a small apple orchard. Still a few apple trees there, but they've had a hard life. Hopefully removing the privet will help them recover.

So are you going to be able to use that bangin’ BBQ setup this summer?

[j44ke]

So are you going to be able to use that bangin’ BBQ setup this summer?

We could use it now. Just needs a new grate. But summer is more likely as we need to get rid of the buckthorn growing in the middle of it. That might require some significant effort.

[open roader]

[Mabouya]

Common privet overwhelms other food-bearing native plants with its incredibly dense growth - dense to the point where it is actually difficult to get through it without a pair of loppers. It grows fast, reproduces from seed and roots, and its limbs have spine-like hooks that allow branches to interlock with each other. It makes a quick and hardy hedge - poor man's boxwood - but at least in the US, not much else.

I have to admit, the only times I've seen the word "privet" used has been for a "privet hedge."

Glad to hear that the critters in the area will continue to be well-fed.

[open roader]

[open roader]

[j44ke]

That's a looker.

[Paul Jacobs]

First lambs of the year at our local rare breed farm. The mother is a Shropshire ewe. Shropshires are no longer classified as a rare breed. Apparently Shropshire sheep do not remove the bark from trees so they can be grazed alongside young saplings, which is why they are kept on this farm together with many rarer breeds.

[j44ke]

Just had this pop up on my radar the other day - an exhibit in the Netherlands about the "design" of sheep over centuries by the design collective, FORMAƑANTASMA.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/a...smid=url-share

[Paul Jacobs]

Just had this pop up on my radar the other day - an exhibit in the Netherlands about the "design" of sheep over centuries by the design collective, FORMAƑANTASMA.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/a...smid=url-share

Thank you for that link, very interesting. It is a shame that sheep's wool (apart from merino) is so undervalued. When I used to farm sheep in Wales, in the 1970s, the wool cheque would cover the capital investment in sheep. If you bought a ewe and kept it for 5 to 7 years, the income from 5 -7 fleeces would be approximately the same as the purchase price of the ewe. Any lambs sold from that ewe would contibute to profits.

[j44ke]

Thank you for that link, very interesting. It is a shame that sheep's wool (apart from merino) is so undervalued. When I used to farm sheep in Wales, in the 1970s, the wool cheque would cover the capital investment in sheep. If you bought a ewe and kept it for 5 to 7 years, the income from 5 -7 fleeces would be approximately the same as the purchase price of the ewe. Any lambs sold from that ewe would contibute to profits.

Plus the free lawn mowing.

Merino wool industry in the area where I live now began in the early 1800's after William Jarvis, the US ambassador to Portugal, took advantage of Napoleon's invasion of Spain to send 1000's of Merino sheep out of Spain to the US (Merino sheep were otherwise Spanish intellectual property essentially and export was prohibited.) He even sent a dozen to Thomas Jefferson. Compared to other wools, Merino was cutting edge technology - like the elastic or lycra of the early 1800's. Meanwhile, Britain and the US were fighting a trade war, and England put an embargo on US grain exports and the US retaliated with one on British wool. With the arrival of Merino sheep, NY & New England fields that were heretofore used for grain farming for export were switched over to sheep. The demand for Merino eventually increased the amount of acreage required for farmers to keep up (more sheep, more grass) and land became too expensive in the east - but then work on the Erie Canal completed (1825) allowing farmers to move their operations to more affordable land in Ohio and ship wool back east relatively cheaply for production. We still have a couple stone walls on our property that were likely for sheep (no barbed wire) and some that were for the dairy cows that came after sheep herding moved west (barbed wire topped.)

[claritycycler]

Saturday morning farmer's market in downtown Santa Barbara

[rwsaunders]

[open roader]