Site Discussions

I own a small farm in Royalton VT.  Our house was built in 1798 and it is surrounded by six specimen butternut trees of various sizes and ages the oldest perhaps being 100 years old, or older.

We purchased the property in 2001.  The Butternut were covered with Black Canker and in serious decline.  I have experience with specimen trees so I decided to try and save them.

I believe one problems that Butternuts have is due to the enormous amount of foliage they produce and loose each year.  I think they suck the nutrients right out of the soil especially in they are not in a forest location with plenty of organic matter.  Mine are surrounded by lawn.

I started to heavily fertilize them by going around their approximate drip line with an iron bar and poke several holes in the ground which I then fill with a high nitrogen fertilizer.  I do this every spring.  They have recovered nicely though the Canker is still there.  My major problem now is limbs occasionally breaking due to crotch rot and the weight of new foliage.  I have had them trimmed, especially the tree that overhangs our house.

The second problem I have discovered with butternuts is that some trees are viciously attacked by ants and other bugs at the base of their trunks.  I keep an eye on them and put bug spray and or powder on the trees’ trunks at ground level at the first indication of bug damage.

All in all, the trees are fairly stable now and I see new growth each year.  And they have begun to produce nuts once again.

Thanks!

Steve Judge

We love putting butternuts in our chocolate fudge (the recipe on the back of the marshmallow fluff jar)!

OK, I’ll be sure to delete the “boilerplate” that says “Please consider the environment before printing this email” with an illustration of a green leaf to “print away, who cares anyway”.

Thanks for this very interesting article!

Does anyone know anything about the new outdoor wood furnace being sold with the name Fisher Stoves USA?
Thanks

Laurie,

To answer your question I grew the honey mushroom mycelium in my lab as a demonstration for a high school biology teacher’s workshop on bioluminescence that I had conducted some years back. The mycelium was grown on bread crumbs and water along held together with a solidifying agent called agar (an extract derived from seaweed).

Frank Kaczmarek

  Jack-o-lanterns and me

Every fall there is a beautiful fruiting of jack-o-lanterns (Omphalotus Illudens) on my neighbors lawn, probably growing on the dead roots of a tree that used to be there.
Do they really glow in the dark?  I wonder.
So when they first appeared last September, I picked one, brought it home and put it on the shelf in my bathroom.  That way, I figured, when I wake up in the middle of the night, my eyes should be sufficiently adjusted to the dark that I might see the glow.  But it didn’t glow.
Day 2: picked one more, brought it home, put it on the shelf in the bathroom next to the first one, but it didn’t glow either.
Day 3:  picked one more.  Same thing.  No glow.
Day 4:  picked one more.  Same thing.  Still no glow.
Day 5.  picked one more.  Same routine.  This one did glow beautifully!
Day 6:  picked one more.  Again, a beautiful glow.
Day 7 and 8: Added one more mushroom each day, and now lots of glow.  Day 5 mushroom and day 6 mushroom both continue to glow.  The first four never glowed.
Day 8:  The lawn-care people came and mowed the lawn, thus bringing my study to an untimely end.
But the four mushrooms in my bathroom continued to glow for a couple more days, until they finally dried up.
Whether to glow or not to glow must be a matter of maturity. 
(Would this observation apply to people, too?)
Oh, by the way,  the spore prints never glowed..

  I have caught 2 of these Whitespotted Sawyer Beetles just recently , Both males. they are huge . I have a lot of pine trees around here but I don’t wish to get bitten..I also don’t want my great grandsons to get bitten….

Great article. I’m wondering about the honey mushroom grown “in the lab”. Whose lab was it?
Thanks,
Laurie

A few days ago I went to my friends’ cabin deep up north in WI. And this morning I woke up with a mysterious rash that was not there a few hours earlier when I went to sleep. My friends say it looks like a bad case of acne and my dad says it looks like poison ivy… but it didn’t start to even show til 2 days later?

It doesn’t itch, and didn’t show up on contact, it is on both sides of my face and is covering my jaw, and looks like a major breakout of acne. I want to know what it is so I can watch out for it next time. Got any ideas?

Thanks for writing an article about an under-appreciated tree (and a favorite of mine). One thing I would take issue with, however, is the comment that black birches are going to become more successful because of their ability to grow up above the fern later.  Here in southern Vermont, the black birches are one of the absolute last trees to leaf out in the spring, along with hickories and ash.  Perhaps this is a regional difference?

Molly was my woodworking teacher. At only 8 years old she showed me how to use a lathe to make beautiful bowls on my own; dovetails, joints, etc., as she guided me in making a piano bench, bookshelf and little milking stool all by myself. When she helped me build my first project; the stool, we went to the wood pile to pick some wedges to affix the legs. She suggested I select a rich mahogany piece that she suggested would offset the lighter color of the wood nicely. As we drove the three in, the third cracked in half leaving it with a gap in the middle and causing each end of the wedge to sit a bit crooked. I remember feeling panic and disappointment that it was “broken” . . .  and her smile when she noted how lovely it looked; just like that “winking at me”.

I found a nest like a robin’s, however it was mud lined. What bird makes such a nest?

Hi Bruce,

Unfortunately the tree may be too far gone to help. If there are no visible culprits causing the decline (bugs, for instance, or recent construction that disturbed the roots), it was probably road salt. Sugar maples are very intolerant to salt.

If you want to try to help it anyway, i’d prune the dead branches and use a balanced fertilizer. The general recommendation is 2 to 4 lbs fertilizer per inch of tree diameter (0.35 to 0.7 kg per cm of tree diameter at 1.5 m above ground), or so says this ag bulletin: http://ccesuffolk.org/assets/Horticulture-Leaflets/Maple-Decline.pdf

If the tree doesn’t bounce back you might consider planting a new one nearby so it can get a jump start on establishing itself as this one slowly dies. If you think road salt is the issue, black ash, cottonwood, tamarack, northern red oak, balsam poplar, gray dogwood, staghorn sumac, choke cherry, and serviceberry are all relatively salt tolerant. You might consider one of these species instead of a hard maple.

Never would I have thought that a walk on my lunch break at work would bring me to this - spotted a catamount for certain. Of all places in Littleton NH. Right near Remick Park in the woods out back at the end of Pine Hill Road. Reported this to FIsh & Game.

Dear Sir or Madam,
I would appreciate it if you could help me in regard to the following:
I have a beautiful maple tree on my boulevard which has maple tree
decline. I would like to save this tree.
I have found research on the internet which indicated that the addition of calcium to the soil could halt this decline.
Last year and this year I added gypsum to the soil along with liquid
gypsum this year.
This year with our early Spring and Summer the leaves have started
falling off the tree.
I would like to know what source of calcium to add and how long it
will take to see results. Also, how much?
Is this an excerise in futility or could it possibly work?

Well written article! Both hysterical and informative - a real pleasure to read.

Really nice job, Dave Mance. This is the kind of thoughtful prose I’ve come to expect from Northern Woodlands. Great short story with an underlying message we can all take with us into the weekend and the summer ahead….  slow and easy trumps work hard, play hard. Bravo for reminding us about what is most important when fishing… or playing at anything: enjoying ourselves and relaxing.

It is rewarding to rear, mate and release cecropia, or any of our other Saturniid moths, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of silken security.  The Compsilura concinnata, which is the tachinid fly you alluded to introduced in 1906 by the USDA (in some areas released as recently as 1986), still takes quite a toll on our native Saturniid moths.  In 2009, I did a local study using Antheraea polyphemus caterpillars and approximately 90% of those recovered had been hit by Compsilura.  Odd as it may seem I was always a bit relieved to see external eggs knowing they were most likely of a native fly parasitoid (such as those Peter mentioned/showed in his comment.  Lucky for his very cooperative patient, these were removed before hatching and having a chance to burrow).  What I did know, they had not been left by the exotic gypsy hunter, which directly deposits larvae (as do our native wasp predators).  In the case of Compsilura, the life cycle is then quite short and the demise of its host can be as little as 5-7 days.  C. concinnata has 3 to 4 generations, gypsy moth only one, thus the need for future hosts throughout the season.  The many weeks of feeding and large size make many of our native wild silk moth larvae an easy target for this fly.

Since a very small percentage of the hundreds of eggs deposited by each moth survive to the adult stage in nature (not only due to other insect predators), it is likely that the dozen or so you released made some, no matter how small, difference.  I rear and release a number of species every year (this is my 14th) and figure for every pair of mating moths that continue to produce one more pair my local population gets a helping hand.

If interested, I just updated images from this study: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54787179@N00/sets/72157627565358450/

This came in as a Letter to the Editor

Thank you for the excellent issue, as always. One comment: Rather than a full page lamenting hyperbole in journalism, I would rather have read a cogent article on what data does exist regarding the start and duration of sugar season in the northeast, sugar content and such, and what conclusions can be drawn from that data. I’ll be surprised if no credible data exists. Mr. Mance seems to say that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from data that exhibits a wide degree of variability, which in general is not true.

Thank you

Timothy Budell
Westford, VT