14
in other words
june28
2011
Diggin’ In The Dirt: Weed Your Vegetables!
By Chip Bubl
Oregon State University Extension
Service - Columbia County
Yellow jacket and hornet update
Yellow jackets don’t like wet
springs either. Colonies start new each
year from pregnant queens that have
over-wintered wherever they can find
shelter. I often find the fat queens in
firewood piles. In drier springs, they are
often active in April and have built good
size paper nests with lots of workers
by this time. I have seen a number of
queens that are just getting started. That
means that it take considerably longer to
build up colony size to truly annoying
proportions. The yellow jacket family
is virtually hairless and thus are easy to
distinguish from honeybees and bumble
bees. It is worth noting that all of the
yellow jacket species (we have several)
and the bald-faced hornet (in the same
Vespid family) are predators on insects
in varying degrees. My rule of thumb
has been not to kill them if the effort
could put you at risk (like a bald-faced
hornet nest 30 feet off the ground under
an eve) or if they pose little or no risk to
your family or livestock. The colony dies
each year and the nest is not re-occupied.
Only the newly pregnant queens flee the
nest in the fall and survive.
The yellow jackets that nest in
the ground can be very difficult to live
with. Often you discover them in the
course of doing something else, like
baling hay (personal experience), cutting
ivy (personal experience), walking
the dog (personal experience), or off-
loading firewood (personal experience).
In fact, I seem to have up close and
personal encounters with these insects
almost every year. To control either
ground nests or aerial nests, you need
to buy one of the aerosol hornet and
wasp insecticides. Locate the opening
to the nest, either at the bottom of the
aerial nest or where they are going into
the ground. Wait until dusk to get them
all back into the hive and then spray
the aerosol into the hole. Most of the
canisters will spray accurately about
8-10 feet. Then get the heck out of there.
Be very careful on ladders and always
follow the instructions on the label. Look
the next day or two to see how you have
done. Ground nests are more difficult to
treat since the opening might travel on a
bend to the cavity where the paper nest
under the ground is constructed. The
insecticide has a hard time making that
bend.
Don’t ever plug up an exterior
hole to a yellow jacket nest that is in
a wall void. They can chew through
sheetrock and come pouring into your
home. This is not a good solution.
One other note, the German yellow
jacket (Vespula germanica) is now
well established in Columbia County. It
builds huge paper nests plastered against
walls and rafters inside houses. These are
not round nests but irregularly shaped
with an interesting scalloped pattern in
how the paper covering is layed down. I
have seen several that were 2-4 feet wide
and about 2 feet long. They were exiting
through a hole in a basement or attic
wall to feed outside. One of these nests
needs to be dealt with by a pest control In my own experience, the most serious
company.
case happened when some ornamentals,
particularly yew clippings, were tossed
Weed your vegetables!
over a fence to some 600# steers. Yews
Vegetables are rather tender are highly toxic and several steers
crops. They have been cultivated and were dead within two hours. The take-
coddled for so long that they really aren’t home message is don’t feed landscape
very competitive. Weeds, on the other trimmings or even garden plants to your
hand, make their living by being the stock unless you really know there will
first out of the ground. As they develop be no problems. If you have questions,
leaves, weeds capture sunlight, shading call the Extension office.
the poor vegetable seedlings and stunting
their growth. The most important time
in your vegetable garden is the four
The Extension Service offers
weeks you spend weeding after you its programs and materials equally to
plant the garden. Transplants reduce the all people.
weed competition problem but don’t
eliminate the need for vigilance. It is Free newsletter
The Oregon State University
worth noting that if you don’t thin your
crop plants as well, they can compete Extension office in Columbia County
with each other just like weed and crop publishes a monthly newsletter on
seedlings compete. So thin and weed. gardening and farming topics (called
The following table shows the yield of County Living) written/edited by yours
paired plots of various vegetables that truly. All you need to do is ask for it and
were weeded and not weeded after the it will be mailed to you. Call 503 397-
vegetables were planted from seed:
3462 to be put on the list. Alternatively,
you can find it on the web at
Crop Not weeded Weeded
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/
columbia/ and click on newsletters.
Carrots 27.9 lbs. 503.3 lbs.
Beets 45.9 lbs. 240.3 lbs.
Contact information for the Extension
Cabbage 129.1 lbs. 233.6 lbs.
office
Onions 3.6 lbs. 67.7 lbs.
Oregon State University Extension
Service – Columbia County
Poisonous plants and livestock
505 N. Columbia River Highway (across
I recently had to give a talk on from the Legacy clinic)
poisonous plants to a livestock group. St. Helens, OR 97051
In preparing for the talk, I was struck 503 397-3462
by how many of the worst poisonous Email: chip.bubl@oregonstate.edu
plant cases involved cultivated plants.
Intruder Alert: How Accurate Is Your Information?
By Burt Tschache
The massive amount of information stored on
the Internet has made research that used to take years,
into a matter of months or days if you happen to be a
speed reader with a fast Internet connection. However,
it comes with one large caveat, just because it is in print
does not mean it is accurate.
As researchers, it is up to us to verify the in-
formation as the quality is subject to a wide range of
variation due to quality of research, quality of the re-
searcher, what the researcher wants you to know, any
bias and almost any other combination that can end up
as valid information, partial misinformation, partial
disinformation, any combination of those three or com-
pletely out of right field.
The best tool to have in your kit for any re-
search is a well honed BS detector. Lacking one is the
cause of much misinformation and incorrect informa-
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of widely varying data with our brain.
It also depends upon your belief structure as
a researcher. A true researcher sets any bias aside and
follows where the valid information leads. It may
cross disciplines, so you must have an understanding
of closely related fields or at least to the extent neces-
sary for your project. This is where nearly all of the
great discoveries occur. It is sometimes referred to as
thinking outside the box.
In times past, science and religion were under
the purview of the church. Galileo was excommuni-
cated from the Roman Catholic Church because he had
the audacity to state that the Earth was not the center of
the Universe and not even the center of our Solar Sys-
tem. He was condemned by those that would not even
look through his “magic” viewing glass.
However, each new ground-breaking discov-
ery has at first been reviled, then ridiculed and then
accepted as fact. Even Einstein was derided for his re-
search and was unable to resolve gravity
in his Theory of Relativity.
So we have come a long way from
a flat Earth that is the center of the Uni-
verse and for that, we can thank re-
searchers risking life, limb and ridicule,
SM
dedicated to understanding something
HERE.
never previously understood.
Whenever I am at the nexus, where
revealing some new data will lead either
to acclaim or stoning, I remember the
words of my drama teacher, John Wel-
don, a Missourian in the true sense of
the word, “Burt, you can’t be afraid to
make a fool of yourself.”
More to come . . .
Be Safe Out There . . .
tion in any publication. Another is the paucity of good
information in the particular field you are researching.
The Internet allows for a wider and more rapid disper-
sal of the information than in days gone by, valid or
not.
There are also individuals that purposely put
out disinformation because they want to mislead their
readers for myriad reasons. It makes the verifying
process so much more difficult when you have to sort
through all the disinformation as well as the misinfor-
mation in order to find the nuggets of truth within.
We have a special file folder in our brains for
those issues that seem to require further evaluation.
I call it my Miscellaneous file. We actually possess
many of them; in fact it’s arguably the largest file in
our brain. It’s for those bits of data from out of right
field or those that produce a quandary that needs re-
solving, not immediately, but sometime in the future.
What is required here is the ability to contain many bits
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