Hickory Horned Devil 2: Avoiding Predators and Parasites

Years ago, I saw a small tree coming up in the meadow, not far from the yard. Huh. Wonder what it is? Well, it was a persimmon, and that being one of my very favorite trees, I decreed that it should not be mowed.  It grew quickly, quickly enough that an orchard oriole pair tried nesting in it in the summer of 2021, how wonderful! 

And now, it would find a new use.

The persimmon branches I cut and put in a vase for my now captive hickory horned devil did something unexpected, wilting dramatically overnight. Some plants just do that, especially woody plants. Oh no! I couldn't feed my Precious dry, dying/dead leaves. What to do? Well, I got online in the wee hours and searched and searched for sleeves to put on live trees, before I realized I had an answer right in front of me. I'd just take the mesh clothes basket and zip it right onto the living tree! Brilliant! or so I thought at the time. It's never as brilliant as it seems.

Walmart to the rescue! I'd been meaning to buy one of these groovy clothes baskets (as opposed to hampers) for awhile, to house little things like insects and small birds. It would be a good hummingbird home, for instance...maybe even a good bat home, a good nestling home...I like it.

The beauty being that it has great big windows AND it zips completely closed.

I would let the persimmon tree do all the work of keeping its leaves alive and juicy, and just zip the Worm inside, on a living branch full of leaves!

I ran the branch in one window and zipped it closed with the worm inside on August 23.

Pretty slick, huh? I twist-tied it in place by its various straps. That thing wasn't going anywhere.

Just to make sure, I twist-tied the zippers closed. However.

I woke up in the wee hours the next morning, as I am wont to do, thinking...is that mesh small enough to keep braconid wasps out? I knew it would keep cuckoos out, and big old tachinid flies, which lay eggs on caterpillars, but parasitic wasps? I asked my guru for all things insect, Laura Stalder Hughes. Nope, she said. Braconids can definitely get through that mesh. ARRRGH. Back to the drawing board.

 I must diverge for a bit, to explain why I woke up thinking about braconids. Here are some images from my blog from 2010, showing a glorious tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta decimating a tomato plant.

 The adult of this impressive worm is the Carolina sphinx, shown here on large-flowered evening primrose Oenothera glazioviana, in my garden.

Those flowers are more than 4" across. The Carolina sphinx moths are so big you can hear and feel them fly in. They have a low thrum like a hummingbird. They are miracles on wings.

And this is why you should not squish or toss or otherwise torment the hornworms on your tomatoes. Find a "victim" tomato plant (everybody has one) and put them on it. Please. Let them live. They are getting rare, at least around here. I get very excited when I get one on a tomato plant, but they rarely make it to adulthood, thanks to birds and braconids.

To show you how long ago that lovely caterpillar encounter was...here are Liam, Grady and Arlo, all of whom are either graduated from or in college now, inspecting the worm. Liam's gonna love this picture...

And this is what braconid wasps do to large caterpillars.

The little braconid female lays her eggs on the caterpillar. The eggs hatch, and the tiny larvae burrow through the skin and eat the caterpillar from the inside out. They avoid eating vital organs until they are ready to pupate and exit the decimated husk of what was once a turgid, healthy caterpillar. As a final thank-you, they eat the circulatory and digestive organs. Bye, thanks for giving us your life. We'll be leaving now.

You can see the tops of the cocoons flipped off, as the adult wasp exited each one. The braconid might be called the gardener's friend, unless the gardener loves tobacco hornworms and giant sphinxes as I do.

Here's a braconid cocoon mass I found Sept. 11 '22. There may or may not be the husk of a caterpillar under all that. 

You see, these are the nightmares of a naturalist who is trying to do her best by one charismatic caterpillar. These are the things that keep us up at night.

So on the advice of Tami Gingrich, a legendary Geauga Co. Ohio naturalist,  I went online and ordered a giant mesh sleeve from raisingbutterflies.org

the biggest one they make. Its polyester mesh is too small to admit braconids. Hooray!

And I kept the caterpillar in the hamper on the live persimmon branch because I had no choice but to do that until the sleeve arrived. And I am happy to say that no braconids had gotten in to parasitize it before it came in the mail. 

Meanwhile, the little brown caterpillar was about to go through some serious changes. It was growing but it wasn't eating. It hadn't eaten a bite since I took it in on Aug. 23. Here it is on Aug. 24. Of course I was blaming myself and the wilty persimmon leaves, but something else was clearly going on.

At 11:11 AM on Aug. 24, this is how it presented:

Just hanging there, bent double, anorexic...arrgh! I was in turmoil because I had to take Curtis to the vet to get a bunch of stitches out. He'd had two tumors removed, both of them benign, thankfully. And this caterpillar was going to shed its skin, I was pretty sure.

Wouldn't you know that I'd have to be gone for the last instar skin shed of the most special caterpillar I had ever found? Oh how I wanted to see it, and make a timelapse, but Mr. Loew was more important than that!

He had been a Very Good Boy and not scratched his incision but maybe once in two weeks, and he needed to get his Frankenstein staples out, and get his good lab report, so off we went, hoping to see a brand new caterpiggle on our return.

Gift of the Trees

Ephemera! I chase ephemera. I'm obsessed with fleeting natural phenomena and plan entire days around being there to catch moments. I guess these passing phenomena are my movies and crossword puzzles, my soap operas, my alcohol and tobacco. I live for them.

Around this time of year I go to town more often than usual, because there are trees there I need to connect with. 

It starts with some maples in Mound Cemetery, Marietta, Ohio. This is a Japanese maple, but it's not one of your little weeping threadleaf frailties, all twisted in on itself. There's a lot to be said for those, but I kinda like the rangy ones. This is a stalwart and stately tree, a towering fountain of crimson.

It talks to a Norway maple just across the street. They almost brush fingertips. 

The synergy between the Scandinavian gold and the Japanese lacquered red just sets me afire. I do drive-by checks for weeks in advance of their peak color. And then one fine November day (this was the 7th) I finally strike gold and scarlet. 

Hitting the Mound Cemetery at peak color is only part of the fun, because I start gathering persimmons under trees in town about a week before Halloween. This is my squashy haul, gooshed into the bottom of a feedsack, from October 25.

 These are cultivated American persimmons, and they are about 10x bigger than wild ones, but with the same fabulous flavor. Best of all, many are seedless!

I absolutely don't care that people stare at me as I circle around beneath the trees, looking down at the ground like a dog trying to find the perfect place to poop, then picking objects up, sometimes tasting them, then putting them in a shopping bag. Let them stare. There seems to be almost no competition for this precious food resource, and that's how I want it. Think I'm a weirdo? Great! I quietly feel sorry for you, because being weird is way more fun (and delicious) than rudely staring, wondering what somebody else is up to.

I bring them home and pick the seeds out and peel them, mostly, with my fingers and it takes way too long but I'm happy, standing at the counter, sucking on pulpy seeds, staring out the window, and dreaming of persimmon custard pies to come. I freeze the pulp in Ziploc quart bags, and eat it all year long over cottage cheese, with goat cheese, in yogurt, and atop pies.

Oh, you want my persimmon custard pie recipe? Well, I've been blogging long enough to know I have to give it to you here, or do it in the comments.  Make Velvety Vanilla Pastry Cream and chill it with Saran on top. Then make a graham cracker crust with lots of butter and bake that until it's browning. Fill the cooled crust with velvety vanilla custard (I am drooling) and then top it with persimmon pulp. I jazz up the pulp with vanilla extract and just a touch of sugar. THEN put whipped cream on top. See you in Heaven. I just cobbled that recipe together, because I figured persimmons would pair well with vanilla custard, and they do, they do.

Pro tip: Taste every dang persimmon as you process it. Don't throw them all together until you're sure they're ripe. A persimmon that looks gorgeous and not squashy like the one on the left, below, is going to turn your mouth inside out and line it with fur. The squashier the better, honestly. They do NOT have to freeze to be edible. They just have to be ripe. If they survive the fall without breaking, they're probably not ripe yet. So taste. It's part of the fun.

This post was supposed to be about ginkgo trees, but I haven't blogged in so long that I had to share some maples and persimmons, too. 

Depending on where you live and when you get your first real hard freeze, you can catch ginkgo drop. It wasn't until I started this post that I realized I've been spelling it gingko all my life. Nope, it's gink-go. 

Ginkgos are amazing trees, native to Xitianmu Mountain in China, but endangered in the wild. Go figure. They're everywhere in America, being just too odd and alluring not to plant. Kind of like the Dawn Redwood, which is fairly common in cultivation, and extinct in the wild in China.

Harking way way back to my Harvard botany class with Carroll Wood, I remember that the ginkgo's structure is extremely primitive, as they were among the first trees to evolve. Ginkgos don't have twigs like most later-evolved trees do. What they have is leaves that sprout directly from long branches. Isn't that cool? 

Not only that, but their leaves are super-primitive. They are formed from tiny twigs that come out in a fan-shape and fuse to form the simplest possible leaf. I may have mangled that, but I remember Dr. Wood telling us that. The parallel, fanned venation recalls that of maidenhair fern, another very primitive plant, and in fact the ginkgo is often called Maidenhair Tree. These leaves have been found in fossils on every continent, unchanged for 200 MILLION YEARS. Gack! The first ginkgo in America was planted by John Bartram, a well-known botanist, in his Pennsylvania garden in the 1780's.

Ginkgos can achieve tremendous heights and live for centuries. To me, it's a pure miracle that they get planted in cities, where they get mangled because they grow up through wires and such. They get planted because they are almost impossible to kill; they thrive in compacted soil full of pollutants; and they are very easy to prune back because they have no branches, only long straight limbs.  I love to see them planted, though, where they have room to grow! Here's a young hopeful with plenty of space overhead. 

Landscapers try to plant only male trees, but the occasional female sneaks through the lines. Apparently, the trees can change sex, perking along being a male for 20 or 30 years, then suddenly taking to dropping fruit! Though I'm tempted to call them drupes, they are technically cones, with a fleshy outer layer designed to be alluring to...something. You know how a juniper has fleshy fruits that everyone calls berries? Those are cones, too. Now I'm thinking that yews must have cones, as well. Yep, the red aril on a yew fruit  is actually a highly modified cone scale. COOL. Sometimes cones are fleshy and look just like fruits.

A female ginkgo drops jillions of fleshy, olive sized, pinkish-orange cones that smell like puke, which does not endear them to anyone. People have tried everything from shaking the green cones from the trees to (in Seoul, Korea) paying an army of more than 400 workers to hand pick the green cones so nobody has to slip on them and smell vomit come fall! 

Ginkgos are said to be toxic to insects that try to eat their leaves, and as I think about it, I have NEVER seen a ginkgo leaf with a hole chewed in it. Nor have I seen anything eat the fruit. It may have been dispersed by dinosaurs. Whatever liked to eat fruit that stinks of dogvomit is, evidently, long extinct.

But back to ephemera. The coolest thing, at least for me, about ginkgos is the way they shed their leaves.

First, they turn entirely golden yellow, and they hold that for a little while, maybe a week, maybe two. 

And then one fine night it gets really cold, down to the 20's. And the next morning, the ginkgos drop all their leaves almost at once. I'll quote a fine article in the Atlantic: 

In the autumn, deciduous trees form a scar between their leaves and stems to protect themselves from diseases and winter’s coming chill. Most flowering trees, like oaks and maples, form the scar at different rates, in different parts of the tree, over the course of weeks. Their leaves then fall off individually. But ginkgoes form the scar across all their stems at once. The first hard frost finishes severing every leaf, and they rain to the ground in unison. 

The article also quotes soil microbiologist and professor Serita Frey, who found records for one tree in front of James Hall at the University of New Hampshire. In 1977, ginkgo leaf dump occurred on October 24. With each decade, the tree dropped its leaves three days later. Now, leaf dump occurs around November 7. She has shown the effects of climate change on a single tree! The article is well worth checking out.

I was thrilled to see evidence of leaf dump, in the soft carpet of perfect golden fans beneath each tree.

From splendid to utterly naked, with a tablecloth of gold beneath.

At the elementary school Bill and his siblings attended in Marietta, there's a particularly nice ginkgo that paints the still-green grass with gold. Look at that structure, compared to the twiggy oak behind it!

Just once, I'd love to be beneath a tree when it dumps its leaves. Until then, I'll settle for driving around town from tree to tree, gawking and hoping, and slishing through the carpet beneath them.

On my way home, I noted that the Three Graces had dropped their dresses entirely. I missed most of their coloring, because I hadn't gone anywhere much at all.

I've revised their identities. Leftmost is a red maple. The middle tree, which I'd thought was a sugar maple, appears to be a black maple, Acer nigrum. And the rightmost tree, who holds her arms down, is still a black tupelo, and a fine one at that.

Tonight's ephmeral event was a sunset that brought me to my knees. I actually had to lie down, it was so beautiful. It caught me and Curtis out in the orchard, where I was freeing young trees of honeysuckle vines. I didn't think I had time to make it to the tower, so Curtis and I watched it through the trees.

He was clearly enjoying it, looking left and right, gazing fixedly at the sky. There could be no better companion for such a show. His only agenda, to keep me company. I am a lucky woman, and he is a lucky dog.

The sunset went on and on, and I did have time to climb to towertop and take in its last flames, on this soft warm evening in late November. What a gift. What a gift they all are--the maples, persimmons, the ginkgos; the ephemeral things I live to see and share. 

 

Until I Get It Right: Persimmon Pie

We've been doing some foraging under a particularly generous persimmon tree in Marietta. It has been dropping fruits since mid-October, and there are still a ton of them in the naked branches as of Nov. 17!

 

You don't have to pick them; they're lying all over the ground, like Easter eggs!

 

 Obviously, the thing to do was to make a pie.

 

I love a custard pie. But the bar is high. Bill's mom Elsa made a cherry custard pie for his birthday every year that was just the most delicious thing you've ever tasted. Her crust, for one, you could eat like a cookie, it was that good. And the custard was velvety and vanilla-y and it never tasted really eggy. I just don't know how she did it. I believe there was a double boiler involved. And time.

Two weeks ago I set out to make my first persimmon custard pie. I followed the custard recipe I found it Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It ruled out a graham cracker crust because you had to cook the liquid custard in the crust. OK. So I used a conventional pie crust (Pillsbury, if you must know) and Bittman's custard recipe. Not giving it here because read on.

Once it had cooked and set and cooled, I schmeared fresh persimmon pulp on top. I pulp the fruit with my fingers, just getting the seeds out. Many, if not most, of these cultivated American persimmons are seedless, a huge bonus. You can't really peel them at all; the skin is too thin to get a hold on it. So what I do is seed them and then mash them so the skins disappear into the pulp. I agree with the reader who commented that it's hardly worth pulping wild American persimmons--they're mostly seed. These cultivars are the bomb! There's a lot of food in each one.

This first pie was really, unexpectedly delicious. I will say that the custard part was quite eggy-tasting, and the consistency was that of flan--thin and a bit jiggly. So it wasn't quiiiite what I was going for. But it was still gone in a day, between me and Liam! No regerts!

Fast forward two weeks, and sweet Liam is coming home again for my lecture at People's Bank Theater in Marietta, Nov. 14. I resolve to make another attempt on this pie. I figure the missing element is VELVETY. So I Google "Velvety vanilla custard" and this recipe pops up.

https://www.simplysogood.com/velvety-vanilla-pastry-cream/

Right away, I can see this is more what I'm after. I follow most of the instructions, omitting the candy thermometer (I can durn well tell when a cooking custard has set up) and the strainer (who cares if it's a little lumpy, and who wants to push custard through a strainer, then clean the strainer? Not the Lazy Chef.)

I cook it mostly to instruction, then cool it outside, with Saran over it to keep a skin from forming, while Liam and I make the graham cracker crust and pulp the persimmons. We are terrified a raccoon will come and eat the custard so we keep glancing nervously out on the deck (our big cheap refrigerator).

We make the crust with fresh cinnamon sugar Honey Maid graham crackers, even though they remind Liam of eating them while running cross country repeats which he did not like.  Liam lets out a little emotion in smashing them in a large Ziploc bag. We're a little short of them so we add a couple Breton wheat crackers to fill it out. We melt 6 TBS butter and mix it with 1 1/2 cup of crumbs, then press the mixture into a 9" pie plate and bake it at 350 for a few minutes until the edges start to brown. When the crust and the custard are both completely cool, we combine them and it looks like this:

I.E. YUM!! It's light and fluffy and vanilla-ey and not eggy. Not flanny. Perfect.

Here are the pulped persimmons.

 

 and the finished pie.

 

I cannot tell you how delicious this pie is. This is what I was shooting for, but it's better than I'd dared hope.

We had to let little Curtis clean up our plates. He likes persimmons! and, needless to say, custard...

It's been such fun having Liam home the last two weekends. And Thanksgiving break starts this coming weekend. I'm in tall corn and getting very spoiled. We all are! Liam is just about Curtis' favorite person on earth.

I've got lots of extra persimmon pulp. I'm going to freeze it, though it keeps remarkably well in the fridge. High sugar content, and it seems to have some kind of natural mold repellent. Very little problem with that. I want to find a way to get this stuff to my three cooking sisters, see what they do with it.

The gorgeous time is coming to an end, and we'll need bright cinnabar fruit to get us through the long gray winter.

If you don't have American persimmons around, you can do a custard pie with rhubarb, cherries, strawberries--anything that'll make a nice bright schmoosh for the topping. Bon appetit!!