Blooming now in Virginia in the wild. A hint is added if you recognize the insect in the second pic as its favorite host is that plant.
2 Likes
Kudzu.
I never tried making jelly from the blossoms, but have battered and fried the leaves.
I love the scent of the blossoms.
4 Likes
Right you are! I love the scent too. Lucky for me those plants are not on my land. But I do stop to smell the flowers when I see them in bloom.
Kudzu Bug is the insect. Can be a pest in soybeans needing a spray but rarely. In the fall after a hard frost, you can find Kudzu bugs clustered on green soybeans that missed the frost as they get a last meal before hibernating under tree bark.
1 Like
We had a ‘kudzu field’ on the farm back in south AL… saved the day for the beef herd more than one summer - would be green and leafy when everything else was brown & crispy - but it didn’t take the cows more than a day or two to strip all the leaves - but they’d grow back quickly. Great, high-protein forage that the cows loved, but once it managed to get up above browse height and into the trees… it was out of control. That said… I prefer kudzu to Chinese wisteria…
Every couple of years, we’d have to spend a day or two cutting/pulling dead kudzu vines off the half mile of barbed wire fence along the highway frontage and re-stretch the wire, 'cause the kudzu would have pulled the 5-strand fence almost down to ground level.
1 Like