Thanks for the link!
Will post at end of season.
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Sounds exciting! The bees will take care of it this summer!
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The document provided by @clarkinks mentions a moth - Evippe leuconota that feeds in the fruits of Physalis (pages 28, 29). This could be a lead. There are pictures and description of the adult insect, but there don’t seem to be any pictures of the larva online.
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Thanks. I hadn’t noticed that species mentioned. I’ll have to reread that document and try to read what I can about that moth. I had read about another obligate Physalis eating moth called Heliothis subflexa (now changed to genus Chloridea it seems). The descriptions I read of them sounds like a good fit, but the pictures don’t checkout.
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The Evippe leuconota moth sounds like a good match. The blurriness of the text makes for a bit of a rough read. A belated thanks for posting the link. It’s one I’d spent sone time with a while back, though apparently not enough. The text seems to confirm that eggs are laid early on at the start of fruit development.
I’m not having much luck finding even a pic of the adult moth. Info about the life cycle seems scant. I wonder if it goes by another name now, 80 years later.
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Yes, it seems its current name is Agnippe leuconota
http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/species.php?hodges=1770
https://bugguide.net/node/view/493412
There is also very similar A. prunifoliella
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Another possible suspect found attacking Physalis from the same family is Phthorimaea operculella; much more information on the internet about this species.
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I put remay over the native Physalis for a few weeks in spring and found out they wont fruit w/o pollination. Id thought being a solanaceous plant, they might auto-self pollinate or set parthocarpically. Fruits are late in sizing up but I dont see any worm action in the fruit. not sure if the row cover helped
such productivity from such rugged small statured plants that just seem to want some gravely shale to grow in.
r
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Weve been enjoying these pointy Chupon de Malinalco tomatillos. Nice flavor in the yellow stage. They’re usually kind of insipid. Not too foamy either
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Those Malinalco tomatillos are my favorite–tropical, sweet, intensely flavored. Roast them hard and add them to salsa.
My p. peruviana crop got about 95% wiped out by those darn moths. Did you have any luck treating for them this year @hobilus?
I wasn’t aware the native temperate physalis were edible. That’s exciting–ploidy issues would be my bet as well for the problems with crossing, though a paper cited on Wikipedia mentions trouble with hybridizing the annual species compared to the perennial species which hybridize easily.
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I bought some Bt thinking to spray for the larvae, but i realized that since it depends on contact and breaks down readily, the closed calyx would probably make it really tricky to actually spray effectively. These native Physalis are so low and sprawling that spraying anything but the tops of the plants is next to impossible, so even spraying the flowers and lower stems would be a trick. Ive seen next to no wormy fruit on both the native patch in front of my house and my immense 3 plant peruviana patch in the high tunnel. I have no idea if this reflects something I did or if the pest is just far less prevalent this year for whatever reason. How can it be, I wonder, that this moth is so pervasive yet none of us have actually seen it fluttering around, nor its eggs or pupae? Ive looked a fair bit and haven’t discovered anything of note. The only reference Ive found to this pest elsewhere is brief mention in a Rutgers article about their field trials of peruviana, where after a few years of growing then successfully they note that the fruit is destroyed by an unknown lepidopteran.
I know that ploidy differences prevent hybridizing pruinosa and philadelphica with peruviana and other perennial types. The native ones definitely hybridize freely in my observations. Im inclined to say that peruviana
will also readily cross with the native ones, whose taxonomy is a total mess from what I can tell.
The center of diversity of Physalis is central America or thereabouts. Ive mused about the likelihood of tasty Physalis having been directly brought to the colder portions of N. America as an item of trade. Some of these native ones resemble peruviana very much. Most noticeable traits distinguishing one type from another (whether that reflects true differences in species or not) are calyx size and shape (including number of ribs), leaf shape, degree of stickiness of the fruit (some are almost coated in a black sticky ‘tar’). They grow very readily in corn fields, so would have been a natural associate of three sisters type agriculture. Wouldnt it be interesting if better native types represented relict populations of food plants brought here centuries ago. Personally, I think its pretty likely thats the case, as in other fairly obvious examples like Apios, sunchoke, and paw paw, where the distribution tracks very clearly indigenous settlement patterns, and mechanisms exist to prevent their naturalization without human assistance.
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i ate a Malinalco tomatillo last night and it had grown (and tasted) very much like a sweet pepper, with the seeds and foamy pulp encasing them pulling away from the crunchy outer flesh
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It’s a real bummer with that moth. Physalis can be so tasty, and they looks really cool too. I may try some control strategies next year, not sure what though. If the moths are laying eggs shortly after fruit set, could be really hard to deal with.
If the barrier is just ploidy levels that’s not too bad. I’ve not the time or materials to mess around with more fancy breeding tricks just yet, but in the coming years I might give it a go.
Totally agree, a bunch of our “native” physalis almost certainly aren’t, at least going by the conventional understanding of native. But, well, I’ve given voice to this sentiment before, but I honestly don’t give a beaver’s dam what’s considered native or natural anymore. I about (1) if the plant provides genetic diversity (and not, “yeah, this subpopulation has elongated petioles, let’s put it on the Fed’s list” but “holy smokes, this plant is in its own genus and clade, and its family has been extinct in the northern hemisphere for 200 million years, let’s propagate it!”) (2) if a plant serves a role in the ecosystem, (3) if a plant is useful to us, and (4) if it’s just charismatic and darn cool (given the choice between letting Wollemi pine go extinct or letting five different species of Eriogonum go extinct, I’ll let the buckwheats kick the bucket, heck I’d trade a hundred Eriogonum species for Wollemi nobilis).
But anyway, certainly seems likely that physalis had some help in getting around. Apparently, mapping the “native” ranges of agaves is considered basically impossible, because Native Americans had been moving them around and cultivating them for so long, and those species have been hybridizing with each other, that instead of nice and tidy well-defined ranges and geographically distinct populations, agaves are just a big soup of species, crosses, and varieties smeared randomly across Mexico and the southwest like one of them modern art paintings.
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Looks a lot like the ones I’m growing, but bigger. Mine I wouldn’t say taste at all like sweet peppers. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I guess vaguely like papaya?
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It looks like there are some worms in the hogh tunnel peruviana, not that i can really even get in there to pick
Three plants are occupying about 6’x 10’ and are 5 ft tall.
One thing Ive notoced is that they seem to enter before the fruit os formed- no entry hole, and are almost always on the proximal end of the fruit near the stem. The black hole they make later is an exit hole. Sometimes the whole fruit rots, other times it the center is merely eaten out and filled with worm poo.
Out of 6 fruits I picked, 2 had worms. They must pupate in the soil after they leave the fruit, I would guess.
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Came across a volunteer Physalis (pruinosa I assume?) far from the garden, in the cracks in a concrete path under a fence on the north side of my house, where it only gets a couple hours of sun at best. They really can grow basically anywhere it seems. I’m guessing this was from a bird or rodent that had raided the garden, though I rarely see birds going after them.
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Man, these pictures are so triggering. That is exactly what all the fruits I have been hoping to enjoy ended up looking like.
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My tomatillos have shown similar weediness–they volunteered all over my garden. One even showed up way over in my figs, I think via some compost. But, hey, the ones that weren’t in places I needed, I’ve let grow, and now I’ve more tomatillos than a man knows what to do with.
Gonna be in a similar boat one all these biquinho peppers size up…
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Aunt Molly (pruinosa) dropping its fruit. 1/2" rain two weeks ago
probably caused ripe ones to split. Unique tangy citrusy taste - great as jam.
Lucie’s Goldenberry (peruviana) and Schoenbrun Goldenberry (peruviana) look similar as plants. Fruit is still about a month out.
Shoenbrun goldenberry
Lucie’s Goldenberry
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