I second privet.
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they do that bc the big tomcats are territorial. they will fight and kill other new cats that show up, and so will the female cats in a colony of feral cats
so instead of new cats that can breed you get a stable number of old cats that stay put and can’t make new ones. as they age out it’s still unlikely that new cats can encroach much on that area as long as there’s a few left.
there’s a feral fixed colony in my neighborhood and since they did the trap/neuter/release, no kittens at all which is a big change. used to be a bunch every spring
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Western Oregon here, but inland from Florence. Poison oak grows so well here it does reach tall shrub/short trees status, and it can blanket a hillside almost as fast as the introduced Himalayan / Armenian blackberry and Scotch broom. So I keep goats.
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I am dealing with raccoons here, too. Knocking over stuff in the shed and barn, murdering chickens if I don’t lock them up at night, scaring and sometimes attacking feral cats if I forget to pick up their food. They may be cute, but they’re trouble. I just bought a $135 (on sale!) trap since the $80 trap isn’t catching them.
After I wrote this I read other people’s experiences with feral cats. We have a ridiculous rodent problem and I tried to get an owl from Cascade raptor center. I had an American Kestrel that was helping for awhile, but he was displaced by a less helpful Coopers Hawk. So feral cats are my solution. I catch them and take them to the vet for fixing and shots. One or two will run off after, but I am consistently feeding 5 cats.
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I totally agree about the finger lime. I gave mine a bit of fertilizer one time and it died back 75%. It seems to hate sun and shade and water and fertilizer. Cold and heat too. The buddhas hand citron is finicky as well.
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Yeah if the fruit wasn’t cool, I’d have power bombed it into a bin by now. It is the most frustrating tree I’ve ever owned. Glad to know to avoid buddhas hand, since you can’t even eat that fruit. I don’t bake enough to need a cooler than normal zest item.
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honestly, i think this is more of a regional thing, but American beech. in my area (southern new york) there’s some kind of blight that has killed almost every tree in my neighborhood. when they catch whatever kills them, their leaves get kinda browned and wrinkly, and start thinning out. after this they go bare and the bark starts peeling and they drop a lot of branches. and getting rid of them is expensive too they’re usually giant or very tall and flimsy. don’t get me wrong they’re great when they are alive tho.
I agree what a trash tree. We have maybe a 40ft tall one in our lower yard. It constantly sheds branches and spreads its offspring everywhere. I’m constantly pulling Paulownia sprouts up from around the farm. My wife said that her late father planted one years ago when they were all the rage a few decades ago. Their only redeeming value is that they produce some pretty purple flowers in the spring.
My wife said that she didn’t mind if we cut it down. It’s near some power lines, so maybe we can get the power company to cut it down.
Not a tree, but we have several mulitiflora wild rose bushes in the property too. Those are awful as well.
And while many wouldn’t consider them trash trees, black walnuts grow like weeds around here. My late mother in law had two big trees cut down maybe 15 years ago and new trees sprouted up from the stumps. They’re now about 25ft tall and produce prodigious amounts of nuts. Too bad I don’t like them, but my wife does.
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Brother, I feel your pain! Your Kentucky farm sounds like mune in the North Carolina mountains. I whack away at Multiflora Rose and Black Walnuts too. I would add to this Southern Appalachian list Privet, the small tree/shrub from hell.
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Don’t think I’ve seen privet here. I’ve had to clean out some mulitiflora bushes from around a chicken coop I was renovating. You have pull up the roots or they will come back.
Another nuisance tree that grows prolifically here is tulip poplar, although it does produce some good wood.
We also have multiple thorny wild blackberry bushes that grow here. Their fruit is small and sour unfortunately. My wife and her family would pick them, but I’m like why bother, especially after I planted out a lot of thornless domestic varieties.
I will say we have wild black raspberry plants that do very well here, and have produced better tasting berries than my domesticated varieties.
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Ditto that for our blackberries all over any banks that don’t get mowed often enough - ours are small, sour, and have a bitter aftertaste. Lot of Poplars too, but they seem a little more manageable.
When you do cut that Paulownia tree down, good luck with the stump. I cleared out a bunch of 25 year + old trees and the stumps refuse to rot. The Poplars I cut at the same time 4 years ago are already rotting and the Paulownia simply won’t. Apparently Paulownia wood is used to make trunks for heirloom family kimonos in Japan. The wood is fire retardant which would have been good for a country with plenty of wooden homes. It looks like it is also rot resistant too which is not good. I even tried innoculating some of the logs (along with poplar) with oyster mushroom spore. Of course, the mushrooms grew in the poplar logs and not at all in the Paulownia🙄
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Paulownia wood is fairly unusual in structure and composition. It is more fire and rot resistant than other kinds of wood of similar density mostly because of that.
It’s also just a weird family. The genus is monotypic, so it has no other genera in the same family. Its closest relatives are a bunch of small parasitic plants. Those two and a few small families are outgroups of the mint family, all of which are in the mint order Lamiales. They used to be in the Bignoniaceae, the catalpa family, which would make sense botanically since Bignoniaceae has a bunch of trees with big leaves, foxglove-like flowers, and unusually rot-resistant wood like catalpa, guayacan, ipe, lapacho, and Marwar teak (not a true teak, but teak itself is also in the Lamiales it’s just more closely related to verbenas), but apparently genetic evidence says that Paulownia isn’t in that family.
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At least you can get some money from poplar if it’s big enough. My wife’s cousin bought about 5 acres near us from a different cousin of hers. Unbeknownst to most folks, it had a huge stand of virgin white oak on the property. Huge trees, some over 60ft high. So much, that a logger ended up hauling out about 8 log truck loads of it. They made a pretty penny on all that WO. They also hauled out a load or two of poplar, but it paid out about a quarter of what the WO did.
We have 50 acres nearby and had the same logger walk our land and we had maybe a one truckload worth of white oak on the property so he didn’t want to log it. We have lots of old growth poplar but he wasn’t interested. We do have a big stand of WO on a south facing slope, but it’s still too young to cut. The rest of our bigger trees are too spread out to be worth tearing up the hillside to get to.
I think our main hillside had been logged a couple decades ago probably for red and white oak because all that’s left is a bunch of poplar and some sugar maples. This was years before I met my wife, we live on part of her family’s farm.
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Cayenne Pepper sprinkle in your area raccoons possums and rats go and mess stuff around and i promise you they wont do it anymore . Cayenne pepper kills rats annoys the hell out of possums and raccoons
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OK, you got me beat and I am glad about it. I caught one last year that was the biggest I’ve ever seen, but you got me beat .
Just curious, was a 22 bullet Sufficient for that big headed raccoon.
22 is ok for deer too. a 30-06 wasn’t good enough for me yes i got shot in the head . no im not dead .
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You’ve made me curious as to the circumstances, but not sure if it’s rude to ask.
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it must have been a graze or you wouldnt be here to talk about it.
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drove to oregon to see my dad navy guy drunk decided to poach my dads property shot me off my horse he thought he was shooting a deer with a 30/06 winchester home made bullet hollow point loaded for elk. while i was in hospital medicated acoma i was lucky to have friends who took my horses cows animals and no one to help me with my taxes 4 1/2 later his " the shooters uncle bought my land next yr sold it for 4 million. my land was inherited from my dads Grandmother to me at 16 when she passed i had at that time had to pay 250,000 inheritance tax . trying hard to get back there to farming i really miss it i was 28 when i got shot. I do not do head shots Since . IM not against putting animals down i raise meat rabbits and chickens . Harvest myself but i just feel head shots especially mine don’t always work . Oh and the shooter did not time the judge and da his family thought that him not getting to go to war due to His group thinking he might be upset by shooting me . so truth i think he was trying to get out of war and his family finally found a chance to by my property i would have never sold