Yo! Finally autumn, I couldn’t be happier about that.

I’ve got a cool autumn observation for ya and an update on the Grove project here in this edition.

Had a few clients reach out to me about maple trees suddenly weeping at their base. Look at these:

All these dark spots appeared suddenly? What the heck?

I was the second opinion on this problem twice last month, and I believe my assessment is correct.

Two maples I’ve been contacted about were determined to have phytophthora (no typo there), a flavor of rot that is common in extremely wet areas. One that is kind of challenging to treat.

But given the time of year of this symptom’s appearance, how common it is across many maples right now, and one small detail, we can determine this is not rot. Wanna see? Gotta zoom in.

This tiny hole is created by an ambrosia beetle, it is not the weeping canker caused by phytophthora.

Ambrosia beetles aren’t terribly problematic to the health of mature trees. Though they can be to very small saplings. The reason these entrance holes weep is because the insects bored into living wood—wood that is conducting water up and down the tree.

As water passes through these damaged vessels, somewhat obviously now that you see there is a hole there, it has nowhere else to go but out once it reaches that point.

The reason the weeping holes appear around the same time is because of the phenology of this insect. The timing of its life cycle is predictable, and right now it is egg-layin’ season.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but... Unlike their cousins, the bark beetles, who are eating the cambium of a tree, ambrosia beetles are eating fungi. They inoculate the wood with fungal spores attached to their bodies, and their larvae feed on that fungi as it grows inside of the tree. They bring fungi into the tree with them, into an environment where they can effectively grow their own food within.

Pretty cool.

The meeting I had with the folks who own the crowdsource map software Grove would largely be relying on went well. I like those people.

But a limitation that was not evident to me during product testing was shared with me that I think is a big challenge. One so big that its led me to pause Grove’s progress for the time being.

During product testing of their crowdsource map software, I was able to freely place pins anywhere in the map of where I found cool trees from the comfort of my computer. This feature, though, is not available on the user-end. Only the admin-end.

This would mean that users would have to physically be at the tree’s location at the time they’d be submitting the tree into Grove.

While I think it is a good thing to encourage users to go out and find trees; it prevents users from placing pins in the map of trees that they’ve already seen and photographed. Going back to each one isn’t feasible, especially not for me! I could populate the map with 50+ trees, but I don’t have a month to revisit all of my favorites.

There was also another limitation on the software that did not allow users to place highly precise pins in the map. Users could only place pins onto addresses. Which works fine in an urban setting, but not so fine in parks or forests.

This project beta was so close to launch that I couldn’t help but spoil it right before the end-zone line. Maybe next time I’ll holster that urge a bit more lol.

This project isn’t dead, I think the idea has legs. But I have to pause it for now because something else is coming.

OK, that’s all for tonight. I’m teaching Sam how to play Magic and she’s waiting for me.

Later,

TF