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It was on his deathbed, I think, before the oh-so-eminent doctor gave him a hot-shot of morphine, so he’d die in time for the morning papers.

Sorry to go off topic (though the tiny china pig is charming), but I have a question for Uncle Badger. Do you remember the procedure/recipe for washing down citrus trees that one of Stoaty’s readers shared last year? I thought I’d bookmarked it, but I can’t find it. His method used fairly ordinary ingredients, as I recall. My satsuma has a sad case of leaf miner.

…sending up the badger signal…

Ah, thanks to the majik of Google and and a little help from ol’ stoatie herself, we find this:

Hope it helps! 🙂

Comment from BJM
Time: February 7, 2015, 7:38 pm

@Uncle Badger:

Have you checked the pot for ants? Ants are usually responsible for a scale infestation (they feed on the sticky waste the scale exudes).

Your first step is to make a bucket of soapy water and take a soft cloth and wash the plant all over with soapy solution getting rid of the scale and the ants. Just keep drowning them in the bucket. Take time and get every one of them off. Best soap to use is a fatty acid made for landscape use, your local nursery will have safe insecticidal soaps, in the US we have a product called Safer Soap, but any pure castile soap will do mixed with water at 2%…do not use dishwashing liquid.

Once you kill off the scale and ants a very cool preventative trick, if you can get it, is to use dry worm castings as a mulch, ants will not cross worm castings as it kills them. You can also get a safe, sticky barrier to paint on the trunk…it’s called Tanglefoot here..or paint the trunk with a lime based whitewash.

Organic gardeners traditionally use a lime-based whitewash made from hydrated lime, water and oil. Hydrated lime (also known as slake or builder’s lime) is readily available from hardware stores and building suppliers. It’s very caustic, so be sure to follow the safety directions on the pack. When handling, avoid contact with skin and eyes and avoid breathing the dust (wear suitable gloves and eye/face protection).

Adding oil helps the whitewash to stick. Linseed oil is the traditional choice, or you can use an eco-safe horticultural oil. Here’s the “recipe” my Gran taught me:

Step 1 – Pour 500ml of water into a bucket.
Step 2 – Add 224g of hydrated lime.
Step 3 – Pour in 5ml of oil.
Step 4 – Mix together and add more water or lime until you have a smooth slurry similar to the consistency of house paint.
Step 5 – Slop it on the trunk and woody lower branches (not the green twiggy branches) thickly with a paint brush. It rinses off your clothes and surrounds easily.

That’s it…ants and other creepy crawlers will avoid it…be sure to keep Jack away until the whitewash dries. I use it after pruning and it helps fruit trees heal without exposing them to canker.

Hooray! Thank you for taking the time to search. I appreciate it so much. And thanks again to BJM for such valuable information. I hope to be a better citrus farmer this next year. Though my one little satsuma was delicious! We ate it at Thanksgiving 🙂 There are three handsome Meyer lemons not quite fully yellow, and the Mexican lime (aka Persian lime) is loaded with blossoms.

Just don’t use quicklime, because that would be bad. 😉

Don’t they sometimes use a copper sulfate solution on citrus?

That’s a cute little slogan: Wunt Be Druv.

One of these days, I’ll get my finger out of my ass and make a Wunt be Druv t-shirt.

Behead those who insult The Haggis, Great Chieftain o the puddin’-race!

It is very yummy in reality. Abate your squeam and have at it. Sadly I haven’t had one since my Dad died and god knows where I’d get one in Costa Rica anyway.

Haggis is good. If y’all can eat the various things that get made into sausage packed in what was intestine; surely other healthful innards mixed with oats in a sheep’s stomach canna’ be beyond the Pale.

mmmm- Haggis!

“Hope you’ve made the tatties, neaps and haggis.”
I have a theory about those quant inedible cultural dishes that you find in every corner of the world. Like fermented (read rotten) shellfish, urine soaked shark, “pudding” made from the parts of an animal that the dogs won’t eat. My theory is this: once upon a time, way back, those people ran out of food and were starving. So they experimented eating what was available. Later, after they survived, they held festivals to celebrate their survival, and, as remembrance, ate the “foods” that saved them. More later, the real reason for the festival was lost or forgotten, and yet the people continue to celebrate and eat that icky stuff because now “it’s our culture.”

Burns? Bobby Burns? Wrote an ode to a louse or some other vermin, as I recall — “Wee, sleekit, tim’rous, cowering beastie” or words to that effect? My cats would have preferred he write an ode to a flea. Or maybe just killed the fleas, as I try to do.

Bob wrote: . . . once upon a time, way back, those people ran out of food and were starving. So they experimented eating what was available. Later, after they survived, they held festivals to celebrate their survival, and, as remembrance, ate the “foods” that saved them. More later, the real reason for the festival was lost or forgotten, and yet the people continue to celebrate and eat that icky stuff because now “it’s our culture.”

Explains why people in Da Swamp are willing to eat red-black insectoids that yield less than a fingernail of meat per insectoid, and to do it outdoors in heat that would stun a Cape buffalo. (They’re nuts.)

I think all Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.

Somebody tell HowardDevore that they flipped the switch on Abe Vigoda.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/abe-vigoda-sunken-eyed-character-actor-dead-94-36528884

Comment from mojo
Time: January 26, 2016, 4:05 pm

I think all Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.

1) Single malt.
2) Admittedly, #1 makes the dare more feasible.

Haggis HAS to be better than lutefisk, it simply has to be.

That poor pig does seem concerned about something.

Comment from scottthebadger
Time: January 27, 2016, 6:14 am
. . . That poor pig does seem concerned about something.
*
*
Constipation, perhaps.