Hand Tools, Seeds, and Supplies
(Page 7 of 10)
April/May 1998
By John Vivian
In fact, during routine weeding, I never had to hold the flame on one spot long enough to singe anything but young weed leaves. It didn't bother the woody stems of well-established crops. Indeed, the flame was good to nip grass from between corn stalks and trim out inessential ground-level leaf-growth — that does nothing but harbor slugs and snails — from around the base of tomatoes, beans, and brassicas. Applied in early morning or after a rain, it could even be used on weeds peeking up through an organic mulch that might catch fire when fully dried out.
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After several decades of disfavor, flame-weeders are back. They are powered by propane in those wasteful throw-away cylinders sold for torches and cookers. It can also be had in refillable containers of several sizes. I am allergic to insect stings and particularly like a flame-weeder for eliminating the aggressive paper wasps that stake out nest-building territories on the eaves of country buildings each spring, and do the same in hibernating crevices in the fall. They scare off interlopers by dive bombing, making a great buzz, and dragging their scratchy little bug-legs on your hide. If they get tangled in your hair they'll pop the back of your neck with the tip of their stinger. Ouch!
I always have a few wanna-be pet chickens, ducks, or geese who follow me around as I do the chores, waiting to pounce on insects I scare up in passing. The flame-weeder will singe the wings of eave-dwelling wasps so they fall to the ground and buzz around in circles till my pets find them.
New-generation flame weeders were pricey at first, and you can still pay $200 for some larger backpack models. But — as they are nothing much more than a common propane torch with a long nozzle — prices are becoming more reasonable. I got a version, good for stoop-work, from the Harbor Freight discount tool catalog for under $10. It does not have a large, row-wide flame like the backpack models or my old kerosene flame-thrower, but emits a larger version of the pencil flame of a propane torch. It can be used as a precision weeding tool that will even get in under lettuce plants to make steam that will scorch slugs and pop their eggs.
You'll find one or another model in the garden tools section of most seed catalogs this year.
GARDEN POLLINATORS
The main pollinator of our fruit trees and garden plants, the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) is under assault on several fronts. Hybridization by super-aggressive Africanized killer bees that are invading from South America can render bee colonies in warmer climates unmanageable, and two parasitic mites, Varooa and the tracheal mite, are decimating both domestic and feral (gone-wild) honeybee-hives across the continent. Backyard beekeeping is suffering badly. Commercial honey producers and the migratory beekeepers who take their hives to fields needing pollination are hard-pressed to stay in business. Bee-pollination is crucial to millions of dollars of commercial agricultural production. Maine blueberries and California almonds are just two crops that flower so profusely but so briefly that the local pollinators can't handle the load; bumper crops are dependent on pollination by migratory bees trucked in for the flowering period and honey flow. The USDA and the Land Grant Universities are working hard to tame the Africanized bee strain and control the dual plague of mites. Scientists at Purdue University, Indiana's aggie school, are doing genetic research to isolate wild bee resistance to the mites and pass it on to the gentle Italian strain of Apis mellifera.
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