Tag: nature journaling

berry interesting

Published on by Hashi1 Comment
berryinteresting

I think I already knew that tomatoes were berries. But avocados? Apparently so!

In botany, a berry is a fleshy fruit produced from a single flower containing one ovary. Under that definition, bananas, cucumbers, and eggplants are also berries.

But many of the fruit we commonly called berries, e.g. raspberries and blackberries, are not. They are aggregate or compound fruits containing seeds from different ovaries of a single flower, with the individual “fruitlets” joined at maturity to form the complete fruit.

Berrrrrrrry interesting.

you’re so vein

Published on by Hashi1 Comment
letsbotanize1

I just bought this cool book, Let’s Botanize by Ben Goulet-Scott and Jacob S. Suissa. 101 Ways to Connect with Plants? Yes please! The very first prompt has me jonesing for a microscope.

In working on this page, I learned the botanist’s terms for the upper- and under-side of a leaf. Adaxial and abaxial. How to remember which is which? Abaxial includes B for Bottom.

Diabrotica undecimpunctata

Published on by Hashi2 Comments
Diabrotica undecimpunctata
diabrotica

I used to own a shirt covered in green beetles with black spots. Here’s me wearing it back in 2017 (aside: this was taken at our old place, that burned down in the Palisades Fire of 2025. Gah I miss it.) One day someone at work told me that my shirt beetles were Diabrotica, a major agricultural pest. It stuck in my head, because I thought “Diabolical Diabrotica”.

These guys cause damage to crops in the larval and adult stages of their life cycle. Larvae feed on the roots of the emerging plants, and the adult beetles eat the flowers, leaves, stems, and fruits of over fifty different types of crops and wild plants, including corn, peanuts, beans, apples, cherries, clovers, lettuce, potatoes and, yes, cucumbers. The beetles can also spread diseases such as bacterial wilt and mosaic virus.

Who eats them? Wolf spiders!