Have a longleaf pine I’ve been trying to grow in the SC Sandhills which has mostly been a trooper but suddenly a lot of the leaves turned brown and the remaining ones turned yellow. This is what also happened for the only other one on the property before it gave up and died very shortly thereafter the better part of a month ago.

Not sure what precisely is the cause but I imagine lacking water is the issue since we’re having very hot days and are still in a drought, although it weathered much more severe drought earlier this year no prob maybe the sheer heat pushes it over the edge. It was planted in the fall of last year so some but not a ton of time to build up the roots (which were also probably jacked up from curling around in a pot up until then anyway although I tried to gently break up the binding of the root ball to itself when I replanted it). I have been giving it supplemental water but if it’s doing this I imagine not enough.

Is it possible to bring a pine back from the brink when its already in this state by making sure it gets water every day or would you call it hopeless at this stage? Anyone have miracle stories? … if not, honestly I should try to get one of the plugs for it at a small stage if I need to try again so that it can grow the taproot properly instead of having to fix a messed up one… just sentimental because this is one of the first plants I tried to put in so I want to save it if I can but it’s following a trajectory I saw before.

This partridge pea was folding up its blooms and leaves to close shop for the night but this oddly gray bumblebee wasn’t budging from what I’m hoping is a deep nap. A couple others I chaos sowed grew as well but are runtier and sport maybe a couple flowers, this one however has dozens and dozens of blooms everywhere and there’s always some sort of buzz around it.

Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has been dismissed and is expected to be replaced by Ihor Klymenko.

Mykhailo Fedorov was a reformer who is credited with successes like directing money to purchase of medium and long range drones that are now being used very effectively, audits uncovering billions of dollars worth of overspending, moving some procurement to open tender, gamification of drone warfare with more points allotted to outcomes Ukraine prefers to incentivize (ex. killing enemy soldiers) and successfully lobbying Musk to shut down Starlink for Russia. However, he has had conflicts with the heads of the military such as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi; critics say that without a military background he is not qualified to plan a war, and that he is just good at attaching his name to pre-existing efforts that turned out well.

This article by the Israeli ynet website is stating that a cattle herd and with it a “civilian-agricultural presence” has been established by Yoel Zilberman, founder and CEO of Hashomer Hachadash. The location is in an enclave beyond the fence of the Golan Heights, and it was made for the purpose of warding off Syrian shephards and cattle from the area. To quote Yoel:

“My cow company pushed back the Syrian herds that had been here for 50 years,” he said. “The moment the Syrians saw that there was a cattle herd here, that there were civilian farmers and that there was a real hold on the ground, you saw the change. They moved their herds away because they were afraid we would confiscate them. This is no longer no-man’s land.”

As such, this confirms Israeli settler expansion into the UNDOF buffer zone. All countries recognize this to be Syrian territory, including the US, which is the sole country to officially consider the Golan Heights to be Israeli territory.

For a while now Turkey has been barred from having access to the F-35 plane (which is regarded as a very capable military aircraft). Trump has been making noises about allowing Turkey to buy it. This is strongly opposed by Greece and Israel as they are in an emerging block opposed to that Turkey is in, with Saudi Arabia-Pakistan-Turkey-Qatar-Egypt (plus dependents) on one side and UAE-India-Greece-Israel-Ethiopia (plus dependents) on the other. Both Greece and Israel already have the F-35, and it contains Israeli components that Israel would prefer not to have accessible to Turkey.

One potential obstacle is the S-400 system that Turkey bought from Russia after it did not secure the Patriot deal that it wanted. That was the stated reason for Turkey being kicked from the F-35 program so as to not have easy Russian access to information about the F-35 in an air defense context. Options have been floated for Turkey to sell it back to Russia or to a third party; Russia has stated that they’d be happy to buy it back (many will know they are in a crunch for air defenses right now) but the unpalatable aspect of that is that that would shore up Russia in the war against Ukraine, which runs counter to other Turkish efforts to militarily support Ukraine. On the other hand, to sell to a third party if they cannot get Russia to sign off would mean that they get a reputation for playing fast and loose with the contracts for military equipment sold to them, which closes doors to more sensitive technologies that other countries may not want to expose to the whims of politics and more expensive contracts to bake in the cost of that extra risk upfront.

The prospect of selling the F-35 to Turkey has some of both Republicans and Democrats opposed. Republican Mike Lawler and Democrat Dina Titus are spearheading efforts to block the sale of the F-35 citing matters ranging from the S-400 to the Turkish occupation of North Cyprus, increasing anti-Israel rhetoric and more.

What a generous gift to those little flies! This is Sarracenia flava (yellow pitcher plant), a carnivorous native of the US Southeast Plains in a band from coastal Alabama out to southeastern Virginia. The weird looking things on the left side of the 2nd picture are the old structures for the flowers it previously had before the pitchers fully developed and opened up. (The flowers in question look like this and smell bad.) I’m not terribly sure of what the purple thing is since this is my first time keeping one, maybe that’s what develops into a seed pod? Anyway, seems to be a popular place to chill among the arthropods.

edit: initially botched the photos, maybe this works

The Arab League convened an emergency meeting in Cairo after Sudanese officials alleged that various drone attacks against targets such as Khartoum International Airport originated from Ethiopia’s Bahir Dar airport. The Sudanese officials also alleged that these attacks were linked to support provided by the United Arab Emirates to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Ethiopia rejected the allegations and counter-claimed that Sudan was supporting hostile elements linked to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which the latter denied. Similarly the UAE also denied the allegations.

Earlier in February, Reuters said that Ethiopia made a secret training camp for thousands of RSF fighters near the Sudanese border, allegedly with financial and logistical backing from the UAE.

I’ve been at my house for the better part of a year and I’m happily finding I have many volunteers of the Rubus genus which seem to be doing well and are shooting out runners every which way. Almost all have yet to celebrate their first birthday and so are too young to bear fruit but this one predates my arrival and did start working on… this weird thing.

I thought this was a Southern Dewberry (Rubus trivialis). There is a field with like jillions of Southern Dewberries nearby and their fruits which started coming in earlier look very very similar to blackberries by my eyes with many tiny drupelets densely packed together and either black color if they’re ripe or green/red if not. However, this berry looks very different since it only has two comparatively huge drupelets. There are other flowers on this particular bramble but only one other on this one made fruit (that less mature fruit also has only two drupelets).

Is this like some kind of mutant? Or is that variation in fruiting not unheard of for this or similar plants? Just wondering since I’ve not yet seen any similar looking fruit out in that field even though they’re all over the place. For less exotic possible causes I can think of, we have had a massive drought that only lately broke so maybe it’s a resource thing (though that should also be the case for the field which is not irrigated?) or maybe pollination went badly since this particular fella is kind of isolated without many floricanes of fellow Rubus nearby.

I also have what I think is an immature Pennsylvania Blackberry (Rubus pennsylvanicus) without flowers on my property and saw some Sand Dewberry (Rubus cuneifolius) out in the field and who knows what I haven’t seen so maybe there could be hybrid shenanigans? But both of those also have fruit that look way more like a standard blackberry than this weird thing so I suspect not.

Bonus picture since I think I failed to make multipictures at the top: