North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Amelia Hayner <abhayner@gmail.com>]

that is so cool! They must have had it set pretty high, I never figured out how the equipment didn't get entrapped in the vines. I guess if the vines were grazed regularly, they would have been right flat on the ground.

oh well, I guess it seemed a good idea, at the time, importing that monster.

I know that they tried very hard, as well, to get the silk industry going in NC, but that just didn't catch on.

I grew one white mulberry, I think that's the favored type, and it grew HUGE very fast, and was a very attractive tree.

it seemed to have less fruit than the darker variety, BUT at least could be in closer proximity to the clothes line.

Amy

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 9:35 PM, Louis Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu> wrote:

Amy,
Having grown up in east-central AL, I'm familiar with The Vine That Ate The South.  Kudzu is great high-protein forage for ruminant animals - and the young leaves are tasty if you batter 'em and fry 'em.
It's great, so long as there are no trees for it to climb into or fences to conquer and drag to the ground.
Doesn't take long for a hungry herd of cows to completely defoliate a field - but it re-leafs/regrows pretty quickly once you pull them off to another field.
Back in the day, before the advent of effective herbicides, constant overgrazing was the only effective means of eradicating it - but those big fibrous roots went deep, and held quite a bit of reserve capacity - and if the vines ever got above grazing/browsing height into the trees...it was a lost cause.

I've got photos of my dad, when he was in his late teens/early 20s, along with an older farm worker, mowing a kudzu field for hay with a horse-drawn mowing machine; would have been prior to 1950...

Lucky