WOI: News Clip 352

Again, Dr. Lois Tiffany from the botany and plant pathology department and I are down in Pammel Woods and this is the same tree that we were talking about the last time, and we had some more to say about it. That's right. Because we were talking at that particular time of the opp of the leaves being opposite and the type of leaf and one whole, this is this is one whole leaf? That's right, one entire leaf. Right. But, there are some other things that you don't have to necessarily have those leaves on, that you showed me that you could see that even if it were winter time. Right, now if we go back to this branch here where we broke one leaf off to take a look at it a little more carefully, you can see that there's a nice neat break area here and this is where this leaf would have, that leaf would have fallen off this autumn. Now, this is called a leaf scar, obviously enough, and you can see the little bud right there just above the leaf scar, and it'll be bigger by next fall, but not much so. Now, if you look back here on the older part of this branch, if we get back into last, well this is two year old area we're in here actually, but you can see here is a leaf scar from last, from two years ago, and here, even better, on this branch that grew last year, you can see these great big leaf scars and so in the winter even, you can see that there are two leaf scars here opposite each other. So, this opposite and alternate business one can check out not only when the leaves are on the tree, but via the leaf scars you can tell where they were in the winter time. So, this is a good good character to use any time of year actually. All right now, big question. Why does that little branch go off there? Why does a branch go off, or twig, or whatever you want to call it? Because that particular bud grew. Oh, okay. Many many trees have what we call apical dominance, and an end bud will grow, and the lateral buds, the ones back along the side, will remain dormant, but if the top gets broken off, say if we cut this one off here, this bud which is right here at this node by this leaf scar, would probably go ahead and grow. If not, this year, next year. So when you prune shrubbery in the yard or something like this, you prune the ends off and then the the buds that normally wouldn't have grown otherwise will go ahead and develop. Well now, this one wasn't pruned, no? No, this one wasn't pruned. So this is. So what happened? This is just natural. Something happened here that this one did, the one on this side didn't develop, this one did. Uh-huh, mhm. And you notice there are lots of places back here along the the where see there buds pair of buds here. Right. A pair of buds here. Now. And none of these have developed. Now, this has pretty distinct growth areas. Right, now the very green branches right here are this year's growth. Did we say what kind this was? It's an ash. Yes. All right. The flex here on this stem are called lenticels and these are little corky areas which permit the passage of gases from the cells inside the stem to the outside air and outside air gases in to the stem. And you'll notice they look different here you can still see them back here on the older branches also. Now, does insect problem cause it not to grow as much? This would depend on the insect and on the particular plant. This would vary with different combinations. Well now one thing I wanted to for us to go to this because we were talking about and not what it is particularly, but you say that this this is the what, effect of an insect? Right, this is where an insect has actually eaten out the the green cells of the leaf so that and these are the the green cells are the ones that make the food for the tree, so when they're eating if, if enough insects eat enough green cells, then this tree would be in trouble. Now another funny little one here. Where did it go, did I step on it? This leaf right here I think is the one you were looking at. It's now then that looks like you know a little spider went by and left a little web. Now, I'm not an entomologist. Right. But I think this is caused by an insect that's called a leaf miner, and it tunnels actually through this through through the leaf and eats out again the green cells, and so you see the little trails where its journey through the central part of the leaf. Now, I may be asking something that I shouldn't be asking you, but as it goes from here across this main vein, now did that cut off any of the food traveling down to this vein and back? Maybe, maybe not? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know really how. My impression is that they just eat the the green cells, which are relatively thin wall cells, and the cells which actually transport materials are fairly thick walled. But again, I'm I'm talking about something I don't know a lot about. Now, as far as other trees, this is this is a puny one. This is a puny one, but it's one that is of interest. We were talking about poison ivy. Right. And this. That was last time. That was last time. And we were pointing out that poison ivy has three leaflets in each leaf. Well this is a box elder, and it grows in the same kind of place as poison ivy does frequently, and when you see this as a seedling tree with its three leaflets in each leaf, it sometimes can look very much like poison ivy. The edges of the leaf are cut in very much the same way. So does the box elder end up with the three leaves? Some box elders have three leaflets on each leaf. As you can see this plant does fairly consistently. Some of them will have some threes, some leaves that have three leaflets, and some leaves that have five leaflets. And so that there is no. There just, this is just natural variation. But it does, I can definitely see why it would resemble the poison ivy. Now. One of the interesting things about box elders, sort of a scrawny tree. You mean this one is, or all box elders? Often, they are. But it you notice it has opposite leaves here again and it is actually in the maple group of plants, but it's the only maple that we have in this part of the world, or at least in the Midwest here, that has a compound leaf. All of our maples, both hard maples and soft maples, have simple leaves. Right. Like the ones we've talked about before. So this is is a peculiar maple. Now, as I say, this this is one that looks like poison ivy when it's small, but now we were talking about how poison ivy can grow and it's not always on the ground, and this tree is a good example of how it can go up. Right. If we can get it from the bottom. Now, the vine, which you can see growing up that oak tree there, is actually a Virginia creeper vine, but if we. That's a little five-leaf one. Right, but if we couldn't see the the leaves on it right now, the vine itself, the stem growing up there looks very much like a poison ivy vine and grapevines obviously out in the woods look very much like this also. And don't use them to. Don't use them to swing on, no. Will you get that poison ivy from the bark or does it have to be from the leaf, or do you know? You can you can get it from any part of the plant, even the roots, but you have to come actually into into contact with it. I mean, just walking by the tree. Right. Something like this would not be a problem. But contact with the roots or with the. With the stem or with the leaves, right. And this has to again finish this section at least, and our guest has been again Dr. Lois Tiffany from the plant botany plant pathology department and maybe the next time we'll go on campus on some of the unusual trees. Fine. Thank you. Again we have with us Dr. Lois Tiffany of botany and plant pathology, and the last time we were talking in the woods we promised that we talk more about leaves, but we have discovered a leaf here that we better talk about first. We're getting poison ivy, we think. Now, the leaves over there I think are the ones that cause a lot of mothers and children to wonder if it's poison ivy. Now that is or is not poison ivy this is not and this one you see has five leaflets they're all attached at one common point here onto a petiole onto a stem which goes down to the main stem now I'm not going to pick the poison ivy like that but it has three leaflets with which are attached in the same way coming into a common point and the edges are very similar on the two but this business of three and five is quite significant now both of these plants both Virginia Creeper with the five leaflets in poison ivy with the three will be on the forest floor like this crawling along growing along they may occur as vines growing up on houses or on trees or they may look like short shrubs somewhat upright maybe two anywhere between two and four feet high so both the Virginia creeper and the poison ivy plant are alike in growth habit and they both obviously occur in the same kind of habitat same kind of places now I noticed that you were quite willing you know I'll be daring enough to get a finger this close but now actually is it poisonous if you don't touch it or is that debatable depending upon the sensitivity of the person usually you have to actually come in contact with it except when you have poison ivy material that is in a fire if you're having a picnic fire somewhere or clearing an area in the woods if you get poison ivy material then the compound the people are sensitive to is volatile and it will be in the smoke so that perhaps is the way one way people can contact it without actually touching the planet well now on to other leaves but just be careful about this one we'll watch this one now this leaf is I think a different tree but it has some of the same sort of edge as one of the trees the other day right it looks very much like the both the iron wood and the hackberry that we were talking about the other day and it has the same kind of leaf in that it is a simple leaf one flat green part one petiole and when we take a look at the stem here there is a leaf here a leaf here one at each node on at each point on the stem so and we said that there are plants where there is there are two leaves attached at one point here so we just will start from this one again and then this is basswood incidentally it's called also linden tree these are the same same tree and it has it's a very common tree in the slopes here in the woods and often grows you can see there are two trunks there in a cluster and these are actually coming from the same root system and often you'll see different sized trunks coming up from the same root system so you get what looked like a whole cluster of trees but they're actually part of the same one so this this doesn't branch after it once it has a central trunk like some of the trees that may go up and then have their branches that actually it almost branches from the root system almost and this is one of the things that makes it perhaps a little more difficult to in terms of lawn trees and things of this sort all right now maybe this was on the other and I didn't get it that little that little green fella there that little green bump is the bud now this will be for next year's leaves and stem would come from and by the by this fall this one that which is bright green right now will be a sort of a coral pink color and so the winter buds or when the buds go into winter they are actually a sort of a bright red and they're very handsome but it's a much more prominent on this it shows much better on this tree now is that unique for this tree or is it just the time of the year they're a little older than when we were looking at them last and also this one has bigger butts so it's got two things going for it all right all right now with this one in mind let's move over here and take a look at this maple now this one is different this one is different this is one of the maples this is so-called hard maple and as you can see at each node back here on the stem there are two leaves two here coming off in this plane two here and the basal part of the petiole here tends to to sort of sheath around the stem sort of encloses it much more than the other things we were looking at and you'll notice the leaf itself is a very different pattern and it has each one of these big areas here is called a lobe and so this individual this is a still simple leaf but each the leaf has three lobes on this particular one we're looking at and it doesn't have one big central vein that's right we can see this perhaps a little better that's our little friend see this better on the reverse side of the leaf here you can see that there are are three large veins in fact there are a couple of ones which almost qualify as being as big rather than having one main midrib vein as on the leaves we've been looking at before so the vein pattern is quite different too and is characteristic of this particular kind of tree here again this hard maple and the bass would would be trees which we'd commonly find on slopes here in central part of Iowa like the woods we're here in here today now now one other thing before we go to the other though okay now on the other we had the little buds but now this doesn't have nearly the prominent buds that the other one did and it's exactly the same time of the year okay now this one there down in there and if we took the broke the petiole back we could see them nestled right in here where the petiole attaches onto the stem but they they haven't developed nearly as much they won't be as big by next fall either now beginning right here is this year's growth right this much stem is this year's gross how much do they usually grow year or did varies a great deal in individual trees and on different parts of the same tree mm-hmm this is down here in the shade so I'm sure if we you know if we climbed up to the top of the tree we could find some that were much larger even is that a disease that's an insect now these are opposites but now that that one right there has opposites too and they look a little bit different alright let's get it down here oops now you're right you can see on the branches here maybe we can see it on this one very nicely there are two leaves here two here two here and but this much is one leaf on this right and this much is one leaf here right and you can see they're gonna here again they're small but there's a bud right down there and this is the way we tell that this much I'll break this one off so we can take a look at it is one entire leaf now this is the the petiole still but each one of these flat green parts which are separate would be individual leaflets so this is a so-called compound leaf because it has more than one flat green part and more than that it's called a pinnately compound leaf because there are leaflets attached here here and here so they're attached at different places on the stem now these are all important term terms if you're going to be looking up in the tree book for identification and this sort of thing right one of the first things a tree book will will ask you about in terms of the plant you're looking at is whether it has simple or compound leaves and so this is one of the one of the beginning steps if you missed that step you you've had a wrong spot and we'll have to get the details of that particular type of tree at another time our guest has been dr. Lois Tiffany with botany plant pathology department at Iowa State and we will continue perhaps another day not too long ago Debbie [Bull?] our guest today talked about equipment that should be part of camping and she showed us the reflector oven and she showed us the Dutch oven but I thought a lot of people actually don't know how to cook with him and so Debbie is back with us and she is a junior at Iowa State and you just finished getting the fire just about ready to the spot to work with the reflector oven right one of the things with the reflector fire is that you want bright flames because the whole point is is if the fire and the heat reflects off the inside and you can see how the oven is built so that it reflects and one thing it's easy to do is to build your fire down and then so and then you want to back up here this can be done in several ways you can take two sticks and stretch aluminum foil across here or you can take two sticks and stack green logs up or another reflector oven variety of things you can get by without any of these other methods by just keeping a high enough hot enough fire here but you do have to be careful that when you don't have your reflector back here that you may have to adjust the distance that your oven is to your fire or move your fire a little bit because it can get too hot and then it burns without cooking right without cooking it on the interior now this reflector oven looks a little tiny bit different than some of the others right this oven is moved just by the handle on top and many ovens which I'll show you one later has a lid that lifts up in the back so that you can reach in from behind to turn your pan around instead of having to either move your oven out or reaching in front of the fire and turn your pan alright now you're going to fix some cornbread right did is this a mix or did you make yourself or does it really make any difference it doesn't really make any difference I find it easier to mix all the dry ingredients at home and then when you're out camping you can mix the other ingredients that it would make it moist in and then you've got it all ready to put on and it's all pre measured now you're using one the tap on plan pans that you have out of your camping equipment set I think right I like I like the Teflon pans just because they're easy to clean this is cornbread I don't know if we said that hopefully it's cornbread it starts out it might be mush it's supposed to be and then you just I think I'm gonna move this out to take it out slip it in and then you set your oven back in now we'll have to build the fire back up so that there's flames shooting up so that it'll be reflecting Debbie how long does it take to cook well it's kind of hard to say because every time you use a reflector oven or a Dutch oven the temperature fire is always gonna be a little bit different the reflection may not be the same wind will do strange things you kind of have to watch it and when you read your recipes at home or camping or whatever it'll tell you what to look for like a golden-brown crust and you use your knife just like you would at home when to stick it in the middle and I'd say this will probably take about half an hour and so now it should brown in the same to a certain extent like it does in the oven right it'll look it should look just exactly as it does if you take it out of your oven at home completed now are you going to ever have to turn this one around within the oven right when you're using cooking like this especially without a reflector on this side you need to keep turning it because you don't want to get this side will become doner on the bottom where it's closer to the fire where the other side will tend to cook faster on top and you need to keep turning it it will also help keep it level and what does one do with such bees that drop in yes I notice that well there's chocolate-covered ants and chocolate-covered bees we'll have a cornbread covered then right you keep feeding the fire you want to this is a fairly good flame it can be varying degrees of higher or not this one is almost too close but because of the confines of the fireplace we can't really move either one idea ideally it should be about the main part of the fire should be right about here now you can't do this with charcoal can you this is hard to do with with charcoal I've never been able to because you need a flame but you can use the Dutch oven which I'll show you later can be done with charcoal needless to say we've had about a 15-minute intermission here but while the cornbread baked and Debbie it now looks like it it's about done right and just like you do at home to test it you stick your knife down in the middle and since I can't get in from the back of this I'm just gonna lift it out this protects hands from getting burned which can ruin lots of camping trips I think it's done I think it looks like it's done I think it does too and it looks good well there's the finished product hmm then you just cut it and serve it now if you needed something very quickly in the oven you could set it on at the side and keep it warm until the time right and keep it into the but as long as it stays there if you didn't have any little kids now one thing that we wanted to let check let me reach this and this was the other reflector oven (inaudible) right this is another type it's a little more sturdy and this one is nice in terms of it won't fall apart on you because it's made to stay like this this one is collapsible so that it folds up into just a small box and it's easier for carrying for backpacking and just general camping for this one is a little more cumbersome yes now this one will fold up into this size box right but and it's a little bit larger it gives you a little more surface area to put your pan in here maybe I can show you by comparison I'll just sort of you can get your pan further in which allows for a little evener baking and you did we should say that you did for a minute or two put some aluminum up to reflect into this particular fire but I think that would can be done depending upon the situation that you have to do one right and we thank Debbie very much Debbie [Bull?] she's a junior at Iowa State and this is the work with the reflector oven now we will be moving on for one now the Dutch oven but that will have to wait as far as you're concerned until tomorrow