Prepare for new coronavirus like an emergency, health minister advises

Beware invasive, ‘frightening’ waterhemp

There’s a threat lurking on the edge of Manitoba farmers’ fields this fall that’s even scarier than the escalating trade war with their biggest customer.

Provincial extension advisers are warning farmers to watch for a weed known as “tall waterhemp,” which, true to its name, may already be towering above ready-to-harvest crops.

Those wispy tentacles waving in the breeze look pretty innocuous from a distance. But this highly invasive member of the pigweed family produces hundreds of thousands of seeds that are just itching for dispersal through farmers’ combines and across their fields.

Each of those tiny seeds — one small pill container filled halfway holds 44,000 — can produce plants with stems the width of saplings and heights of two to five metres. One or two plants can quickly turn into a patch. If waterhemp takes over a field, it can choke out the growing crop and cut yields by more than 90 per cent.

Paralympics open in empty stadium - just like Olympics

On Wednesday at 12 p.m. ET, Toronto Star baseball columnist and Deep Left Field podcast host Mike Wilner will answer your questions about the Blue Jays and anything else baseball-related.

Of frogs, roses, kings and a Great Lake

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as the saying goes. Basically, if you change something’s name, you don’t actually change the nature of the thing.

That being said, if even 15 years ago an American president had called an entire news conference to announce he was renaming one of the Great Lakes by writing on a map with a red pen and issuing an executive order purporting to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” all and sundry would question his mental health.

Maybe, after witnessing so much from Donald Trump, we’ve all just been hardened off and the foolish is now expected daily. Perhaps it’s the political equivalent of the fable of the boiling frog.

As the fable goes, drop a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will jump right out. But put the frog in room temperature water and bring the pot to a boil, the frog will stay until its death. (It’s unlikely the frog would actually wait.)

Parcel Pizza delivers familiar favourite wrapped up with a saucy twist

Good ideas come to those who wait (for the right location).

Parcel Pizza, a new restaurant from the owners of the Roost and Oxbow, is a case of food inspired by its surroundings. The pizzeria, located on the main floor of a new residential building on Stradbrook Avenue — although it’s equidistant from Osborne Village, downtown and The Forks — is one of the only eateries in the neighbourhood. Choosing a cuisine that would draw people in was the first order of business.

“We thought that something that is universally beloved, like pizza, would be really beneficial for the area,” says co-owner Elsa Taylor. “Another reason, what with the plague and all, is that we wanted something that would be conducive to takeout and delivery.”

In addition to the location, Parcel represents several firsts for Taylor and business partners Caiden Bircham and Isaac Hedenstierna, who make up the Oddlot Collective restaurant group.

One family passes trapping knowledge through three generations

Snow falls softly over a muted landscape of boreal forest, rock ridges, spruce swamps and beaver ponds. This 60-square-kilometre area of land in the southwest corner of Whiteshell Provincial Park is the Imrie family trapline; they are designated to trap and manage the populations of fur-bearing animals.

Right now, three generations of Imries — Murray, 72, Devin, 36, and five-year-old Thomas — are gathered at a beaver house. Devin thumps a 1.5-metre-long ice chisel onto the surface of the pond, looking for the entrance of the lodge (the movement of the beavers swimming back and forth below weakens the surface). Thomas climbs onto the pile of sticks and brush with his grandpa, and the two dig through the snow to find the breathing hole. Hot air and a thick, musky smell means that the beavers are active here this winter.

The scene could have taken place a century earlier. Other than the snowmobiles parked nearby, the process hasn’t changed much over the years. Devin cuts a hole in the ice, chops down a long, thin tree to serve as a pole for holding the traps under the water, and then gets to work setting them. They are wire “conibear” style traps, orange with rust after many seasons of use, designed to snap around the animals’ neck or body, killing them instantly.

Murray explains the beavers have already eaten all of the poplar in the area, which is their preferred food source, and have moved onto birch and spruce. If the going gets really rough, the rodents might even resort to eating cattail tubers to make it through the winter. A twig of poplar, scratched to simulate tooth marks, is stuck into the trap as bait. “We’re going to have a beaver probably in less than two days,” crows Thomas.