The Apple Mint Dance

I was supposed to be canning pickles (both dill and my sweet gherkins), plus I had apple sauce that was hot and waiting for the canner to heat up.  But before I got started packing the pint jars, I thought I would run out to the garden once more to look through the cucumber vines and see if I missed any.   I had.  So I picked them, and noticed that there were some tomatoes that also needed to be picked.   I needed a basket for that, so I started back to the house to get it.

As I scurried past the pond, I noticed that the apple mint was in full bloom.   It is taking full advantage of the lapse in memory I had a few weeks ago when I started the water running into the pond to fill it up, went inside and promptly forgot all about it.  In the morning as I was waiting for my teapot to fill so I could make coffee, I thought idly to myself,  ”Gosh, the water pressure sure doesn’t seem to be as high as usual … OH SHOOT (expurgated for the blog)!!!  Whereupon I crashed out of the house, scaring the dog away from her breakfast, ran out to the garden to turn the spigot off and observed that the pond was approximately 5 inches over flood stage.  Further investigation showed that the water had flowed all the way down to the Petite Prairie, watering the day lily bed quite throughly.  The drain pipe at the other side of the vineyard was also trying to deal with the overflow.   I still have a green circle down there, where everything else is sere and brown.

But I digress.   The apple mint was blooming furiously, having been so well watered previously.   I just deviated from my course a bit to see if perhaps my honey bees were availing themselves of the pollen source.  They were.

The honeybees had lots of company out there.    I forgot all about pickles and apple sauce and went to get my camera.  I spent quite a while out there, standing quietly just inside the border of the mint patch.  When I first arrived with my camera, everyone got very excited and nervous about the big thing that had just disturbed the feeding frenzy.   But as I stood quietly, things settled down.   Here is a group of four different sorts of wasps, all intent on their food source.

 

The variety of pollinators present was impressive.

There were yellow jackets, of course.

 

 

Several different types of wasps were in attendance.

 

That big black wasp was at the large end of the size spectrum.   But there were teensy wasps too.

 

Some of the wasps were overcome with optimism for the future by the large quantity of food available.   The sudden onset of a good energy source put them in the mood, I guess.

The female went about the business of flying and eating as if the male wasn’t even present.

There were also several female bumblebees at the buffet.

 

A tachnid fly — one of several different varieties flitting about.

 

Butterflies –a buckeye and a little blue.   The little blue has a mud dauber wasp sharing the frame with her.

 

I saw a beautiful bright green sweat bee, but it didn’t stick around long enough to get photographed.   You can see what it looked like here.

There was an interesting beetle.

I’m not positive, but that may be an assassin bug, which means it isn’t strictly a pollinator, but more a pollinator eater.   They wait in flowers for the pollinators to come along, grab them and then suck the juices out of them.

Here’s another predator.   Probably not big enough to be a danger to anyone other than that tiny wasp above, or possibly a gnat or aphid.

That’s my finger holding the flower apart because the little crab spider wasn’t anxious to be photographed and kept hiding from me.   No escape from the paparazzi, I’m afraid.

There were a couple of dragonflies around too.   This is a rather small red one.

Just a few feet away is the pond, and this big blue dragonfly was hovering around there.

It was heartening to see all that life burgeoning in the yard, since it has been scorchingly hot for three weeks.    I mean really hot, too.   The temperatures have been over 100°F every day for three weeks, only cooling off into the low 80s at night.   (That would be 38° C for all the rest of the world.)   This heat has been accompanied by a complete absence of rain of any measurable amount.   We had a respite today, a line of storms came across the plains.   We got about 1mm of moisture out of that, enough to settle the dust (barely) and raise the humidity to about 90%.   Ergh.

This is what the garden along the back of the house looks like.   All those burned hostas are not dead, they are just conserving their energy and protecting their roots.   Still, it is a little depressing.   The Hosta Dell exhibits similar damage.

Please notice the lawn to the right of the path.   Our whole place looks just like that except around the landscape shrubs and trees, which we have been pampering with regular water.   This also encourages the grass, which gives the rabbits something other to eat than the fruit tree bark.   The rabbits out browsing gives the owls something to eat.

There is a note of hope in the middle of all that devastation.    The naked ladies have made their appearance.   I just love them, their combination of hardiness and delicacy is inspirational.

The pickles have been put through the canner and are cooling on the counter.   They are accompanied by 6 pints of apple sauce.

Now I believe I’ll get that basket and go out and investigate the tomato situation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Broccoli

I was always a weird child.   We took advantage of the hot lunches at school, and when spinach or broccoli showed up on the menu, I just really enjoyed them, much to the disgust of my fellow fourth graders.

I think maybe this was because since we lived in the mountains in Colorado and it was a long way to Safeway, my mother shopped for groceries only once every two weeks.   She was committed to providing us with a balanced diet, and so there were always vegetables on the table, and they were always out of the frozen food section.   They also were always the least expensive varieties, so we had corn, green beans, carrots, peas, peas and carrots and mixed vegetables served on a regular basis.   Spinach and broccoli were occasional treats.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I have always loved my vegetables, and broccoli is one of my favorites.  It wasn’t until I started growing my own that broccoli achieved the status of a love affair.   The difference between broccoli that you grew yourself and picked a few minutes before it was steamed and the broccoli that has travelled all the way across the country to a warehouse, sat around there and then travelled some more to live in the cooler of a supermarket for several days before you actually purchase it is indescribable.

I’m sure if I had know the sweetness and tenderness of  fresh broccoli earlier in my life, I would have committed more garden space to it sooner.

Nutritionally speaking, broccoli is one of the dieter’s friends.   It is packed with all sorts of nutrients including vitamin A, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, lots of potassium and even sports a complete array of amino acids, which makes it a decent protein source.   Of course, there are also cancer fighting antioxidants and fiber to keep your colon happy.  All of this benefit with relatively few calories:  24 calories per one cup serving.

When you start growing broccoli, you discover that you are not the only being in the world who thinks it is tasty and nutritious.   Believe me, I have watched my broccoli being consumed by cabbage looper caterpillars, and corn ear worms are not averse to feasting on broccoli either.

As an organic gardener, I will not douse my vegetables with poisons.   Over the years I have tried diatomaceous earth with limited success.  Bt is something that works, but you have to keep applying it.    Over the years, what I have found that works perfectly is the floating row cover.

Here is a shot of floating row cover in action.

I

It acts as a physical barrier to the bugs.   Since they can’t get through it to lay their eggs, there are no caterpillars munching the broccoli.   I also use it to protect my eggplants from flea beetles.   I cover my sprouting beans and peas to keep the blue jays from eating the sprouts.   This year I am using it as a light shade to keep the tomatoes from burning up.

As you can see, I have it deployed over hoops.   The hoops are not really necessary, the fabric is so light it will rest gently on the plants and not bother them.   But I like the way the hoops look and also with the row cover stretched over the hoops I have discovered I can water right through it.

Here is my broccoli patch, approximately five days ago. I have the row cover pulled back for picking and weeding.

Despite the hot weather, my broccoli is doing just fine.   I plant a variety called Calabrese sprouting, and once you have picked the main heads the plants continue making side shoots in great profusion.

This is the picking I made that day.  It is the third picking of side shoots I have made.   Some of these are over three inches in diameter; not bad for a side shoot.

I made a delicious salad out of this.    First you lightly steam the broccoli.   Then you lightly toss it in olive oil and  roast it  at 450 until it browns.   Then you toss it in a mixture of 1/4 c soy sauce, 1/4 c rice vinegar, 2 T sesame oil (I used roasted sesame oil), a little salt and pepper, and 4 T toasted sesame seeds.   At least that is what the recipe I found on the Food Source site told me.   I thought that sounded a little bland, so I added about 1T honey, and chopped 1 T ginger and 1T garlic and added that to the dressing.

Read Full Post »

For the birds

It has been a while since I made a bird report about activity at the Havens.   I feel a trifle derelict in my duty, since the stated purpose of my land is to provide me (and my family and friends) with organic food while also providing a  suburban wildlife habitat.  We’ve been pretty successful as habitat landlords, with a few notable exceptions.

One was the great skunk escapade.   I can report that we have reliably excluded them from our crawl space.   Finally.   They still live around here, and I find their modest grub foraging holes around the yard regularly.

Last summer we had a ground hog move into the pile of dirt the covers our root/storm/wine cellar.   I don’t think I wrote about that little episode.   I was happy to have him live there, there was lots of clover and stuff for him to eat, but he decided that the vegetable garden was far superior in the gourmet offerings, and spent no considerable effort digging under the fence to get to it.   We countered his efforts with a trap, which he rather insolently reacted to by digging in at another place.   So we got a second trap and he dug a third tunnel.   It didn’t take us long to figure out that this whole exercise was one in futility, and so our next gambit was to buy chicken wire (much cheaper than live traps) and install it along the back fence where he was digging through.   Attached to the board of the fence, it extended out along the ground about two feet.   So, he figured out he could weasel his way under it anyway.

We were on the point of the next escalation, which involved electric fence installation, when I went out to the garden one fine morning and found Sir Ground Hog busily eating my beans.   Of course, Ruby was with me, and when the ground hog saw her he went bustling off to his tunnel, and exited the garden precipitously.   Ruby was in hot pursuit, of course, but she couldn’t go through the tunnel so she dashed out the gate and around the fence.   Meanwhile, the panicked and bean fattened rodent had gotten himself entangled in the chicken wire in his haste to leave the premises.   He managed to get free before Ruby got there — not that she would had done anything other than bounce and bark at him, but he didn’t know that.  Anyway, that very morning he packed his bags and left for a less exciting neighborhood, much to my and the beans’ relief.

I believe that the skunk has appropriated that abandoned burrow.    This suits me just fine.

Of course we have tons of rabbits, which has resulted in great horned owls and barred owls hunting in the yard.   This is partly why my cats live inside.  The other part is that I did not go to a lot of trouble to create a wildlife habitat just so I could introduce an exotic predator.   Domestic cats are one of the major predators of song birds, and my cats do not need that food source in their diet, they are plenty well fed as is.

Yesterday morning as we arose at the crack of dawn, we heard a most lovely bird song right under our bedroom window, one that we did not recognize.   Very melodic and sweet, it rang out a couple of times, and was answered from the redbud tree.

“Who is that?” we asked each other in unison.   We moved to the window and gently raised the shades so we could get a better view.   Imagine our astonishment to observe the the birds that were singing this beautiful dawn song were a pair of catbirds.    I have only heard their “Cat! cat! cat!” call, and the plaintive meowing call that always makes me want to look for the lost kitten until I realize I have been fooled by bird song.  What a nice surprise to learn they have a beautiful courting song.   I must investigate those shrubs to see if they have taken up residence there.

We have brown thrashers raising a couple of youngsters in the yard, as well as cardinals.   The grackles are being followed by importunate chicks, who would much rather have their parents stuff bugs in their maws than find food for themselves.   Yesterday I observed a mama grackle demonstrating how one gets a drink at the bird bath, after which she showed her youngster the benefits of bathing as well.    Neither process impressed the young grackle in the slightest, and in disgust the mother hopped down onto the ground and began foraging again, assiduosly ignoring the brat following her around making demands for more dinner.  ”I’ve done my best,” she seemed to be communicating.   “Find it yourself, I’m busy.”

I have been amused by the robins.   First they made a nest in the crotch of the wisteria, successfully raising three babies.    This was the most disturbed robin’s nest I’ve seen in a while, since the owner thought that our regular use of the path just 4 feet from the nest was excessive and just plain wrong.   So their next nest was in the elm tree by the garden shed.   Fine.

Now we have new construction, again in the wisteria.  Apparently, the first nest wasn’t close enough to the path.   Can you spot the nest in this picture?

Here, let me give you a clue.

Yes, that is it, right there on the corner of the arbor, where the mama robin feels compelled to flee every time I go out to the garden, or carry laundry to the line, or come back from one of those excursions.   Then she and her husband sit over on the wood shed and scold me.   Like I wasn’t using that path on a regular basis the whole time they were building that nest.

Apparently the disturbance hasn’t been so great that it precluded some successful mating activity.  Nosy neighbor that I am, I got out my kitchen step stool and climbed up there to investigate the situation.   Needless to say, my activities were NOT approved of by the parents.

Lets see, the wren chicks have fledged both on the back porch and in the garden, and now that they are successfully out on their own, their parents have embarked on a new clutch.   One of the sets of babies met each other and evicted the english house sparrows from the next box out by the vineyard and have been discussing housing arrangements quite vociferously.

We netted the last of the rows of grapes yesterday.   While we were doing it, a robin left the vicinity.   I distinctly heard him damning us as he left.  They know how effective the net is, and don’t like us for excluding us from such a delicious and convenient food supply.

In other bird news, both the rock doves and ring necked doves have increased their populations to the point where they are flocks rather than small groups.   That is just fine with me.   I also have a large group of cardinals using the area.   The gold finches and house finches are all around the place right now, enjoying echinacea and liatris seeds in addition to the niger seed I have in the feeder.

In addition to the chickadees, we have sparrows flitting about the place:  song, field, fox, white throated, white crowned and chipping.   A few years ago I would not have been able to tell the difference, but practice has made me a better bird watcher.

Blue jays are ubiquitous.  Right now they are keeping the yard cleared of June bugs, a hunt that amuses me as I watch them pursue the flying beetles until they catch them.   Then they take them to a branch and pound on them to open their hard carapace.

I found some of their moulted feathers the other day, and was fascinated to realize how different the colors are on their wings as opposed to their bodies.   The first image is a small chest feather.   The second is a wing feather next to the same chest feather.

The red tailed hawk dropped a wing feather the other day.   I found it while I was walking Ruby out at the conservation area.   A couple of days later I saw her hunting, and noticed the gap in her wing where the feather had been lost.  She’ll grow another soon enough.

I was captivated by the grass shadows cast by the rising sun on the white part of the feather.

Another denizen of the Havens habitat is the Cooper’s hawk.   She hunts here on a regular basis, and last year I even got to witness a hunting lesson for her fledgling which resulted in the demise of one of the house finches.   Success for the young hawk; not such a great outcome for the finch.   I’m not too sorry; I have know for years that I have a multi-tiered bird feeder.   I feed the seed eaters which are prey for the small hawks.   It’s all good.

I haven’t seen the hawk lately, but I know she has been around.  I have seen several meal sites in the area, scattered with tossed feathers.  She lost a tail feather just last week.    I imagine she either caught it on a branch has she was jinking and turning in pursuit of breakfast, or it was time for it to be moulted and she yanked it out while perched.  Anyway, it was on the ground under the elm where the niger seed feeder is.  I moved it for a better shot.

Right this minute I hear a hummingbird scolding out by my hostas.   As I jump up to look out the window, I see it is a mama with a baby, showing it the ropes of foraging.

How cool.

I believe I shall go out to the garden and see what’s happening out there.   Maybe the ants will have left.   Ha ha ha ha ha ha.  As if.  Maybe a flock of flickers will have come by and eaten them all.     Hahahahahaha.

I can dream, though, right?

Read Full Post »

The ants go marching

“So, how much do organic potatoes cost, anyway?”   I asked my darling husband last night.

“Oh, about $4 for a five pound bag,” he replied.

“Well, I think that maybe growing potatoes is just a waste of my time and effort.”

Dear reader, you might ask what prompted this exchange.

When I was a youngun we used to sing a song very similar to the “99 Bottles of Beer” song that had words that said “The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah…”  It was a rousing tune, and a lot of fun for a six year old to sing in the back of the car when you are traveling across country.  Not so much fun for the parents to listen to, but fun to sing.

I submit that the words should be amended to say “The ants go marching one by one, oh no! oh no!”   Because if your ants are marching one by one, they will soon be marching in their millions, especially if they find something good to eat.

A few short weeks ago, my potato patch looked like this.

Granted, that picture is of the potato patch from last year, but this year’s patch looked just has happy and healthy.    Shortly after they blossomed, the potato plants swooned, for no particular reason that I could see.   They were not blighted, there were no potato beetles.   They just didn’t look very happy.

Soon, they looked very unhappy indeed

Having decided that we probably should cut our losses and dig what potatoes there were, last night, having been stood up by my massage client of the evening, I went out and addressed the situation.

This what I discovered.

Lets just see a close up of that, shall we?

No wonder that the poor plants were swooning.   Something had systematically eaten all the phloem and xylem of the plants, girdling them.   And someone was obviously enjoying the potatoes that the plants had been making, too.   Look at all the holes in that spud.

Who, one might ask, would be doing all that damage?   Well (if the title of the post has not already given it away), take a look at what I discovered when I broke the perforated potato open.

Yep, those are ants, marching one by one by one by thousands.   I mean, how many ants does it take to do that sort of damage?   Let me tell you, there was not a single potato in that patch that had not been attacked by ants.   Some of them had been harmed more than others, but ALL of them had damage.

I contemplated the storage problem this had produced, as all the harvest now had to be washed and cooked and frozen.   Potatoes full of holes don’t keep worth a damn, I can tell you.

Well, as luck would have it, after I had mourned my potato harvest, I attacked the crab grass that was attacking the edge of the raised bed.    We have put carpet remnants around the edge in a vain attempt to control the weeds near the raised beds.    So, as I was pulling at the grass,which had put its roots through the carpet, and was crawling along the edges of it seeking the water it knew was in the garden, I happened to flip back the carpet scrap.

It was the New Orleans of ant cities, a Tokyo perhaps,  inhabited in its millions.   Life was good in the ant universe; with all those potatoes to eat, reproduction was underway on an industrial scale.

I decided that a tsunami, or perhaps a storm surge was in order.    Watch out!  The levees have broken….

Okay, I’m not a very good Buddhist.   I systematically flooded the entire municipality of Ant, several times.   Gleefully I watched the inhabitants scrambling to safety on the escarpments above the town, and cruelly I sprayed them down into the flood.

I admit to a certain joy in the destruction.    As I was casually using my trowel to rearrange the dirt, the ants sent out their minions to stop me.

Pathetic things.  They are not fire ants, their jaws are so tiny that they can’t find a place to pinch me.   Well, except on the soft skin around my knees, where I have lots of tiny wrinkles left over from my weight loss.

I brushed them away casually.   Then I started thinking about what the ants might be thinking.   Was I some sort of Goliath, destroying their Lilliput?   Images of the Godzilla movies ran through my mind.   Were the ant generals down in their bunkers making plans on how to stop my ravages?

A mosquito whined near my ear.   I checked.   It was not being piloted by an ant, nor was it armed with tiny heat seeking ant missiles.   There were no bombs slung beneath it.

Whew.

I decided perhaps the heat had gotten to me, and I should go in and see about the beer situation.

********************************

An exhaustive search of my organic gardening books and the interwebs has taught me that I need to make a tea from Jim’s cigar stubs to spray on the plants, or possibly I should be spreading diatomaceous earth about liberally, or on the other hand I should be using coffee grounds to discourage the hymenoptera.   Then there is the boric acid/sugar or borax/sugar organic poison route.

I believe I shall be doing all of the above.  Beginning today.

And perhaps I shall create a judicious flood now and again too.

Too bad, ants.   You should have stuck to eating the grass seeds and storing up the tiny seeds produced by the spurge, so that I could have more spurge sprouting in the pathways to weed out.

Read Full Post »

On containers

I just got all kinds of kudos on my writing about wildlife and the garden, so what do I do?   Write more on that sort of subject?

Well, of course not!   I have a completely different subject on my mind today.  It was brought to mind by the chore that Jim and I have accomplished in the last couple of days.   Yesterday,  Jim defrosted the 21 c.f. freezer.  This is where we keep our protein supplies.   A while ago I traded about a year’s worth of massage for a calf, which my client raised on grass on her chemical free farm.   We had it butchered, and it pretty much filled up that freezer, with some space left over for the lard, pork, lamb, chicken, and fish we also have on hand.

One of the things that I have learned over the years is that there is no such thing as an air tight freezer, and over the course of  time you WILL develop frost.   You can buy a “frost free” freezer, but you pay a price in the quality of your frozen goods,  They stay frost free because once about every twenty-four hours they warm themselves up to a level where the frost will sublime, and vent the humid air out of the freezer.  This has the effect of causing the exterior of your frozen goods to get a little warm every day plus it is not very efficient to pump all that cold air out of the freezer.

Anyway, the way we use our freezers the air tightness is moot anyway.  I’d say we probably open the smaller freezer (it is only 16 c.f.)  least a couple of times a day, sometimes more often.   That is because we keep all the spices in there, including the pesto, grated mozzarella cheese, lots of veggies from the garden, fruit, and a lot of other stuff too varied to mention.    I defrosted that freezer today, it was really badly in need of it as it had frost built up on the sides about an inch thick.   We needed the space as we have been busily putting stuff into it and it is rapidly filling up.

There are 5 gallons of blueberries, 2 gallons of blackberries, a bushel of peaches, 6 gallons of strawberrries, green beans, snow peas, carrots, asparagus, roasted zucchini and God knows what all else out there.

After I was done, it looked like this.

One of the things I was making space for was plum puree I made from the Santa Rosa plums that are ripening out there.   I have already made sufficient jam from this, and the puree makes a superior smoothie for breakfast.    I freeze it in 1 cup quantities, and after I was done popping the blocks of frozen puree out of the containers I washed them.

You might think that we eat a lot of sour cream around here judging by the quantity of sour cream containers I have.   This is not strictly true; that represents the collection of several years.

A long time ago, I used to save every kind of plastic container that came through the house:  cottage cheese containers, ricotta cheese containers, yogurt containers, etc. etc. etc.   I must have had at least eight or nine kinds and sizes of containers stacked more or less neatly in a drawer awaiting my storage needs.    I did this because the thrifty housewife that lives within me just could not stand the idea of BUYING plastic containers for food storage when perfectly adequate containers entered the house on a regular basis and only needed washing in order to be serviceable.

The container collection used to drive me batty.   You would think that a pint container that holds ricotta cheese would be the same size as the pint that contains sour cream, but you would be wrong about this.   You might even think that a pint of sour cream from one brand will be in an identical sort of container when purchased from another source, but you would be wrong about this too.   Seal Test sour cream lids do not fit Daisy sour cream tubs.   Go figure.  Similarly, the lid that fits a cottage cheese container will not adequately seal a one quart yogurt container.

When I was putting food away, scrabbling around in the drawer trying to find the right lid for the right container used to drive me insane was mildly annoying, to say the least.  Added to that was the fact that I would send a container off to work with something in it for  Jim’s lunch and frequently it would come home sans its lid.  Do not ask me why this happens so frequently, but there was a commercial about this a while ago that really struck home, so this is not the only household in America with this problem.

Anyway, one day after I had thrown all the containers all over the kitchen in a rage I had been searching for an appropriate container and lid combination, I decided that this whole thing was just nuts.   In the years that had intervened after I had developed the habit of saving every damned container that looked like it might be useful sometime, the concept of recycling had surfaced and it is now actually possible to recycle all plastic that comes from the store.    So I didn’t have to feel guilty about throwing it away.

I contemplated the problem of food storage, and decided that a one pint container was ideal.  The Daisy containers are very sturdy and have nice tight lids; they stand up to freezing well.  I can testify that one of those containers will last for many years of use, and they stack very neatly in a cupboard when empty.   I only save the sour cream containers, and thank heavens Daisy has not changed the style of their pint container for over ten years, so any lid that is in the drawer is the right lid.

We rarely need more than a pint of stock at a time, and if we do we can get out more than one block.   If I want to freeze less than a pint, like when I am freezing one cup blocks of puree, I don’t fill the container up all the way.   Simple.

Over the years I have learned that the tape you use for securing sterile gauze pads over a wound is exactly right for labeling the contents of a sour cream container.   It is easy to write on, stays on while in the freezer and peels off neatly when you have finished whatever was in there.   I had to find this out because it became confusing to have left over gravy or bread crumbs in a container  marked “roux.”   There are some things that stay in the freezer for a while and I was using an indelible marker to label them.   Unfortunately, when the roux was gone the indelible marker did not wash off the lid.

Anyway, the level of annoyance has dropped significance since I realized that it was only necessary to save ONE kind of container for the food storage and freezing purposes of this household.

We probably won’t have to defrost the freezers again for at least a few months.

Read Full Post »