Two Left

The pair of Papilo polyxenes caterpillars on my smaller dill plant proved to be too much. I found the plant reduced to a stump, devoid of cuddly butterfly babies. I imagine they have since starved in the flowerbed somewhere, because there is no other food source for them nearby.

These remaining two, above, for now at least, are plump eating machines. If their host plant can keep up with them, they will soon overwinter in my garden in their chrysalis form.

Shudder

I once watched a praying mantis devour a live honeybee. Here is a yellow jacket dining on a mantis. The mantis isn't quite dead yet.

Gotta love the brutality of nature. Shudder.

Eastern Black Swallowtail

My friend Amy sells plants and produce at my local farmer's market. I think she underestimated exactly how excited I would be when she pointed out a giant black butterfly laying eggs on her dill.

It was probably a good thing that I knocked a few of the eggs off when watering in my two dill plants, because each of my small dill plants can only support two of these rapidly growing eating machines.

Here is one of my four little Papilo polyxenes, posing by a dill flower.

Daily Monarch

My Pet Monarch

He's out here every day, eating and eating.

Summer Days

Monarch in my Butterfly Weed

Black Swallowtail

Papilio polyxenes, spotted at Tangerini's. This one had me stumped, because it was smaller than a monarch. Black swallowtails should be a bit bigger.

Audubon has a fantastic page for identifying butterflies of Massachusetts: http://www.massaudubon.org/butterflyatlas/allbutterflies.php

Eastern Comma, if I'm not mistaken.

Polygonia comma. This butterfly was circling the plants at Tangerini's Spring St.Farm, and just wouldn't hold still!

American Lady

Painted Lady

Butterfly with Funny Name

It's called a "Question Mark".  For real!

Red Admiral

It's blurry, but considering I took it with my phone while holding my daughter in the other arm, I'm okay with that.  

Butterflies

I have been too busy chasing the kids to update the blog, or to wield the mighty camera! But I have discovered how to post from my iPhone. So, perhaps this blog can be brought back from the dead now.

This has been a spectacular spring for butterflies. Here is some sort of skipper.

Nursery Web Spider

When I went to clean out the salad garden that had spent the winter snug in the greenhouse there were several spiders per sq. ft. It really was amazing just how much bio-diversity that 4'x8' section of garden was sporting. The biggest spider of them all was this Nursery Web Spider that really startled me.

While it isn't huge by Tarantula standards, for New England this is a monster. It was very patient with me and even stayed still when I placed a dime behind it for scale. I should say that I adore spiders and the job they do. They are very welcome in the garden and this one was released into the pea plants to keep up the good work.

Ick

Today I spent a half hour cleaning the woods of poison ivy. I picked up a deer tick for my trouble. I wish I knew which plants they tend to climb on. But I suppose if they are anything like the wood tick Gabe is looking at above, on our screen door, they'll climb whatever they find themselves at the foot of.



Really? The screen door? The inside of the screen door? You are one dumb bug.




I guess I've lost my energy for getting all squeamy when encountering ticks. The best I could muster was a tired sigh. I fetched a wood chip to carry the critter, and learned something new: playing with wood ticks is rather fun.

What amused me so was transferring the tick back and forth between the screen and wood chip. How easily the tick rolls from one surface to another! The way they grab on is somewhat like a monkey crossed with Velcro.

I'll be getting a poison ivy rash on my elbow in a few days, no doubt, since I let a vine smack me there. But I think it will be worth it. The infestation back there diminishes every year. Now if only I could say the same for the ticks.

The day after.

I'm lacking a suitable picture at the moment to reflect my melancholy mood; our house is no longer in danger of being crushed by the Tree of Damocles. A beautiful, irreplaceable plant has been reduced to various mundane components. So here is a little fellow who turned up in Chris's veggie garden. I airlifted him to a neighbor who has a more robust stand of milkweed, and quite the passion for monarch butterflies.

So, the tree. . . We wanted to have the arborists chop branches to various lengths for garden use, but that would have required lifting large tree segments over the house repeatedly and in many smaller pieces. Nor did they cut lengths of wood into four-foot segments which I had planned to use for cultivating shitake mushrooms. Time was running short, and Chris felt it prudent at that point to let them proceed with their usual methods. I see that as a blessing in disguise, because as much as I would like to recycle the wood in that manner, it would require drilling hundreds of holes, pounding in hundreds of dowels, covering all of that with hot wax, and dragging heavy chunks of tree about the yard. No, I really don't need a project of that magnitude right now.

So, we are left with wood to be aged and chopped for the fireplaces, and mulch, which contains poison ivy and so must be handled with caution. And we are left with one other thing: a twenty-foot trunk still standing. It will put out new growth, no doubt, and it will continue to rot; and the woodpeckers will find it to be fine dining for years to come until it finally falls over and damages nothing in the process.

A smaller maple tree was removed as well for similar safety reasons, and now, standing there without its top, it looks so much larger than it had before. The oak trunk looks gigantic.

Chris did a quick count of the rings of the oak and came in around seventy or eighty years. But that's a core sample taken from twenty feet off the ground. I would guess it's a hundred, poor thing.

Here is one unexpected glint of happiness in all of this: I e-mailed my father the day of the cutting, and found out that he has deep sentiments for trees. How did I not know this? Not only was he already aware of the plight of the American Chestnut and the efforts to restore it, but he holds it in the same regard that I do: that here is the important species to focus on, rather than some charismatic big-eyed mammal at the top of the food chain.

Here is Dad's eulogy for the tree:

"I know it had to be done, but I always hate to see an old tree taken out. I think I'm at heart a Druid. Plus, at some level I just can't help feeling that something that large and old could somehow be self-aware in some manner that's beyond our understanding."

Praying Mantis

When Michelle woke me up the other morning and told me to go take pictures of a praying mantis on the little mulberry tree; leaving my warm bed for the brisk morning air was not high on my list of things to do. Begrudgingly I hauled my sorry carcass out of bed and I'm very happy I did. Since I had to look for myself it took me a minute to spot this big beauty hiding in the leaves, and without Michelle pointing me in the right direction I doubt I'd have spotted it.

The morning light was just about perfect, though a steady breeze made taking its picture incredibly difficult on the tree.

So I picked it up and it quickly went into attack stance.

Then it flew down to the dried out corn stalks I have on the driveway. Which I really need to bundle up.

Everything about these predators is designed to hide them from both prey and their own predators such as birds. Even on the dead corn stalks it blended in well, and its erratic walk made it look very plant like.



This is the last picture I took of it before I picked it up and placed it back on the mulberry tree. It was warming up in the sun and making short flights to get away from me. I wanted it back on the tree to give it a good chance against the crows I heard nearby. I love these bugs!

Spot the Unwelcome Guest

Hanging there Silent.
Like any old leaf in the wind,
While eating its fill.

Tomatoes bursting,
With the flavor of summer.
He watches nearby.

Inviting a taste,
they come in all the colors
of a spring rainbow.

The villain is clear.
Above the Tomatoes here,
Yes, his time has come.

The first fat tomato hornworm has been found this year. While I'm sure there are more where he came from I haven't had a chance to really groom the plants. I'm hoping the wasps do their job this year and take care of most of them for me. This guy is now in a cage being fed pruned tomato branches so we can see if we can get him to turn into a cocoon for Gabe.

The Garden's in Bloom

Despite a record heat wave up here the Garden is holding up really well. It is during times like these that I feel digging out the garden beds to 2 to 2 1/2 feet deep really payed off. I've been watering the garden deeply once every four days. The potatoes are looking ragged due to bug damage, but the flowers are still beautiful.

The Earth Boxes with the tomatoes in them are going through roughly six gallons of water a day each, and I've been exclusively filling them with water collected in our stacked rain barrels. The rain barrels hold 108 gallons of water and were full at the start of this heat wave. They collect some water each day from our air-conditioner, but with two of us using it to water plants we're down to the last thirty gallons or so. Hopefully will get a nice Thunderstorm soon! No hail please.

The heat wave has helped the tomatoes along, and we've been sampling the first of the year. Here are some very early Yellow Amish Paste tomatoes. While I'd prefer a slicer, they're still excellent with some fresh basil and salt.

The Black Cherry tomatoes are setting fruit in bunches, though they haven't started to blush yet. I'm really looking forward to these after missing out last year due to the blight. I've seen some early blight on some of the lower leaves of a couple of the tomatoes, but nothing serious. My miscalculation on row width has made it very challenging for me to get in and prune and they're suffering a bit for it.

I went a little wild with the cucumber, melons, and squash this year and maintaining them has turned into a full time job.

In nearly every flower I find at least one, if not three or four, cucumber beetles. Despite my efforts every morning and night to squash as many as I can there seems to be no end to them. They've already caused some serious damage to the vines in the earth box, though the in ground vines are holding up so far.

This cucumber flower in the earthbox had two mating pairs on it. A quick shake dropped all four into my palm where they were quickly dispatched. They usually respond to being disturbed by dropping off the flower they're on so putting a hand or soapy water under and shaking works well. Though they will sometimes fly away.

A rare undisturbed cucumber flower. I wish I saw more of these.

Three different varieties of potato this year, and I can't wait to harvest them. I have done a poor job of hilling them, and I'm sure our harvest will be worse for it. Interplanting the potatoes with beans made hilling impractical, which I'll remember for next year.

I really enjoy the purple flowers, and the seed pods are nice too. Has anyone ever tried starting potatoes from seed? Can it be done?

There are many varieties of beans in the garden this year though I only have flowers from two at the moment. The Soya bean and Dragon bean varieties have nice flowers as well that I'll have to photograph soon.

I grabbed a few young green beans off this plant tonight and they were heavenly. The harvest should start to roll in on these this weekend.

The Scarlet runner beans are an experiment this year as I've never grown or tried them before. Their flowers live up to the name at least!

One of the pumpkin vines climbed a pole bean tower, and there is a baby pumpkin sitting near the top of it. If it starts to grow I'm going to need to buy some pantyhose to support it with.

The garden is filling out nicely. Too nicely, in fact. I really screwed up on the layout this year in the corn and the tomatoes side by side, and now I can hardly fit between them. We unfortunately are going to have to take down a few ailing trees this summer, which should provide us with a ton of mulch. I think I'm going to adjust the layout this fall and line the new wider pathways with mulch.

I went to stand by the corn today and it was officially taller than me!