nature observations in the garden, plus more

Earlier this summer I stopped filling the birdfeeders for a while. The birds don't really need it in the summer time, and I was mostly only getting piggy starlings and grackles that would fling the seed at the feeders hither and yon, and pigeons on the ground to clean up after the grackles. When I did refill the feeders, I first used pure millet, then switched to "dove mix," millet, milo, wheat berries, oat groats and buckwheat; the sparrows and finches like it, but grackles and starlings do not. And I noticed that after I started filling the feeders again, I suddenly had a lot fewer cabbage white larvae in the garden. The birds like to hang out in the garden while they wait their turn at the feeder, and I guess they're picking up some protein snacks while they wait.

However, I also noticed that when I filled the feeder that it would empty out overnight and that the next morning there would be more deer damage in the garden. They browsed my beet greens down to nubs, nibbled on my green beans and ate a lot of my chard, too. (Although it is worth noting that they only ate the row of chard that was planted between kale and peas, and did not touch the one by the tomatoes, so maybe there is something about the scent of tomato plants that turns them off.) I have a chicken wire fence to keep the bunnies out, but I really don't want to put up an ugly eight foot deer fence. So what I did was next time I filled the feeders, I spiked the seed heavily with chili powder. The next morning there were five fresh piles of deer poop around the yard, but the feeder was full and my plants were untouched. It is also worth noting that the beets and chard that they demolished were directly in the path of the birdfeeders, so perhaps they were mostly attracted to the seed and were just browsing some greenery while they were here.

So now harmony is restored to the garden, or at least human-centric harmony. The deer are more than welcome to eat my hostas--in fact, they are encouraged to eat my hostas. Does anybody want some hostas? They came with the house, and I want to plant something more exciting there.

Garden is producing relatively well. My Three Sisters Garden was poorly planned and over crowded, so the beans aren't doing as well as I'd hoped (getting browsed by deer didn't help either) and the broccoli also isn't producing much, but all my greens are lush and abundant (the chard grew back quite well) and there are plenty of beets and carrots. If I don't pay pay attention, the zucchini grow to assault-weapon size (see picture, with cat for scale) and I've got about 20 cups of shredded zucchini in the freezer for future bread and cake. I've also got about 10 cups frozen snap peas. My grape tomatoes are starting to come in, and I've got some volunteer tomatoes that are rather Sungold-esque, although actual Sungolds are a hybrid, so it seems unlikely that any seeds tucked away in my compost would have sprouted. All my larger tomatoes are still mostly green, except for a few Romas that are starting to turn. I've made two big batches of pesto so far, and there's plenty more basil left out there for more. Recently I dug my first new potatoes, tiny little fingerlings with papery skin, and for most of that week at least one meal a day included boiled fingerling potatoes with butter and salt.

caterpillar explosion

Last week I was remarking to some friends how odd it seemed that I only got two swallowtail caterpillars this year, when I have so much dill and parsley and carrots in my garden. Then Sunday night around 9 p.m. I went outside to pick some dill for my dinner, and when I came inside I realized I had brought in one caterpillar and one egg. I went back outside to pick some longer-stemmed dill for the caterpillar to eat, and with that dill brought in another caterpillar. Monday morning I went out in the daylight and made a formal search and found one more caterpillar and one more egg. Tuesday I went out twice and came back with a total of ten more caterpillars. Today I only did a quick, cursory check, but I'm kind of afraid to look too closely because 15 caterpillars (well, 14 since one of the eggs hasn't hatched yet) is already kind of overwhelming.

All the caterpillars were first or second instar, although several have molted since I've brought them in, and with fifteen of them I can't really be expected to keep track of who's doing what.

All the new batch of babies were found on dill, although I don't think that's necessarily because dill is a preferred larval food plant but rather because they are just easier to see on dill, and I wasn't turning over every leaflet of parsley or carrot greens. I also noticed that my neighbor's dill, which has been judiciously pinched back, seems to contain no caterpillars, while mine, which I mostly neglected and which has mostly gone to flower, is full of them. My neighbors could be picking off caterpillars (some gardeners know swallowtail larvae only as "parsley worms") or he could be raising his own caterpillars or the adult butterflies could prefer flowering dill for some reason. The caterpillars will eat the flowers, although they seem to prefer the leaves, but I wonder if the flowers are more nutritious and the mother butterflies are looking out for their children's welfare. Or the adult butterflies could have been attracted to the flowers for nectar, and just happened to lay their eggs there.

Meanwhile my remaining chrysalis from before remains a chrysalis, although he really should be hatching any day now. More news as events warrant.

it's a boy!

On Tuesday night the swallowtail chrysalid on the carrot was looking darker, although not yet transparent, but by the time I got up at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning the blessed event had already occurred and the butterfly was emerged, flexing his wings, and crawling up the stick and over the cheescloth covering on the jar, so I assumed that he had been out for some time already and was ready to fly. I put off feeding the cats breakfast (which I think is a sin and possibly illegal) to take the butterfly outside, but once he was outside he wasn't ready anymore. So I went back in to feed the cats, and kept poking my head out the backdoor to check on butterfly, and eventually sat down outside myself with some tea to wait for the butterfly to fly. I first coaxed him onto my finger, then onto some liatris, but it was windy and the liatris was blowing around too much and he tumbled off, so then I moved him to a pot of zinnias on the back steps, and he sat there. And sat there and sat there and sat there. Now and then he'd flex his wings again or wash his face, but mostly he sat there. In the morning, that side of my house is in the shade, and I tried moving the pot of zinnias out into the sun, but then then he was less protected from the wind. I was just about to see if the wind was less severe on another side of my house, and just then he flew, up into the lilacs, then across my yard and my neighbor's yard, into the sun. This was at 8:45 a.m. I missed getting video of the first flight by mere seconds, but I got loads of pictures of him sitting around and getting ready.
And it is indeed a boy. Girls have more blue and less yellow. This is the first male of all the swallowtails I've raised. It is also the first that I've found on carrot greens. I wonder if that is coincidence or if the butterflies can somehow choose to lay male or female eggs and if they base that choice on larval food plant. It'll be interesting to see what the dilly caterpillar this year turns out to be.

pupation in action!

The carrot swallowtail had been in the "sling" position for almost 24 hours and I was starting to worry; I couldn't remember how long it normally took for them to pupate after them slung themselves up, but I don't remember it taking that long.
I was checking on her one more time tonight, and just happened to catch the very beginning of pupation--I've never actually been able to watch it happen before. At first her body was heaving, with each segment pulsing individually from the tail up. Here's a picture from early on; sorry for the low quality but I'm taking pictures in low light through wavy plastic here. But you can see here there are already some color changes.
Then suddenly it looks like the chrysalis just starts growing on the back of her head and starts spreading down her body, and it's not clear until halfway down that her old skin is being pushed off, just like when they molt between instars.
It took a huge about of thrashing and writhing to get the skin to detach from her tail, but the whole process of shedding her skin lasted maybe 60 to 120 seconds. After she was fully pupated she continued to writhe and pulse, and from the time I started watching until she stopped moving was about 20 minutes, and this happened, for the record, around 7 p.m. tonight.
The pupa continued to darken slightly after she finished moving, but last I checked was still green with yellow highlights, despite being on a brown twig with the container sitting on brown paper (the pupa can be either brown or green, depending on the environment).

Meanwhile, the little egg that I brought in a week ago has just molted to instar four already. They grow up so fast!

butterflies

Last summer was a sadly swallowtail-less; I think I just got my parsley out too late. But this year I have babies again. Or rather, I have one newborn and one teenager.
On Friday, my friend C. found two tiny eggs on my dill (although one of them is a dud--you can see right though it) and I found a big, fat third instar caterpillar on my carrots. The caterpillar molted into forth instar that night and into fifth (pictured above) today. You can also see in the picture above that she has completely denuded a sprig of carrot greens. Fifth instar is the last, so she'll be spinning a chrysalis already in the next day or two.

The non-dud egg hatched early Saturday morning, and as of this writing it looks like he might be getting ready to molt into second instar. I am assuming it is a black swallowtail, because that seems the most likely, but she looks much redder than other caterpillars I have known (in my experience they are usually closer to black).
In other butterfly news, I also have loads of cabbage white larvae on my broccoli and kale. I would raise them, too, but cabbage whites are non-native and unlike swallowtails they do serious damage to gardens, so for the past few days I've been picking them off and feeding them to my neighbor's chickens, one of whom now recognizes me and starts pacing the coop making whiny begging noises when she sees me in the garden.

fussy lunch

This was my I-have-work-to-do-but-I'm-trying-to-avoid-it-so-let's-make-something-fussy lunch today:
Salad with Forellenschluss lettuce from the garden, kiwi, bleu cheese, extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sea salt and fresh ground pepper, and a quiche with a homemade crust, local eggs, baby kale from the garden, onion, sweet potato, smoked cheddar and bleu cheese. YUM. Kiwi, bleu cheese and balsamic vinegar sounds weird, but they pair really well together

Now I am further avoiding work by posting about it. Later I can avoid work by doing all the dishes.

foraging fail and win

First the fail: Rhubarb season is coming to a close, and here in Duluth it grows everywhere: vacant lots, alleyways, in overgrown hedges, everywhere. I figured that the neglected rhubarb with long, skinny, green stalks would be more tart than maintained rhubarb, but I thought I could simply add more sugar to compensate, so on my way home from the farmer's market the other day I picked a bunch of a scraggly, abandoned rhubarb. But then when I got it home and cleaned it up and tried a bit, I had to throw it all in the compost. It wasn't just tart, but was inedibly bitter and bad tasting, and no amount of sugar or anything else would have salvaged it. I post this only because when I went online to research the subject, to see if everyone but me already knew that you can't eat neglected rhubarb, or to see if there was some inedible rhubarb look-a-like (not really), I found surprisingly little on the subject. So this post is a public service announcement for urban foragers everywhere: unmaintained rhubarb with thin green stalks is not worth harvesting. I tried several stalks from several sites, and even covered in sugar they were spit-out-in-your-hand bad--and I like tart, sour food. From what I understand, rhubarb needs to be dug up and moved every few years or else it will start putting out thinner and thinner stalks, and I guess that also effects the flavor.

Now the foraging win: Yesterday I went out to an undisclosed location in the pouring rain to dig up some wild leeks (a.k.a. ramps). This is the environment I was in. Can you see the leek?
At this time of year, the leaves are completely died back. I was hoping they'd still be flopped over and obvious, but no such luck. So you have to look for this flower stalk:
But not all leeks produce a flower stalk, and I've heard that the leeks that do flower don't taste as good (and any way, you'd want to leave the flower stalk to develop into seeds so that more leeks can grow). So you look for the flower stalk, then poke around in the leaves and duff to find the little leek nubs poking up through the dirt.
If you can't tell from the picture, the leek nubs stick out from the soil maybe a half inch at best, usually less, and sometimes not at all. Compare that to a month earlier in the season, when they are rather a bit more obvious.

But now at the end of June, the bulbs are so much bigger, some of them close to an inch and a half across. The flavor is noticeably stronger than that of May leeks, but I still don't think they're as overpowering and pungent as some other local naturalists seem to think. The flavor now is more garlicky than oniony, but is sharper, cleaner and sweeter than cultivated garlic.

I pulled up enough leeks for a couple meals, and I've been roasting them with olive oil and salt and serving them over pasta. Roasted whole they are crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside, like roasted garlic, but what I like best is cutting them in half and separating some of the layers. They crisp up into leek chips and the sugars caramelize and they are swooningly delicious. Slicing them also makes the leeks go a bit further. Wild leeks are at least semi-common, and I know of several small colonies and a few larger ones here in town. But it can take up to 18 months for the seed to germinate and seven years before the plant is harvestable, so it's better to be frugal.