Weekly Homestead Report 12: Halloween 2016

November 1, 2016 / jablyth / Leave a comment

Nothing like a little snow to change the scene in a hurry! Don’t worry, it all slid off the solar panel before the sun was up the next morning, and two days later nearly all traces of snow were gone.

Oct 25

Oct 27

But the plants felt the cold. Here are the same three flowers, separated by one frosty night.

Happily, those mums I mentioned last week seem to be able to take it. They’re about the only flower left at this point. The New England asters are still alive too, but barely.

The milkweed seeds are dispersing.

Before the snow, we harvested amaranth seeds (below; approx 1.5 cups from 3 large plants), herbs for drying (oregano and parsley), pink and green tomatoes, the last of the peppers, and huge numbers of butternut squash, pumpkins, and spaghetti squash.

I cut out a new chicken door in the coop, which we’ll be able to manually open whenever our fancy electric door quits working. It seems to run out of battery every few months, just when we are getting used to relying on it (and/or when we go on a trip, leaving our neighbors in charge of the chickens).

If this works, you’ll see footage of the door closing and opening after manual prompting—a test, after I recharged the battery. The timers are set to open the door for 7:00 am, and close it at 8:00 pm. The chickens are safe and happy, and that makes me happy.

The woods are really lovely this time of year. Yesterday we hiked up to the Crag to enjoy the view and get a little sunshine and exercise, but the little loop through our woods is just as beautiful. It’s worth mentioning that this year there was no fall black fly emergence, for which I am extremely grateful.

I feel like I’m trying to hold on to the essence of this gorgeous season in New England. I’m pretty sure you can’t capture it this way, but the leaves are very pretty.

But of course, autumn is more than yellow-orange-red; it is the feel of the air, the crisp crunch of a fresh apple, a pot of butternut squash soup simmering on the stove, and the cozy feeling of curling up next to the wood stove with a book after a long day cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood.

Weekly Homestead Report 11: October 24th, 2016

October 25, 2016October 25, 2016 / jablyth / Leave a comment

In the spring, we used huge rhubarb leaves to form two lovely concrete birdbaths. Largely, the birds have ignored them. This week a couple of bluebirds found one of them and put on quite a show bathing.

In fact, all the splashing drew the attention of a yellow-rumped warbler and a junco, which hung around on the deck railing for the whole ordeal, as if waiting for their turns for a bath. When the female bluebird was done, the male jumped in, and eventually the others left.

Ants were on the move! These winged queens from a colony of turfgrass ants (Lasius neoniger) in our yard are about the size of carpenter ants, but if you look closely, there are small winged drones and tiny wingless workers all boiling out of the same hole.

Later, splitting wood toward the bottom of an old wood pile, we found actual carpenter ants, probably Camponotus novaeboracensis. These have a distinct red middle, unlike the common species, Camponotus pennsylvanicus, which is all black.

Witch hazels are blooming! (This photo is from Northampton, but they’re blooming at our house too).

Our perennial mums (from my mom!) are just starting to bloom. This year I cut them back in early June, because my mom said that would keep them from getting so tall that they fall over, but as a result, they are starting to bloom a few weeks later than last year (I think, but don’t have any record). I hope we get a few weeks of blooms before a hard frost does them in.

Our current project is the development of a hugelkultur bed, after we were inspired by Margaret Roach’s awaytogarden blog and interview on the subject. The basic idea is to pile up woody debris, cover it with about a foot of soil, grass clippings, leaves, and other organic matter, and use it as a raised bed full of slow-release nitrogen. Since we have an abundance of woody debris (our property was logged about 5 years ago–just before we bought it), we thought we’d give it a try.

phase 1 nearly complete

Site of future hugelkultur bed

“mowing” down the tall weeds on a damp morning

We’re eating/picking in the garden: raspberries, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, strawberries(!), squash (butternut, spaghetti, pumpkins), peppers, eggplants, and chamomile. Most of the ground cherries and tomatillos were killed in a light frost. The squash vines are also mostly dead. Some of the beans seem to be reinvigorated. Most of the brassicas look terrible–covered with cabbage white caterpillars, cross-striped cabbage worms, and aphids; I’m hoping the predicted hard frost on Wednesday night kills the bugs but leaves the plants unaffected.

In the hoop house, the new seedlings are all getting their first true leaves. Most of the transplants are faring okay, but we have something (a cutworm??) eating big sections of the swiss chard every night. I haven’t caught it in action, but it leaves behind big piles of wet goopy frass.

With the cool weather, we’re feeling a lot more like cutting firewood… I got the chainsaw sharpened up and running, and we’ve been cutting and splitting some of the tip-ups that are close to the yard. We burned fewer than two cords of firewood last year, so we have a good supply left over, but it is nice to be filling the woodshed for next winter.

Weekly Homestead Report 10: Oct 17, 2016

October 17, 2016 / jablyth / Leave a comment

As we try to keep our anxiety about the upcoming election at bay, it is good to be able to walk in the woods and notice flowers.

Indian tobacco, Lobelia inflata, is blooming again, although it already has mature seeds.

Maple leaf viburnum, Viburnum acerifolium, has ripe fruits. Charley says that they’re technically edible but not worth it.

Japanese barberry, Berberis thunbergii, is (regrettably) also fruiting. Not prepared with gloves, we pricked our fingers pulling up barberry on a walk off of our usual trail where we’ve pulled most of the invasive plants already. Japanese barberry is one of our least favorite invasive plants because of its spines and the fact that it readily sprouts from seeds that the robins poop (along with multiflora rose and bittersweet).

This was the week of the first frost (10/14) and the first fire (10/16).

Well, it wasn’t really that frosty, but I didn’t get a photo before it was gone, so I found one from last year. We covered our strawberries and raspberries with sheets, and they still seem to be in good shape.

Of course the frost meant that we went out the day before to rescue the last of the tomatoes, tomatillos, and peppers… thus more hot pepper jelly, tomatillo salsa, and a batch of enchilada sauce.

One of our older hens died, so I put the carcass out in front of the wildlife camera. We were able to add a new mammal species to our yard list for the first time in a year or so: grey fox! We also got photos of a red fox, a coyote, and a couple raccoons.

Grey fox

raccoons

red fox

coyote

In honor of Charley, and because we led an insect tracking walk today, I give you Coptotriche fuscomarginella (or possibly a closely related species). It’s the leaf mine and larva of a moth in the family Tischeriidae. What a beauty!

Weekly Homestead Report 9: October 10, 2016

October 11, 2016October 11, 2016 / jablyth / 2 Comments

Pictured here: fall’s finest bird food (poison ivy) and aster eye candy! This week a number of longstanding items got crossed off of our big to-do list, and in the process, we learned important lessons about timing harvests.

sweep chimney (nothing too bad, here)
dig potatoes (grrrrr! voles!)
pick and shell dry beans (oh, no! mold!)
pick popcorn (oh no, mold again! But not too bad.)
harvest remaining watermelon (gah! overripe!)

The dry beans seemed to be doing well last time I checked, but the last two weeks of wet weather caused some of them to get moldy instead of dry. I’ve been doing a rescue operation to try to salvage most of them. I could have picked the whole plants and hung them in the shed to dry, giving up the possibility of the younger pods ripening, but thoroughly drying those that had already made beans. Instead, I’ve been shelling not-quite dry beans, throwing out the ones that are slimy or moldy. There are still a bunch in the field that aren’t ready, but some weeding and propping up collapsed plants to allow greater air flow makes me think they’ll successfully dry on the vine. Lessons for next year…

Digging the potatoes really made me mad, because about 2/3 of the potatoes are damaged—some almost completely eaten—by voles. Voles seem to be one of our main garden pests. We’re out there all winter shoveling the snow away from our fruit trees so it doesn’t top our hardware-cloth vole guards (they would happily eat all the bark they can get to under the snow, thereby girdling our trees). Next year, I will try to harvest potatoes early to mid September when the vines die back instead of waiting until October to harvest. My strategy was to “store” them where they were, to minimize their time in my root cellar, hopefully maximizing the length of time they would last before trying to sprout. If waiting allows the doggone voles eat them before I even get to them, though, that’s far worse than knocking a few sprouts off and eating slightly squishy (but intact!!) potatoes in March.

When I picked the first ear of dry popcorn, I panicked to find a tiny amount of mold… but it was just on a few ears, luckily. I spent an hour in the afternoon shucking the corn and crafting corn husk dolls to distribute to some of the kiddos in my life. This was satisfying.

When we picked the watermelons in anticipation of another frost tonight, we found that we had waited too long on some of them, and they centers around the seeds had deteriorated beyond enjoyment. This is truly a tragedy.

Because the Nantucket Conservation Foundation is hosting its annual cranberry festival this weekend, we decided it must be time to eat ours. Delicious!

We noticed some doll’s eyes, the creepy fruit of white baneberry, Actaea pachypoda.

As for the chimney sweeping, it was a good opportunity to view the yard from on high.

Weekly Homestead Report 8: October 3, 2016

October 4, 2016 / jablyth / 3 Comments

Dreary skies have made it difficult to appreciate the vibrant colors of the leaves, but they’re real nice. Today the sky finally cleared for a few hours, and then a huge dark cloud blew over and dumped a bunch of rain on us in the late afternoon.

The tomato vines are starting to look a bit brown, but we’re still overrun by tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tomatillos. We just made some eggplant Parmesan to keep things under control. My food preservation efforts are starting to feel a lot less fun. For inspiration, I called up Jeannie Seabrook, a good friend who owns the Glass Rooster Cannery. She gave me a bunch of new recipes, so hopefully the next round will be more interesting.

We’re trying to grow every edible plant we can think of, including some that prefer conditions other than those we can offer. Cranberries fall into this category, since they thrive in bogs. This year one of our two cranberry plants fruited, and the berries are nearly ripe!

One of our hens laid a rubbery egg without a proper shell. We ate it anyway.

The monarch caterpillars continue to grow. One was missing yesterday (Sunday) and today I couldn’t find any of them. I suspect they went looking for a suitable place to pupate.

The asters are so striking that I couldn’t help but include them here, though I’ve already written about both smooth and New England asters.

smooth aster

New England aster

Weekly Homestead Report 7: September 26, 2016

September 26, 2016 / jablyth / 1 Comment

This was a very full week, with little time or energy for the garden or woods; however, as there was some chance of a frost Sunday night, Charley and I harvested all the ripe squash, tomatoes, and a lot of other veggies this weekend. We picked 19 butternut squash, about a dozen acorn squash, seven pie pumpkins, six spaghetti squash, and about 25 pounds of tomatoes, as well as a large quantity of ground cherries and a few pounds of tomatillos. We harvested all of the dry lima beans, and enough green ones for a meal. I also picked a bunch of herbs to dry or freeze. We’re still getting a few strawberries, as well as red and yellow raspberries.

Earlier in the week, we picked 13 pounds of grapes (a mix of our cultivated Concord grapes and wild fox grapes). We simmered, smashed, and strained them, but the juice is waiting in the refrigerator for me to have a couple of hours to make it into jelly!

I have been featuring a different aster each week. Over the weekend, I noticed that the New England Aster, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, had begun to bloom. This particular plant is glorious, over five feet tall, has dark purple flowers with orange centers, and is loaded with buds. According to the excellent website GoBotany, New England asters are distinctive because they have “more ray flowers than other American-asters (45-100 per flower head).” They are also the deepest purple of the asters in our yard.

The monarch caterpillars we’ve been watching disappeared from the plants they’ve been feeding on early last week. However, we found three previously unnoticed caterpillars on a patch of milkweed on the other side of the garden this past weekend. They seem to be at a similar stage of development, almost two inches long, so we’ll follow these guys now. Mysteriously, the smallest of the three was resting on an ash leaf as if it were about to pupate.

Weekly Homestead Report 6: September 19, 2016

September 20, 2016September 20, 2016 / jablyth / Leave a comment

I’ve been on Nantucket for most of the past week, so I’m relying on Charley to provide much of the fodder for this post. I work in the natural science museum at the Maria Mitchell Association; this week I had the honor of meeting our new Natural Science Director, Dr. Emily Goldstein, as well as seeing off my good friend and previous Director, Andrew Mckenna-Foster. Just before catching the ferry home this morning, I went out with them to check American Burying Beetle pitfall traps (evaluating a long-term reintroduction project). I’ll write more on that first insect love of mine another day, but that’s what is going on in the photos below. I’ve included photos of the endangered ABB (Nicrophorus americanus), as well as its more common cousins N. marginatus, N. orbicollis, and N. tomentosus.

upper left- N. tomentosus, center- N. marginatus, right- N. orbicollis

Andrew and Emily checking a trap

ABB; N. americanus

Anyway, before I left home on Wednesday, I finished blocking in the raised beds in the hoop house and planted some lettuce in the bed that I’d already filled with compost.

Charley has continued tracking the development of the monarch caterpillars that hatched last week. They’re getting bigger. We’ve also been seeing several fresh-looking adult monarchs on the butterfly bush and wildflowers in the yard.

Both the wild fox grapes and our cultivated Concord grapes are ripening and smell delicious. I sense grape juice and jelly in our immediate future.

Fox grapes

Concord grapes

A bear left its calling card on the path between the chicken coop and the shed. It had obviously been enjoying the grapes as well. In fact, seeing this is what reminded Charley that it was time to check on the local grapes.

Bear scat with grape seeds

About once a week, we think we’re eating the last mulberry, but then we spot a green one. This time around, when Charley ate the one ripe mulberry, he discovered two additional flowers! I’d be surprised if these ripen before the frost, but we’ll see.

ripe mulberry

mulberry flower

Charley also noticed this millipede while he was mowing some grass by the pawpaw patch. It’s a Narceus sp. People often confuse millipedes and centipedes. Centipedes have just one pair of legs per segment and are somewhat flattened; millipedes have two pairs of legs per segment and a rounded body. (I remember that millipedes have more legs than centipedes because a million is more than a hundred).

Charley found some other fun bugs munching on the birch in our woods on Friday morning. You can read about it and enjoy his fantastic photographs on BugTracks.

There are still lots of veggies in the garden. Charley picked an oddly deformed tomato, and I remembered that I’d found one like it a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what’s going on with these.

On Nantucket, in addition to preparing lots of birds as specimens for the museum, I had the opportunity to witness the beautiful spectacle of a tree swallow tornado. At dusk, around 50,000 swallows began swirling around our hilltop perch in Sanford Farm. They flew all around us in a disorganized flurry for about half an hour, wowing me with the sound of their wing beats as hundreds flew past at once. Finally, when it was just too dark to get a decent photo, the whole flock rose up quite high above Hummock Pond, forming a murmuration like a school of fish that bent one direction, then another, and then down, down, in a ribbon to roost in the phragmites and cattails in the marsh. It was a graceful tornado, a ribbon with a curl. Finally, they were all down and out of sight. Less than a minute later, a strikingly large and orange full moon rose in the east.

The following day, about 20 birders walked out to witness the beautiful event together. David Policansky got some nice video footage. You may be able to view it here (on his Facebook page).

Weekly Homestead Report 5: Sept 12, 2016

September 12, 2016September 12, 2016 / jablyth / 2 Comments

This week Hurricane (then Tropical Storm) Hermine made its way up the coast. In Northfield, it manifested as two days of misty rain, high humidity, and relatively cool weather. I jumped on the opportunity to divide perennials and fill in the new flower beds by the driveway. We got almost 3/4 of an inch of rain on Friday, and another half inch (along with serious wind and a little thunder) on Sunday, all of which should help the plants survive the uprooting.

This is the season of being overwhelmed by the garden’s productivity, so I’ve been busy preserving it. I canned another batch of tomato sauce, a big batch of salsa verde (tomatillo base), and a ridiculous quantity of hot pepper jelly. Tomatoes are ripening faster than I can keep up with them, so we’ve been trying to give away a lot, too. We’re getting lots of cucumbers, ground cherries, tomatillos, peppers, squash, and eggplant. We picked another outstanding watermelon, and made our first pumpkin pie of the season. I’ve been collecting dry legume seeds; we’ll plant the peas in the hoop house this winter to eat the greens, and the black beans are just plain food. Charley brought the first bunch of delicious fox grapes home from work on Friday. A few more beach plums were ripe (one bush makes orange ones instead of purple, we learned yesterday), and we’re still getting strawberries. The raspberries are going strong.

Salsa verde, hot pepper jelly, pizza sauce

Last week (Wed, Aug 31st), I saw a monarch lay her eggs on a milkweed plant, and posted Charley’s photo. Nine days later (Friday, Sept 9th) the eggs hatched into these tiny caterpillars! On the third day, one of them had molted into its second instar.

Day 1

Day 2, with an aphid

Day 3

Eager to get things going in the hoop house, I started building the raised beds. This one bed will have the highest quality compost, since we have only produced a limited supply and need to use some of it in other parts of the garden.

Our soil is dramatically different across our property. This is well demonstrated by the size and vigor of kale planted on the same day in the “upper” and “lower” gardens, but perhaps best seen by comparing these sunflowers. They range from about three inches to eight feet tall, with flowers of less than an inch to over a foot in diameter.

Having a “wild” yard means we get to see wildlife. On Friday a big flock of turkeys wandered through, eating grass seed and insects. I really enjoy their dinosaur-esq appearance, and I’m glad they’re not as damaging to the landscape as chickens (which seem to prefer bare dirt, and scratch the vegetation to death if allowed enough time). In the interest of full disclosure, this photo is from last year.

I’ve been mentioning different asters blooming in each post; this week belongs to the Smooth Aster (Symphyotrichum laeve). This particular plant seeded itself in right by the corner of our driveway turn-around. It’s over four feet tall, although someone drove over it in June and many of the stems were broken off. It has re-sprouted, but the flowers on those younger stems aren’t yet open.

Several of the perennials that I grew from seed this spring started blooming. The verbena started almost a month ago, but the hyssop and balloon flower just opened up this morning! Some kind of hypenoptera (a cuckoo bee, I think) was sleeping in the hyssop when I went out to photograph it.

Verbena

balloon flower just before opening

balloon flower

cuckoo bee(?) sleeping the hyssop

Weekly Homestead Report 4: Sept 5, 2016

September 5, 2016September 5, 2016 / jablyth / Leave a comment

My parents, Charley, and I skinned the greenhouse and did a lot of the fiddly little finishing work on Tuesday. Then I picked up a bunch of cardboard by hanging around at the transfer station intercepting people with big boxes on their way to the recycling bins. I’m using it to smother the grass; hopefully in a year or so, both the sod and the cardboard will have turned into good soil, without us having to dig it up (a lot of work that would apparently disturb the good soil microbes). Now we just need to frame the raised beds and fill it up with compost and some seeds for this winter!

After getting to a stopping point with the hoop house, Dad went fishing while Mom and I picked about 8 pounds of Hungarian hot wax peppers and pickled them. We made 11 half pints and 4 pints of sweet hot peppers, and managed not to burn our hands or eyes with the pepper juice (gloves are essential for this operation). Thursday was another tomato day, with 4 jars of stewed whole tomatoes, and 9 more jars of sauce (a few jars thick enough for pizza sauce this time).

Wednesday, August 31, sometime while I was taking my parents to the airport, a grouse struck the fence of our chicken run, killing itself.

This is not the first grouse-smacking-chicken-pen incident at our house, but it is the first that ended with a death. Last April a grouse hen flew into the closed shed door while I was in there getting food for the chickens, which was quite alarming for both of us. She sat, dazed, on the ground for long enough for me to take some pictures. When Charley opened the door a while later, unaware of the event, she spooked and flew into the side of the chicken fence, then veered off into the woods.

Later that summer, we found a grouse-sized dust bath, complete with a feather, under our rhubarb patch. This year, we have routinely flushed a family of at least five grouse from our blackberry patch, and recently found another dust bath sufficiently large for the whole family on the dirt among the roots of an upturned tree.

I suspect this bird was one of those. It is always very sad to find that our human infrastructure has caused the death of an animal, but around here, we try hard not to waste food, especially meat. I don’t usually photograph my dinner plate, but the “chicken” vindaloo with fresh tomatoes and onions was mighty fine.

Wednesday was an interesting day for another reason, too. Just after finding the dead grouse, I spotted an adult monarch butterfly. She fluttered over the garden and laid several of the distinctive ribbed yellowish eggs on a small patch of milkweed. Charley took some closeups of the eggs (it’s his photo below), and we’ve been checking them every day so we can record how long it takes them to hatch, and photograph the young caterpillars.In the yard, lobelia is blooming, and the red maples are just starting to turn reddish-orange, but most of the woods still look green. We found some mating ambush bugs hanging out with a dead cabbage white butterfly in the woods today. We’ve been chasing the little buggers around the yard with nets, trying to feed them to the chickens before their caterpillars finish decimating the brassicas, so it was nice to find an ally.

We ate our first ripe watermelon of the season and a few beach plums, as well as an abundance of ground cherries, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, squash, beans, etc. We probably ate the last of the corn, though maybe there are a few ears yet to be found.

This weekend we started digging an expansion of our perennial bed by the driveway/ solar panel area. It has been a week of unbridled productivity due to the pleasant weather and my computer not being around (it got some kind of virus and had to take a trip to the neighborhood computer-repair guy).

I suppose it won’t look like much until next summer, but I’m excited to get it all planted and mulched in the next week or so.

Weekly Homestead Report 3: Aug 29, 2016

August 30, 2016 / jablyth / 3 Comments

There are two bits of exciting news this week: we found that our rock garden isn’t a complete failure, and we started construction of a hoop house!

When we dug up parts of the lawn for our vegetable garden about two and a half years ago, you could see the four rock piles on satellite imagery (just below the rectangular beds, from Google Maps).

After using some of the rocks for the floor of an outdoor shower, to level off the road edge by the mailbox, as steps down from the driveway to the “lower garden,” and other projects, there were still lots of rocks left. We decided to spread them out and fill in the spaces with dirt and sand, and then sprinkle in some seeds we collected from open sandy habitats. Crickets quickly moved in and made homes in the miniature caves. This spring, we neglected the rock garden and it became covered with cinquefoil, horseweed, and milkweed.

On Tuesday when I was weeding the cucumbers just on the other side of the fence from the rock garden, I discovered a funny-looking plant, something I was pretty sure was a sandplain specialist. Sure enough, Charley identified it as orange-grass St. John’s-wort, or Hypericum gentianoides, a plant of rocky ridges and grasslands, especially disturbed habitats like the sand pit created by four-wheelers where we’d collected the seeds. The plant has tiny (practically nonexistent) upright leaves, small yellow flowers, and orange-red fruits.

When Charley came out to see the St. John’s-wort, he looked over the fence at the rock garden and spotted what I had somehow missed—blooming bluecurls! Forked bluecurls, or Trichostema dichotomum, is appropriately named, as it is blueish-purple with two long curved (curled) stamens that would clearly get pollen all over the back of a bee. Like the St.John’s-wort, this is a grassland plant that readily colonizes disturbed places. I had never seen the flowers before, but the dried stems and seedpods were charming when we collected them last fall. Each plant is about one foot tall with dozens of flowers that open each morning and wilt by mid-afternoon.

I decided to pull out the cinquefoil and horseweed to see if any of the other rock/ sand specialists had sprouted. I got about 3/4 done when a couple of irritated paper wasps came over to let me know that I was disturbing their nest. I left. Lucky for me, we’ve had a few skunks hanging around. We’ve seen them in the driveway at night, and gotten a few photos on the wildlife camera. Skunks really like munching grubs, and don’t seem to mind a few stings if that’s what it takes. Two days after I abandoned the weeding project, a skunk (I presume) had pulled a few rocks out of the way and ripped the nest out, devouring the grubs, and digging out some of the dirt. There are still a few unhappy adults around, but now that the nest is gone, I can probably get on with weeding without getting stung.

P14_T_FG=2250,FT=76970,NIR=0,GM=2,CT=128,EV=48,TY=98,PY=100,DY=46,GB=0x80,NY=0,AE(320,80,160,320,1),0

There is purple-stemmed aster (Symphyotrichum puniceum) growing out of the pavers in our patio under the deck. It started blooming this week. That makes aster #3, after the white wood aster and calico aster.

In our woods blooming plants include: virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana), monkeyflower (Mimulus ringens), meadowsweet (Spiraea alba), Canada goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), Indian tobacco (Lobelia inflata), jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), willow-herb (Epilobium), and white turtlehead (Chelone glabra). Our cultivated pink turtlehead just started blooming by the driveway, too. Additionally, in the powerline cut behind our woods, we found blooming joe-pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum), purple milkwort (Polygala sanguinea), gerardia (Agalinis), rattlesnake root (Prenanthes trifoliata), and flat-topped aster (Doellingeria umbellata).

Fritillary on Joe pye weed

gerardia

Virgin’s bower

rattlesnake root

milkwort

I find it fascinating to watch bumble bees collecting pollen from the turtlehead. They pry open the lips of the flower, squeeze inside, back out after about 5 seconds of buzzing, and briefly attend to collecting the pollen from their furry parts and transferring it into the pollen baskets on their hind legs before heading to the next one.

We’re pretty much eating the same things as last week. This is the time when the garden swamps us with its abundance. There are so many tomatoes! I picked 32 pounds on Friday and made 12 pints of tomato sauce, and that’s in addition to dehydrating all the ripe cherry tomatoes on Tuesday (now they fit into a one quart bag).

And now, the hoop house! My parents are visiting from Ohio. My dad is a remodeling contractor and someone who doesn’t relax much. My mom is an avid gardener and food preservationist. They recently built a hoop house using hog panels (4′ by 16′ stiff welded wire fence), and had such a great time eating salad all winter that I wanted one too… So before they came, I measured my space and gathered up materials. Because of the way it is constructed, with the 16′ hog panels creating the arc, it can only be about 7-8 feet wide if you want to be able to stand up inside. We decided to use 6 panels for a 25 foot length. I also bought six long 2 x 8s for the box at the bottom, some 5/4 decking material to build the ends, and some hardware. I’m sorry I didn’t take a photo of the little-Honda-Civic-that-could hauling everything from the lumberyard, because it was impressive! This is a great experimental greenhouse, because the materials cost just $426, and two of us built the entire frame in less than 6 hours yesterday. Today we built and hung the doors and put plastic on the two ends. Tomorrow we’ll “skin” the main part.

The hoop house is currently oriented with the long sides oriented east-west, mostly because our corn patch is in the way of where we wanted to put it, oriented with a long side facing south… BUT, according to the New Mexico Extension website: “For maximum passive warming in the winter months, consider orienting your hoop house so the long side runs east/west.” Okay, done! I think leaving it where it is sounds much better.