Homestead Report 27: another belated installment in a busy summer season

September 24, 2017September 24, 2017 / jablyth / 4 Comments

This is the time of year when I glory in bringing in the harvest. It never ceases to amaze that a tiny seed, given rain, sun, soil, and a little love, will grow into a great vigorous plant that miraculously produces big, juicy, delicious fruits that feed us until we can’t bear to eat any more.

gorgeous peach

Seascape strawberry

We’re overrun with luscious fruit!! Over 55 peaches eaten fresh in just about 2 weeks of gluttonous delight! Everbearing strawberries are still producing. Tiny blueberry bushes loaded with berries. Raspberries dropping off the canes (but covered with horrid fruit flies). Watermelon, cantaloupe…

blueberries

watermelon

peach tree

raspberries

Vegetables are doing well too, for the most part. I’m swamped with produce to put up for the winter.

peppers

sungold cherry tomatoes

corn

lower garden

my favorite summer treat. Homegrown tomatoes, basil, homemade mozzarella

black beauty eggplant

But I say “for the most part” because the tomatoes now have late blight. It’s horrible. The fruits get gross blisters and the whole plants wither and die.

sungolds with late blight; note blackened vine

brandywine with blight scabs

My parents visited and we fixed the hoophouse that partially collapsed in the snow last winter. This fix makes me feel much more confident that we will survive the next big snowstorm without further damage, plus we can now walk through the central aisle without dodging boards.

propped up in the central aisle

supported interior

swaybacked hoophouse

looking straighter

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I’ve also been working on our high porch railing, in part to keep all of our friends’ kiddos safe from a second story drop-off; previously the railing basically functioned as a ladder.

The flowers are nice too…

driveway bed overflowing

Charley in the zinnias

obedient plant

lobelia

Our hugelkultur bed succeeded in growing pumpkins and tomatoes, despite the fact that it is essentially still a pile of logs, sawdust, and grass clippings.

Aug 17

Sept 21

A few hen turkeys along with their mixed-age young like to journey through our yard frequently, eating grass seed and dust-bathing in the potato patch.

turkey hen with chicks

We found this gray tree frog resting on a grape leaf.

Homestead Report 26: July 16, 2017

July 17, 2017July 17, 2017 / jablyth / 1 Comment

Somehow I took over 700 photos in the last month and didn’t post any of them… leaving me a bit overwhelmed as I sort through them now. It’s the glorious growing season and we’ve been BUSY as bees (or beetles, bugs, flies, moths, or any of the other creatures visiting the flowers these days).

Crab spider with a moth

bee balm on the garden fence

At the beginning of the month, we were swamped in strawberries. This season we picked over 40 quarts of strawberries. I sold about 25 quarts at the farmers market. I also froze 2 gallons, made 3 batches of jam, gave away several quarts, and made a raw pie for the 4th of July. They were tremendously abundant, and then abruptly done around July 8th.

12 quarts; 8 pints

strawberries for the market

at the market

Next up are black raspberries, blueberries, red currants, and chokeberries. All of our black raspberries are “wild,” but we’ve been encouraging them by beating back the blackberries in the edgy parts of our yard and woods. We’ve been picking them since the strawberries quit. We have about 10 highbush blueberry plants of different varieties. A few of them are producing berries, though they’re all just a few feet tall. I think we’ve eaten about 10 berries so far. The white cultivar of the red currant under our solar panel is loaded, and so far the birds haven’t found them–same with a feral red currant we stumbled upon in the woods. We also found a patch of purple chokeberries up on the Crag with abundant berries. Quite delicious after a climb up there.

planted red currant–white variety

feral red currant

Charley at the red currant bush

black raspberries

highbush blueberries

purple chokeberry

The partridgeberry is blooming. You can see the paired blossoms, which make a single fruit with two “nozzles” evident in last year’s berry in the upper right. The cranberries seem happy in our yard too, even though it isn’t a bog.

partridge berry flowers and last year’s berries

cranberry blossom

Speaking of bogs… I’ve had the opportunity to accompany Charley to work a few times recently, and lucky for me, that means admiring the carnivorous plants and insects (and non carnivorous things too) that live in bogs and shrub swamps.

Canada Lily

Charley catches dragonflies for me

pitcher plant flower

pitcher plant “pitcher”

sundew

Slaty Skimmer

Insects are everywhere! And it is awesome! Here’s a selection. The captions will tell you what things are.

Cereal leaf beetle (Oulema melanopus) disguises itself by smearing its feces on its back as a larva

unusually marked ant

Liriomyza limopsis, a recently described leaf miner whose larvae feed on cow-wheat (a snapdragonish plant)

lace bug family on chokeberry

clavate tortoise beetles (Cassidinae)

Milkweed is a favorite not just of monarch butterflies; but also of ants, bees, flies, and moths that are nectaring on the blossoms right now. Also present are the characteristically orange and black milkweed feeders (bugs that eat milkweed leaves have various strategies to survive the toxic latex; they often become distasteful, making the warning coloration effective).

Gorgeous tiny moth!

milkweed bug (Oncopeltus fasciatus)

One of my favorite plants is meadowsweet (Spiraea alba). The bugs are loving it right now too.

beetle that looks like it has a pronotum on it’s bum

plume moth

skinny wasp

long horned beetle and bee

beetle and bees

On our most recent walk I noticed this adorable jumping spider.

Hi!

Check out that pattern!

waving with palps

Also, a spider filled this acorn cap with silk. Perhaps it is an egg sack?

We’ve been seeing a young porcupine around (as well as a bigger one, sometimes).

young porcupine

Munching an elm in a storm

Hardly any leaves left

And there are other rodents of unusual size around, too! The old beaver pond on our neighbor’s property has new activity! A dam!

Our motion camera caught this young fox and its parent (I think) as well as a fawn.

young fox

older fox

fawn

The chamomile is going crazy. Lots of flower picking/ drying for tea.

chamomile

chamomile about to be picked for tea

Carrots! 3.7 pounds of them, harvested yesterday.

And so on.

Homestead Report 25: June 14, 2017

June 15, 2017 / jablyth / 3 Comments

Veggies are all planted, the flowers are looking lovely, we had two 90 degree days in a row, and we just ate the first strawberries of the year–we’re starting to get a taste of summer!

red yarrow, chives, iris

Strawberries are pure bliss. At this point, we’ve spread the plants around our yard to the point that we can hardly remember all the places to look–but that is sort of the goal, because if we have that many, it doesn’t matter if the birds or voles or slugs destroy some berries. And it feels like a treasure hunt. We have two varieties: Seascape everbearing (which have already started to ripen, and last year went well into October, and are delicious, but don’t self-propagate well) and Honeoye Junebearing (which are also ripening now, but only go for a few weeks, and make TONS of daughters for us to spread around).

hiding strawberries

strawberries in the lawn

strawberries as a perennial border

strawberries in the garden

Aside from strawberries, the honeyberries are ripening. This is our first time eating them. Honeyberry is an edible blue-fruited honeysuckle, with a flavor somewhere between cherries and blueberries. I think they aren’t fully ripe yet, though the one I tried was tasty even so.

Just about everything is planted in the vegetable garden, which is a good thing, because I had minor hand surgery last week and can’t play in soil until I’m all healed up. The tomatoes are looking vigorous and a few have started to flower. The beans (soy, green, black, lima, kidney, pole) are all sprouting. The last few days have been HOT–in the 90s. Today was very pleasant though, after a storm front came through last night.

tomato plants in the lower garden

edamame, green beans, and black beans in the upper garden

The flowers by the driveway have really started in earnest. Lots of irises, bachelor’s buttons, lupines, chives, red yarrow, garden heliotrope/ valerian, Canada anemone, campanula–a purple clustered bellflower, garden loosestrife, and more.

white campion

red yarrow, chives, iris

evening light

Campanula, bellflower

Iris

Garden Loosestrife

bachelor’s buttons

canada anemone

And all those flowers are making the bugs happy. The valerian was abuzz all afternoon, mostly with little cuckoo bees (in the Nomada ruficornis species group) with two yellow spots, and drone flies (Eristalis tenax) that look a lot like bees if you aren’t paying close attention. Charley says the drone fly larvae are rat-tailed maggots and live in sewage. The adults seem nice enough, though.

wasp on valerian

Bee mimic fly on valerian

Crab spider on Rogersia

Last week the phoebe babies were practically bursting out of their nest atop a light fixture in the woodshed. They fledged on Friday, June 9th.

The bluebirds fledged a while ago, but can still be seen occasionally harassing their parents for food. Tree swallows, likewise, fly over in formation, the young ones chasing their parents, begging, though they seem fully capable of foraging on their own.

The ticks and black flies seem less abundant this week, though mosquitoes are picking up. The young chickens are happy to eat cabbage white caterpillars as well as ticks and cutworms tossed to them. They are supposed to be preparing that area for corn seedlings to be planted, but they seem to be letting the mustard go to seed.

temporary chicken shanty

Pullets doing their thing

Chickens in motion!

I just can’t resist the beauty of lupines. In the story Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney, the lupine lady is instructed as a young girl to do something to make the world a little more beautiful. That certainly doesn’t always mean planting flowers, but these ones sure do their part.

Homestead Report 24: June 4, 2017

June 5, 2017 / jablyth / 3 Comments

With this country pulling out of the Paris Accord, I feel extra drawn to wiggle my toes down into the soil and work a little harder at the things I can control to combat climate change. Mostly, that looks like growing as much of our food as I can (thereby relying less on harmful big-agro farming practices and transcontinental shipping), but also includes eating less meat, planting trees, talking to kids about nature, avoiding driving whenever possible, conserving power and producing solar power, working with the town to hopefully purchase renewable energy for town buildings (and eventually residences too), and advocating for (and against) various things with our state representatives. If we all work at different angles–conserving land, transitioning to renewable energy, building bike paths, growing food, we perhaps have a chance at averting some of the worst consequences of climate change; and failing that, we’ll at least have built a better community.

We have been tremendously busy these last few weeks planting, planting, planting. I’ve even been selling some stuff at our little farmers market (seedlings, some greens, rhubarb, and eggs). Leaf miners are again so abundant that it is hard to take a walk without finding something new.

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casebearer moth on birch

One of the most exciting things to do is watch fruit develop. We are eagerly anticipating eating peaches, blueberries, strawberries, apples, serviceberries, and sweet cherries.

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Blackberries, goumi (like an autumn olive, but not invasive, at least in MA), mulberries, and black cherries are blooming, but don’t have fruit set yet.

blackberries

gumi

black cherry

Blooming wildflowers include wild geranium, golden alexanders (in the parsley family), rue anemone, phlox, wood hyacinth, blue-eyed grass (actually a tiny iris), azalea, columbine, and white campion (actually a non-native).

azalea

geranium flower detail

wild geranium

golden alexanders

rue anemone

blue-eyed grass (a tiny iris!)

columbine

white campion (non-native)

In the mostly nonnative perennial category, iris, lupine, comfrey, bachelor’s buttons, and violas are blooming. On June 2, I noticed the first hummingbird of the year visiting the comfrey flowers. It also visited pea and kale flowers inside the hoophouse! Luckily, it seemed to have no problem finding the exit.

iris

lupine

comfrey

We’ve eaten the last of the asparagus (choosing to let our plants have a rest and feed their roots) and I ate the first of the peas.

We’re always looking at bugs, especially leaf miners, around here. You can find Charley proclaiming the glory of them on his blog, bugtracks–and I admit that I appreciate most of them too–but there is one, a fly that communally mines spinach and chard, that I could do without.

anthomyid fly on spinach

fly larvae in mine

If we stay on top of eating the spinach, we end up just eating the eggs (no problem, just a little extra protein), but if we let it go a few days, the turn the leaves to mush, good for chicken food but not much else. I think I am starting to understand why people use row covers…

We moved our young chickens from the upper garden, where they prepared a few beds for me by scratching up all the weeds, into the lower garden. They are enjoying the mustard, as well as hopping out of their fence and scratching up my onion patch.

pullets in upper garden

new home in lower garden

Goldfinches have been descending on our yard in big flocks to devour dandelion seeds. A few times, we’ve seen a gorgeous male indigo bunting joining in the feast. Speaking of bright, beautiful birds, we’ve been hearing scarlet tanagers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and Baltimore orioles regularly.

indigo bunting with goldfinch

indigo bunting

goldfinch

A chickadee is feeding young in one of our nest boxes. The bluebirds and tree swallows seem to have fledged, although we never did see the young birds. Phoebes, catbirds, flickers, chipping sparrows, robins, and common yellowthroats also seem to be nesting nearby.