Which Tomato?

We may not have snow here in San Diego, but we have been having some very welcome rain over the last several weeks.

The only problem with that is that the ground is too wet for the resident gardener to get outside and do anything in the garden.  As Cindy says, farmers are never happy with the weather:  Not enough chill hours for the fruit trees, not hot enough for the sugars to form in the tomatoes, too wet for some things, too dry for something else.

So what does a vegetable farmer do when she can't be outside?  Well, she reads some of the endless avalanche of gardening and seed catalogues that have descended upon us now that that Christmas is over.  She also goes back through her gardener's journal, which she has kept diligently for several years now, to see what has worked in past years and what plants didn't work out so well.

Right now she's trying to pick out the tomato plants she wants to start for the coming year, so what will it be this year?  Carbon?  Black Krim?  Stupice?  I think we're done with the Mortgage Lifter--I don't know whose mortgage they lifted, but they've never really done much for us.

She usually tries to grow one variety of cherry tomatoes for salads, a medium sized tomato for cooking and sauces and a larger tomato for burgers and BLTs.

Past Successes, Future Anticipated

Unfortunately, our yard is too small to plant all the varieties she would like to try; it requires detailed planning to determine what to plant in our limited space.

She usually gets a pretty good variety  of tomatoes and we've been very happy with them.  They definitely beat anything you can buy at the grocery store.

Happy New Year!  May your garden grow and flourish in the new year.

Snow, Snow, Snow

Just not here in San Diego, though.

Cindy's dad called to tell us that it had snowed several inches in Fort Wayne, and asked if I would come scrape the snow off his windshield.

We would not be able to make it there before the snow melted, so I'm rerunning this picture from earlier in the year instead.

Sorry, but that's as close as I want to get to snow for a while.

Longhorn Roundup

Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer

We found a very odd looking bug on our front walk the other night--I'd never seen anything like it.

Its two most noticeable characteristics were its two-toned body color and its extremely long antennae, which were even longer than its body.

The bug wasn't going anywhere, so I had time to take a couple of pictures of it.

Turns out it's a Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer, Phoracantha semipunctata or Phoracantha recurva, a beetle that attacks (guess what?) eucalyptus trees.

These beetles bore into the bark of eucalyptus trees and lay hundreds of eggs.  When the eggs hatch, the larvae create entire galleries of tunnels in the cambium layer of the bark and their activities can stress and eventually kill the eucalyptus tree.

We don't have any eucalyptus trees in our yard, but there are many of them in the neighborhood, including several out in the canyon behind of us.  We've never been very fond of them; if eucalyptus trees catch fire the oils in the leaves and bark tend to turn them into gigantic flaming bombs that can send embers shooting off to spread the fire.  Not a comforting thought, and dead euchs would burn even faster than live ones.

Knowing that we have a pest insect working on the trees out behind us to turn them into dead trees is even less comforting, so once we identified the bug, we made sure it was a dead bug.  Probably too late to stop any damage, though.

It's too bad that this bug is such a destructive pest because the black and gold or cream color scheme is really striking and very pretty.  I may have to try to make some beads with that color scheme.  I'm not doing antennae on them, though.

Potato Haiku

My brother, whose nickname in the Navy was "Spud Taters", was inspired by my recent posts about our potato harvest to create these two haiku:

So, Cindy Struck Spuds! 

And, Since Teeters Eat Taters, 

Felicity Ensues. 

Tubers hid, dormant

While bold Basil claimed the sun.

Surprise! A gift of gold!

More Potatoes

Yesterday we, and by "we" I mean Cindy and her sister Mary, harvested more potatoes, this time from the second grow bag.

Cindy planted these German Butterball yellow potato plants last January, then pretty much wrote them off later in the season when  the plants seemed to die back and some basil plants took hold in the bags.  So she was very surprised last week when she went to clean out the bags to discover that there were indeed potatoes in there.

We got over two pounds of potatoes out of the first bag, and about four and a half pounds out of this one.  Considering how much I love potatoes, that should last for about a week.  We had some for dinner last night and they were delicious.

Some of them will probably go back into the bags as seed potatoes for the next crop.

More Seasonal Color

Toyon

Other areas of the world have the seasonal reds and greens of Holly and Mistletoe berries and leaves at this time of year; San Diego gets the same colors with the leaves and berries of the Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and Pyracantha (Pyracantha coccinea) shrubs.

The birds, especially Mocking Birds, love the berries from these two plants, and they are welcome to them.

Some gardeners like the Pyracantha for its ability to thrive in conditions of drought and neglect, but its nickname of Firethorn graphically describes why we're not too fond of this plant; its thorns make it difficult and painful to try to prune this plant.

Late Harvest

Cindy did some cleaning up in the garden recently and picked the first of our current lettuce crop and the last of the peppers and shallots.

I thought it made a very colorful seasonal display.

Potatoes!

Our Potato Crop

Cindy planted some seed potatoes in two grow bags almost a year ago, and they've been quietly growing away ever since.

We were initially afraid that the varmint that stole the False Sea Onion bulb last January would also go after the potatoes, but Cindy created some of her anti-varmint cages out of hardware cloth and electrical ties to protect the plants until they were big enough to fend for themselves.

Today she pulled out the plants in one of the bags, dug around and found that we really do have potatoes.  In fact, she pulled up two pounds of them, and that's just from one of the two grow bags.

Considering how fond I am of potatoes in almost every form, this is really good news.

Who's Home?

A New Varmint Hole

Cindy has been waging a fierce battle with gophers in the raised beds out behind the garage, so when she found this new hole in the planter beside the garage, her first conclusion was that the gophers had moved around to the side of the garage.

However, I'm thinking it's probably not gophers; the one we saw filching blades of grass up at Temecula a couple of weeks ago (see Black Friday, No Thanks) was very careful to fill the hole up behind him when he had enough vegetation, whereas this varmint has brazenly left the doorway wide open.

Also, the gophers left neat mounds along the course of their tunnels, while this critter just scattered the dirt from the hole all over the planter, burying several other plants.

So this varmint is probably our old nemesis, the California Ground Squirrel.

I'm just hoping they haven't completely undermined the garage by now.

A Miscreant Revealed

This is the time of year when critters traditionally try to come inside from the garden to avoid the winter weather, even though San Diego's winters are really pretty mild.

So I wasn't too surprised the other night to see our two youngest cats stalking a spider that had made it into the house downstairs and was scurrying across the rug.  Knowing Bailey and Jenna, I felt the spider's life expectancy was measured in minutes, if not seconds, so I quickly grabbed a cup, scooped it up and deported the spider to the outdoors.  The kittens kept up the watch for a while, but the spider apparently realized it was flirting with danger and didn't reappear.

Draft Blocker, AKA Cat Toy.  Isn't He Cute?

Later, while I was watching TV, I heard a strange, creepy slithering noise behind me.  Thinking that a sizeable snake had also managed to get into the house, I jumped up and found that it was our senior male cat, Chutzpaw, dragging a draft blocker across the floor.  Cindy's Mom gave me this years ago to stop the drafts that chill my downstairs office.  Naturally, the cats think this is just another big kitty toy.  Every day, I put this draft blocker in front of one of the downstairs doors.  Almost every morning, we find that it has been laboriously dragged somewhere else, usually onto the stairs or even all the way upstairs.  

We knew one of the cats was doing this, but didn't know which one it was.  Now that we know it's Chutzpaw, maybe we'll start calling him Sisypuss, since he apparently feels compelled to repeat this process every night.

We really could use a big King Snake around here to take out the gophers and California Ground Squirrels that are digging up our yard.

Just not in the house.  

Black Friday? No Thanks

Gopher

We don't go shopping on the day after Thanksgiving; we'd rather stay home and avoid the crowds.

It reminded me of a couple of weeks ago when we were up at Hart Winery in Temecula.  We were sitting outside of several hours; it was a very pleasant day and we enjoyed sitting in the shade of a huge sycamore tree.

Suddenly, Cindy noticed some movement out of the corner of her eye.  We looked around and were surprised to see a gopher staring at us from a hole he had opened up a few feet away from us.

Gopher Hole

He would pop his head out briefly, seize a few blades of grass, then duck back into his hole with the grass.

After a while he had apparently had enough and simply retreated into the hole, filled up the entrance with dirt and retired to enjoy his blades of grass in peace and quiet.  We felt just the same on Friday.

We had fun watching this gopher, but the ones that are digging up our yard are a different story.

Delicata Squash, Yum

Delicata Squash

Cindy planted the usual zucchini and squash plants this year, but she also planted a dwarf Delicata Squash plant.  It only produced one squash, but, with the green and cream stripes, it was beautiful.

We had it for dinner last Sunday, roasted with walnuts, and it was as delicious as it was beautiful.

She's already put this one on the list to plant for next year, and maybe we'll get more than one.

How Do They Do It?

Becoming a butterfly must be a very confusing process to go through:  one day you're a caterpillar with umpteen legs, happily chewing your way through all the vegetable matter you can find, and then you're compelled to form this cocoon, and finally you emerge to find you've only got four legs, but now you've got these wings.  How do they work?  What are they for?  How the heck do the newly emerged butterflies figure it all out?

As I said, our fifth guy flew off, but his flight was a bit wobbly at first.  He flew around the yard for a while but didn't seem to figure out what the plants were for.  Then he flew across the street and landed in the gutter.

He flew back across the street into our yard, narrowly missing a neighbor walking along the sidewalk.

Still figuring it out, I guess.  But at least he flew.

Number Five Comes Through

The butterfly in the fifth and last chrysalis in the cage finally hatched out Monday morning.

We were really afraid to hope about this one; the first one hatched, but its crumpled wings never filled out, the second one hatched and its wings filled out properly, but it died shortly afterward, the third one hatched and flew away and the fourth one never made it out of the chrysalis.

So we felt that it wasn't a very good record to that point.  I was afraid we might have contracted the Ophryocystis elektroscirrha parasite, one symptom of which is that butterflies are not able to emerge from the chrysalis or emerge with crumpled wings.  However, since this was the first time we had used the cage, we knew that the cage itself was clean, we were afraid one of the caterpillars might have introduced it to the cage and infected the others.

So, after mixed results with the first four, we weren't too hopeful of the fifth one.

Cindy had read something to the effect that Monarchs essentially shut down if the temperature is under 55 degrees; our days have mostly been warmer than that although the evenings have been getting down into the 50s, so I woke up thinking that maybe we needed to move the cage into the front yard where it would get direct sunlight.

After about an hour in the sunshine, the chrysalis opened, the butterfly emerged, his wings filled out properly and he began opening and closing them.

It still took him the rest of the day and part of the next to get going.  After a short initial flight, he landed on the Fortnight Lily and clung there for a while.  We were so anxious for this one to be a success that Cindy went around and destroyed the webs of the various Golden Garden Spiders and Orb Weaver spiders (without harming the spiders) in the immediate vicinity so he wouldn't get caught in them.

And eventually he flew off.

Showing Our Dedication To A Noble Cause

Wine Cork Mulch

Cindy decided to use our extensive collection of old wine corks as mulch under the three citrus plants in the pots in the driveway.  They make a good mulch because they keep the moisture in but don't absorb the water that the plant underneath needs, they don't degrade, and they don't pick up the dirt from the pot.

Also, they can easily be moved aside when it's time to add more fertilizer or to repot the plant.  And, of course, it's a great way to recycle the corks.

The problem was that we had enough wine corks for the three citrus pots, but not enough for the three blueberry bushes, too.

So, clearly, we need to buckle down and accumulate more wine corks.  A lot more wine corks.

It's a mission we'll be glad to accept.



* By "noble cause" I meant recycling the corks, of course.

Finally, A Successful Launch

Out of five Monarch caterpillars that formed chrysalises, three have hatched out.

The first one never was able to get its wings filled out;  the chrysalis had fallen a couple of times and the fluid the butterfly depends on to fill out its wings never got into the wings properly.

Number two hatched out a couple of days ago.  His wings filled out, but he never seemed to get going.  He finally made it out of the cage, but we found him on the ground with his wings outstretched, but after a while it was clear he was dead.  We just don't  know what went wrong with that one.

Butterfly Number Three, second chrysalis from the right in the picture above, hatched out yesterday afternoon and hung on to the top of the cage for a while.  We were afraid to get our hopes up again, but today, she moved to the top of the cage, then ventured out, trying to get her wings going.

She landed on the cement outside the cage and staggered around for a while, so I lifted her up onto the Jacaranda branches.  She hung there for a while resting, then went up on top of the branch, trying her wings.

And then we watched as she flew away, down toward the canyon.

Hummer Wars

Cindy really enjoys visiting other people's gardens because it means she can enjoy the garden without compiling a list of things she needs to do; weeds that need to be pulled, plants that need to be fertilized, bird feeders that need to be filled, and on and on and on in the gardener's endless list of chores.

So a couple of weeks ago we went to a party at a friend's house and were sitting out on her patio enjoying her garden and watching the hummingbirds at the feeder.  Lots of hummingbirds, all at the same feeder.  

We've never seen more than one hummingbird actually eating at our feeders at any one time.  Each feeder is usually claimed by a dominant male bird who sits up in the Lemonadeberry tree and guards the feeder from intruders.  If any other hummer dares to show up and try to eat there, the "owner" appears and chases him off in high-speed acrobatic moves the Navy's Blue Angels would envy.  

So we watched in astonishment as three, four, five, six and up to seven hummers congregated and sat down to eat at the feeder at the same time with only a few buzz-offs.  

We finally noticed that most of the birds did not have the colorful throat feathers of adult male hummers and decided that these birds must either be females or, more likely, juvenile birds that had just recently hatched out of a nest.  

I had seen that behavior before:  Daddy Bird lets the young ones feed at "his" feeder for a couple of weeks, then chases them off to go find their own sources of food.  No "boomerang" chicks for Hummingbirds, it's "go find your own feeder, kid".

I'm always amazed by these wonderful birds.  

By Popular Request

Glider

Cindy's dad had requested pictures of our new porch furniture, so here they are.

We've been looking at this furniture at an Amish store in Shipshewana, Indiana, for several years, and finally decided to order some.

We got a glider, a two person glider and an end table, and we liked them so much we ordered another table and a swivel rocker.

We had to put them together and learned in the process that if the Amish say, for example, "insert the 4 inch bolt, the 3 inch bolt and the 2 1/2 inch bolt", they mean insert them in that order or else it won't work.  But we finally got it together and we love it.

This furniture is made by LuxCraft, and the best thing about it is that it's made of polyethylene from recycled plastic bottles and milk jugs.  It won't warp, crack, splinter or rot and NEVER NEEDS TO BE PAINTED!   How cool is that?

Not Going Well

Monarch caterpillar Number One finally hatched today, but it did not go well.  The butterfly's wings never filled out and it was never able to fly.

Number One was the caterpillar that formed its chrysalis on the edge of the cage's zipper; the first time we opened the cage to add some Asclepia leaves for the other caterpillars to eat, the silk button began to unravel and the chrysalis was left hanging by a thread.

About a week ago the chrysalis fell off the cage when we were inserting more new Asclepia leaves, so I made an armature that we were able to tie the chrysalis to with cotton thread to keep it off the floor of the cage.

When the butterfly hatched today, it landed on its back on the floor of the cage and seemed to be struggling to grasp something with its feet, so I took the stick that I had used for the armature and let it grasp the stick while I moved it over to the leaves of the Jacaranda.  The butterfly kept trying to move its wings, but they remained crumpled and never filled out properly.

With other Monarch butterflies we've watched hatch, it usually only takes about an hour for the wings to fill out, so I knew this one was in trouble when that didn't happen.   Live Monarch.com indicates that crumpled wings can mean that we might have an outbreak of bacteria, or that the pupae was very stressed during the pupation process.  I'm hoping that it's the latter and that the other four chrysalises will be O.K.

As Cindy says, we're still learning about all this.  Meanwhile, I'm really bummed that it didn't work out for Number One.

Even More Caterpillars

As we were admiring the chrysalis Caterpillar Number Two had made Wednesday morning, and encouraging Number Three to get a move on and attach so we could finally clean the wilted vegetation and accumulated frass out of the cage, we noticed, oops, another little caterpillar.  And then another one.

The Monarchs currently frolicking in the butterfly garden in the front yard must have deposited some eggs on the new Asclepia leaves we had put into the cage on Monday.  And now they've hatched.

These two are only about an inch long, so they are probably in the fourth stage, or instar.  That means they've probably got at least another week to go before they will be ready to attach and form chrysalises, so we'll need to figure out how to get even more Asclepia leaves into the cage for them to eat.

With Numero Uno's chrysalis so close to the zippered door, that makes it a very delicate operation to open the door, take out the old plant leaves and put in new ones without dislodging the chrysalis.  Number Two attached close to the zipper but not on it, and now Number Three looks like he's going to attach a little further over from the zipper.

We may try to move the first chrysalis to a branch or something.  It's currently hanging from the zipper by some of the silk from the silk button the caterpillars form to keep them attached to whatever they've chosen, so we're thinking we might be able to wind some of the silk around a branch or something.  I have no idea whether this would work, but we're going to have to do something soon to get more Asclepia leaves into the cage for the new guys.

It's amazing how much these caterpillars can eat.

The Straight Poop

When we bought the Caterpillar Castle from www.livemonarch.com, they suggested that we should clean the cage with a 5% bleach solution after each group of butterflies had used it.

"Why would we need to do that?" we wondered.

Oh.

It's called "frass."

Turns out that caterpillars do nothing but eat and poop.  All day.  Every day.

The three of them have been in their castle for a week now and it's pretty clear that it will have to be thoroughly cleaned of the frass after they hatch.

It's a good thing they don't spend any time on the floor of their cage.  Yuk.

Of course, I couldn't resist pointing out to Cindy that that's NOTHING compared with what three chickens could put out.

Caterpillar Update

Looking For A Good Spot

Caterpillar Number Two, shown here industriously climbing the side of the mesh cage, finally stopped roaming and selected a site for his chrysalis close to, but fortunately not actually on, the cage's zippered door.

Number Two is now in the classic "J" shape and should form the chrysalis late today or sometime tomorrow.

When we were watching Mr. Upside Down last year, he took so long to form his chrysalis that we thought he was dead.  His antennae drooped and hung limp, his skin shriveled up and we thought he was a goner for sure.

However, what we didn't know then was that this is a normal part of the process of metamorphosis; the caterpillar is actually forming the chrysalis underneath the outer skin, which it sheds when the chrysalis has formed.  The skin splits and drops away to reveal the chrysalis.

The Monarch chrysalis is a very beautiful thing; it looks like a small green jewel with a rim of golden dots around the top and other gold dots on the body of the chrysalis.

As the butterfly inside the chrysalis matures, the chrysalis grows darker and you can see the orange and black of the Monarch wings forming inside.

It's an amazing process and we love watching it happen.

Codependent to Caterpillars, Part II

Butterfly Garden

We love our front-yard butterfly garden, especially when we see several Monarch butterflies at once enjoying the flowers and bushes we've put there to attract them.

In fact, we've had lots of Monarchs this summer flying around and landing on the Asclepia, the lavenders and the Buddleia.

What we haven't had is what makes butterflies:  namely, caterpillars.  The Asclepia plants were flourishing, but with all those Monarchs fluttering around, they should have been all but stripped of leaves.  But they weren't.

After the disaster of the Anise Swallowtail caterpillars we found on the parsley in the back yard, probably gobbled up by the Scrub Jays that hang around our bird feeder, we relocated some several Monarch caterpillars from an Asclepia plant in the back yard.  When they, too, disappeared, we began to think that maybe it wasn't just the Scrub Jays eating our caterpillars.

Wasps, lizards, ants and other predators eat caterpillars and we now suspect that the Mud Dauber Wasps that have built nests all over the eaves of our house may be responsible for the disappearance of the Monarch caterpillars.  (Caution:  that article is fairly graphic--don't read it if you're squeamish--it's like something out of "Alien").

The good news about these wasps is that they prefer to use spiders, especially Black Widows, to feed their larvae; the bad news is that they will also use butterfly caterpillars.  That's O.K. with us if the caterpillars are the larvae of the Tomato Hornworm, laid by the Sphinx Moth, but not O.K. if it's our Monarch caterpillars.

So, to protect at least some of the Monarch caterpillars, we finally bought a butterfly cage, a soft-sided mesh cage to protect them.  The cage has a clear plastic side and three mesh sides, one of which has a zipper to form a door on that side so you can open the cage.

Last Tuesday we put two fairly large Monarch caterpillars into it with some of the Asclepia in a bud vase with water.  Cindy wound plastic wrap around the stems of the plants so the caterpillars wouldn't crawl in and drown, which was probably a good precaution:  I don't think they can swim.  Then the next day we found two more caterpillars and moved them in, using a rose bud vial with a rubber lid.  We put stones in the bottom to keep the whole thing from blowing over in the wind.

By Friday the first caterpillar had crawled off the plants and attached to the cage to form a chrysalis.  Naturally, since nothing is ever easy, Numero Uno decided to attach and form his chrysalis very close to the zipper, which made it very difficult to open the cage to put fresh plants for caterpillars Two and Three.  Number four was very small and we never found out what happened to him, but Two and Three were eating everything in sight, so we had to slide the fresh plants in very carefully.

So that's the story so far.  Today Number Two is crawling all over the cage, looking for a suitable place to attach (NOT near the zipper, PLEASE!), and Number Three is still eating everything is sight and will probably attach soon, too.      

Pickles and Zucchini

I love the Pickles comic strip, and today's was particularly appropriate-- click here to see it:  Pickles.

The reason the cartoon is so appropriate is that Cindy forgot to check the zucchini bed for a couple of days and found three monster Clarimore zucchinis lurking among the vines.

These things were huge.  So we've been eating zucchini, zucchini and more zucchini lately.  She's frozen some and managed to foist some off on a neighbor, but I have a feeling there are more of them out there.

Maybe for Halloween I'll dress up as a huge zucchini.

Pacific Slope Flycatcher

We think we've finally identified the bird we've been calling the Slide Whistle Bird; it's a Pacific Slope Flycatcher.

Cindy had been seeing a small, fluffy bird with a short beak and a yellowish breast in the neighbor's shrubbery, and this morning she saw it again as it was singing.

This is the bird we originally thought might be the bird that we later identified as the Tropical Kingbird because of its similar coloring, but the Tropical Kingbird is much larger, with a longer tail.

Since the principal food sources for both birds consist of insects, they are more than welcome in our yard.

Tropical KIngbird

Tropical Kingbird

We were eating breakfast outside on the patio this morning when we noticed a Tropical Kingbird sitting on the power line over the canyon.

Cindy saw a couple more of them swoop by while we were watching the one on the wire, so we know there are more of them in the area.

We've been hearing a very interesting bird call lately but haven't been able to identify the bird making it.  The call sounds like a kid's slide whistle; up the scale, then back down.

I've tried the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds guide, which has sound clips of typical sound for each bird, but couldn't identify the sound.

I also tried the San Diego Audobon Society's website with no luck on identifying the sound.  However, I did learn from the latter site that California is noted among birders as the home of six bird species of very limit range:  the California Quail, California Condor, California Gnatcatcher; California Least Tern; the California Thrasher and the California Towhee.  We have at least two of these species, the Thrasher and the brown California Towhee, visiting our yard regularly.

In fact, the towhees are all over our yard all the time.  Who knew they were rare?  The California Towhee's coloring is pretty drab; basic brown with some rust colored feathers near the tail.  The bird we really enjoy seeing is its relative, the beautiful Spotted Towhee with its black head, white breast, orange sides and black and white spotted wings, but we don't see these birds as often as we see the California Towhees.

Too Darn Hot

Sun Baked Parsley

As the rest of the country cools off for the arrival of Autumn, San Diego is experiencing a wave of very hot weather.  We had two consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees last week and several others in the 90s.  

I think I can hear my brother laughing all the way from Southern Oregon, where they routinely have several weeks of 100 plus degree weather every summer, but San Diego just isn't used to this kind of weather.  

We can retreat into our air conditioning, but our plants stay outside.  Cindy has been viewing the damage; parsley that was thriving a week ago is now a sunburnt mess, or was until she ripped it out. 

The leaves on the new avocado tree are showing quite a bit of sun scorch, even though Cindy has been watering it every day.  

Avocado Leaves

One of her Master Gardener friends reported burn marks on orchids, succulents, agave, bromeliads, honeysuckle, Boston fern, umbrella plant and some trees.  

We expected to see the California Ground Squirrels doing the back stroke in the bird bath, but they seem to have retreated to their presumably cooler underground burrows.  

Amaranth

Amaranth

One of the best things about doing this blog for the last two years is that I've learned a lot while I've been doing it.

Cindy does all the work, I wander out into the garden occasionally, find something new and ask her what it is and then go look up more information on it.  Plus, I get to take pictures of all this interesting stuff and post it on the blog.

One of these interesting things is the Amaranth plant growing in our garden.

I thought the bright purple flowers were very pretty;  I should have known better.  Cindy tells me that Amaranth seeds are used as grain throughout the world even though they're not a true grain; they're a "pseudo cereal," but unlike some of the true cereals, they have no gluten and so can be used in gluten-free recipes.

It has the potential to reduce cholesterol and is also high in protein content, including the amino acid lysine, which is missing from most other grains.  Apparently a very healthy addition to the diet.

I have no idea what Amaranth tastes like, but I suspect I'll be finding that out one of these days.

Attack From The Air

Bean Leaves

The green bean plants suffered a double whammy this year.  Not only have their roots been attacked by the gophers from below, but the flock of Lesser Goldfinches that patronize our bird feeder have decided to vary their diets by noshing on the upper leaves of the green bean plants.

They have now eaten so much of these plants that the top leaves resemble lace curtains more than they do plants leaves.

They've also been hitting the catnip plants on the side of the house, but they're probably getting seeds from the flowers on those plants.  Unless it's the catnip itself they like.

They're cute little birds and fun to watch.

Covert Operation

Beans Reach For The Sky

Cindy's green beans have been fading a bit lately, which is a good thing since she has already stuffed the freezer with as many packages of frozen beans as it can handle.

Still, she was surprised as how rapidly some of the plants were fading; many of the leaves seemed to be shriveling as if their roots had been cut off.

That led her to peel back the experimental mylar mulch she had used in that vegetable bed to encourage plant growth, and discovered.... yup, gophers.

She knew that these varmints were gophers instead of the ubiquitous California Ground Squirrels because they had left the tell-tale surface mounds of gophers instead of digging deeper tunnels the way the squirrels do.  

They were able to dig into this raised bed because she had decided not to line the bottom of it with hardware cloth as she had most of the previous beds we had constructed.  So that made it easier for the varmints to tunnel in, and she hadn't noticed because the mylar covered any signs of their covert operation.

So that means a fairly extensive remodel of the two beds is needed to line the beds with hardware cloth and also to amend the soil.

But who knows, maybe the gophers will have softened up the ground below and make it easier to dig it out.

Or maybe we could contract it out to the squirrels.

No Caterpillars

A few days after my post about the Anise Swallowtail caterpillars we found devouring the parsley leaves, they all disappeared.

One of the caterpillars was huge; he was obviously just about ready to find a place to attach and form a chrysalis, but the other two were smaller.  Since it looked like they prefer to attach to an upright twig or branch, we put a garden stake in the ground among the parsley, but it doesn't look like any have attached to it.

So the pack of boisterous Scrub Jays that were hanging around the suet feeder, or one of the brown California Towhees probably got all the caterpillars.

Too bad, we were looking forward to trying to watch them hatch.

New Caterpillar

Cindy found a beautiful new Asclepia plant growing in her tomato bed the other day and then noticed two caterpillars nearby with coloring very similar to that of the Monarch caterpillar, but with a few differences.

The colors were the same dark blue, yellow-green and light green or white, but the Monarch caterpillar has solid stripes, where these had yellow dots on the dark blue instead of solid stripes of color.

Monarch Caterpillar on Asclepia

So we dug out the butterfly identification guide we had just bought, and identified them as the caterpillars of the Anise Swallowtail butterfly.

Anise Swallowtail Caterpillar

We've seen the yellow Swallowtail butterflies flittering through our veggie garden, so we know they're around.

The clincher, though, was that these caterpillars were completely ignoring the very handsome Asclepia nearby that Monarchs would be devouring, and instead were chowing down heartily on the parsley and dill, which, according to the guide, is what they prefer to eat.  

Eating That Parsley

These caterpillars should be ready to form their chrysalises soon; if we can find them, we may be able to follow their hatching as we did the Monarchs last year.

Rain!

Well, in San Diego we call just about any moisture at this time of year "rain".

Anywhere else what we had this morning would probably be called a light mist, but since any precipitation between May and November is extremely rare in San Diego, we'll call it rain.  

Any moisture is welcome in helping keep the fire danger down, but Cindy sighed that now her plants would be developing rust as well as the powdery mildew they're already getting.

If it's not one thing, it's another in the garden world.

A New Bird

Cindy spotted a new bird, or a bird that's at least new to us, in the shrubbery yesterday.  It had a similar coloring to the Lesser Goldfinches we see regularly, but this bird was much larger than the Goldfinches.

It had a yellow underside, from its throat to the underside of its long tail feathers.  We watched it for several minutes, frantically thumbing through the field guide to western birds at the same time.  It stayed in the shrubs for a while, then finally left.

I finally checked the Tropical Kingbird, a member of the flycatcher family, on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds search guide.  The description of the Tropical Kingbird sounded a lot like the bird we saw, but its normal habitat is mostly South America.  But the "Cool Facts" listed under the bird's life history indicates that "the Tropical Kingbird has become a regular fall visitor to the Pacific Coast of the United States.  Nearly every year a few wandering kingbirds are discovered there."

That made sense to us; the monsoonal flow must bring them up from the Gulf of Mexico and a few apparently go sightseeing.

The Guide also says that the Tropical Kingbird likes to go after large flying insects; we're hoping this one will take on the huge Junebug that has been chomping its way through our Avocado tree leaves.   And maybe a few of those bothersome Black Flies for dessert.

The Corn Is As High As... What??

Indiana Corn

Well, the corn in Indiana was definitely not as high as an elephant's eye in late July.  Far from it, in fact.

It looked to us to be about 2 to 3 feet high in most places and was already tasseling.  The leaves at the top of the stalks was reaching up like the leaves of agave plants.

The soybeans weren't looking much better to our eyes, but we couldn't tell much about them.

It was a different story in fields where there was irrigation; that corn was looking pretty good, tall and green and looking like corn should in July.

Irrigated Corn

There wasn't a lot of it available for purchase.  Cindy loves sweet corn but she had to hunt to find some for dinner.  The Amish farm near her sister's house usually has some for sale, but none while we were there this year.

She finally found some at a roadside produce stand; the ears had been cut in half because the birds had apparently gotten the seeds on the top of the ears.

Is this year's heat and lack of rain an aberration or will it continue?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Drought Monitor website indicates that there are already both short and long term effects in most of the areas affected most severely by the current drought.

My parents both grew up in Kansas during the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression, an experience nobody wants to repeat.

Signs of Drought In The Midwest

Dad's Lawn

We recently returned from a trip to visit Cindy's dad in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Weather records have now confirmed that this past July was the hottest ever recorded, hotter even than July of the Dust Bowl year of 1936 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We knew before we got there that it was hot in Indiana, but we were stunned by how brown and dried up everything was.  Flying into Indianapolis looked like we were flying into a California city because it was so brown.

They had had no rain for weeks.  We had never seen Dad's lawn so brown in the summer, it looked like it does in winter when they've had no snow.

There were still trees down from the huge wind storm several weeks before, and the surviving trees looked stressed and some appeared to be dying.

Later, Signs of Green

The day we arrived they had a small amount of rain and got a little more a few days later.  By the time we left, the grass was showing signs of green, but it was still a long way from the normal lushness that used to require mowing twice a week.

That was the lawn; the corn was another story.

Coming Back a Little

Happy Birthday, Julia Child

In honor of Julia Child's 100th birthday today, Cindy made a quiche with leeks from our garden, bacon, cheese and eggs, with some of our Riesenstraube Cherry tomatoes on the side.  Yum!

"Diet food is what you eat while you're waiting for your steak to cook."   Julia Child.

Bon Appetit!

Still Around

What Are YOU Looking At?

We were having lunch out on our patio today when Cindy drew my attention to a California Ground Squirrel who had screeched to a halt and plopped down to chew on some seeds on the garden wall about ten feet from our table.

I couldn't believe how bold this guy was, but he seemed right at home, eating his snack and taking a very short nap on the cool stone wall.

Then he was off again, scampering up the driveway to find more seeds, I guess.

Nap Time

So there are still a few squirrels around; the fox and the hawk haven't taken all of them out.  However, they now seem to be much more cautious, staying under cover or at least out of exposed positions.

Anyway, he wasn't afraid of us, since he obviously knew he could be long gone if we made a move toward him.

Another Reason For The Squirrels To Be Nervous

Red Shouldered Hawk

This isn't the greatest picture of it, but this Red Shouldered Hawk has been working the canyon behind our house for a while now.

We had been seeing and hearing the hawk for a while as it circled over the canyon, but we weren't sure whether it was a Red Shouldered Hawk, a Red Tail or a Cooper's Hawk.  We finally made the identification as a Red Shouldered Hawk after we viewed Bert Kersey's excellent video Bring On The Birds.  Bert's video has very clear photography and very entertaining commentary on many of the birds found in the San Diego area.

The section of that video on hawks included audio of the territorial "Kee-aah"cry of the Red Shouldered Hawk.  Just after we shot this picture, this hawk launched itself off the wire into the canyon with the same cry, which you can hear at http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/red-shouldered_hawk/sounds.

Since Red Shouldered Hawks mostly eat small mammals, as well as lizards, snakes and amphibians, the  remaining California Ground Squirrels have yet another reason to be nervous, in addition to the Gray Fox lurking in the shrubbery.

Okey Dokey, Artichokey

Artichoke

We've been watching a huge thistle develop on our next-door neighbor's property.  The plant has spiky leaves with magnificent bluish purple flowers.

Cindy has identified the plant as an artichoke.

Apparently they're good to eat until they flower, so this one is past its prime as food, but it's beautiful to look at.

I'm not real sure how you would go about harvesting one, anyway.

Bell Curve Beans

It's the weirdest thing with the beans that are growing through the space-age mulch; they seem to be growing in a bell curve pattern.

The tallest beans are in the center of the row and the size of the plants gradually decline toward both ends.  In fact, the plant on the extreme right end sprouted but doesn't look like it's even going to climb the string at all.

The plant in the center, on the other hand, is looking for new worlds to conquer.  I told Cindy that it looked like it's trying to figure out how to get to the telephone wire six or seven feet above it.

We have no idea why these plants are doing this.  It could just be a coincidence; it could be something to do with the heat coming off the mylar.

Strange Phenomenon

Cindy found this strange tomato in the garden the other day.

What looks like a green stem emerging from the top of the tomato is actually the result of a seed that has sprouted from within the tomato and emerged out the bottom.  You can actually see some of the real stem underneath the tomato in this picture.

Although it looks strange, it doesn't change the edibility of the tomato.

And that's a good thing.