Praying Mantis

 For the last several months, a shrub in the front yard has been the home to the biggest Praying Mantis I have ever seen; she was almost as long as my hand, probably about five inches.  

This mantis was very well camouflaged, her gray and green coloring blending so well with the vegetation that some days I could look for several minutes before I finally spotted her.  Given her coloring, I believe she may have been either a Chinese Mantis, Tenodera sinensis, or a California Mantis, Stagomomantis california.  

I first saw her in November.  She moved slowly around the shrub, but usually not very far.  A few weeks ago, she had moved over to the lavender bush on the other side of the walk.  She stayed there for several days, but now seems to have moved elsewhere.  I miss seeing her, but she may still be around.  

So..... What Is It?

 On of the things I've discovered about gardening is that you're constantly finding new things to baffle you.  It was OK when Cindy was in charge of the garden; she had the knowledge and resources to know where to find answers to those questions.  I would wander out into the garden, find something weird, like the space-alien Keelbacked Treehoppers from a decade ago, Cindy would figure out what it was, and then I'd write a blog post about it.  

Now that I'm left in charge of things, I have to figure them out for myself.  

So what is this thing?  I've seen these whitish domes in the garden before, usually on wood or, in this case the bark mulch.  They last for a few days, then the top seems to crumble and they gradually deteriorate into a sort of granular dust.  

Dome on Thursday, Aug. 31st.

Two of them appeared in the front yard in the last week.  When holes appeared in the top of each of the domes a few days later, I thought they might be insect egg cases.  

Same Dome on Sunday, Sept. 3rd.

Seeking identification, I posted it to Bug Guide.net.  Several people suggested that it is probably something called Slime Mold, a single cell amoeba that lives on soil.  This one doesn't look like any of the photos I've seen of Slime Mold, but there are at least 900 species of this that exist, so that's the best bet so far.  

I guess I could pack it up and take it in to the County Ag. office and see what they say it is.  If it really is Slime Mold, the kids in the neighborhood will love it.  How cool is that?  

A Different Kind of Hornworm

 One of the neighbors who's using the veggie beds in my backyard showed me a large caterpillar she had found in the raised bed behind the garage where Cindy had been growing raspberries and blueberries.  Because of the large yellow horn on one end of the caterpillar, I figured it was some variety of hornworm.

We've had hornworms before, both Tomato Hornworms and Tobacco Hornworms.  They're the larva of different types of Sphinx moths.  See A Tasty Snack For the Birds and Big Green Worms.  The way I remember which is which is that the Tomato Hornworms have chevron stripes on their sides and the Tobacco Hornworms have straight stripes, again on their sides.  

This one was different, though.  The stripes on this caterpillar were long racing stripes along its back and no stripes on its sides.  

A quick search on the internet indicates that this might be another type of Sphinx moth, probably the White-lined Sphinx Moth.  Adult Sphinx Moths are pollinators, feeding on nectar of flowering plants, usually at night.  The larva feed on a variety of plants, including chickweed, purslane, evening primrose and other plants.  

I usually pull hornworms off the tomato plants and leave them under the bird feeder as a snack for the birds, but since this guy was not in any of the beds with tomato plants in them, and since the White-lined Sphinx Moth larva eat weeds, I put him back where I found him.  

He's welcome to any weeds he wants to eat.  Just as long as he stays off the tomatoes.  

The Saga of Alfred

 About two weeks ago, I found Princess Fair-weather Daintypaws hunting something in my office.  I moved some stuff aside and found a bead on the floor.  I praised her for finding the bead and put it up on my workbench, but she continued in hunting mode, so I figured there was something else under there.  I moved more stuff aside and found what I thought was a large worm flopping around on the floor, so I scooped it up, carried it outside and dumped it in one of the garden beds.  It flipped itself over and I saw the scale pattern on it and realized it wasn't a worm, but the tail of a Southern Alligator Lizard.  

Since those lizards shed their tails as a defense mechanism, that meant the lizard itself was still in my office.... with Princess.  So I hustled back inside, tossed her out of the office, shut the door and started hunting for the lizard.  I found him, but he scurried away before I could catch him.  I moved more stuff, but he got away again.  Since then I've kept the door to my office shut in the hopes that the lizard would take the opportunity to escape into the furnace room so Princess wouldn't kill him.  

These lizards are valuable bug hunters.  At the Art Glass Guild studio in Spanish Village in September, I watched another Alligator Lizard hunting a swarm of termites.  As each flying termite fluttered to the floor, that lizard, whom I named Albert, would pop out of hiding, gobble up the termite, and dash back into hiding until the next termite landed.  So I was hoping Alfred would do the same thing under my house.  

Albert About to Nab a Termite

I hadn't seen anything of this lizard since then, but this afternoon I found Princess in hunting mode again, this time under the bookshelves in the family room, so I picked her up, put her in my office and shut the door.  I couldn't find the lizard, so I reopened the door, and found Princess sitting there with the lizard curled up on the floor in front of her.  I shoved her into the bathroom, shut the door and looked for a container to put the lizard's body in, but when I turned around, he was gone.  Hoping he hadn't run under the bathroom door, I opened it, and sure enough, she was hunting again in the corner of the bathroom.  

I got her out and finally managed to trap the lizard in the container.

Alfred in the Container

He didn't appear to be wounded, so I carried him waaaayyyy out behind the fence and released him into the shrubbery.

Alfred Among the Shrubs

Run free, Alfred, and DON'T COME BACK INTO THE HOUSE!

Snake Season

Neighbors on NextDoor are reporting finding snakes in their yards, including a rattlesnake and a San Diego Ring-necked Snake, Diadophis punctatis similis.   The Ring-necked snake is not poisonous, but rattlesnakes are definitely a danger to humans and pets.  When a neighbor found one in her front yard a few years ago, I wrote a post on how to tell a Rattlesnake from a harmless Gopher Snake.

 Recently I've been seeing a California Striped Racer, Coluber lateralis lateralis, also known as a Whipsnake, in my yard and the neighbors' veggie bed. These snakes move very fast and apparently can climb trees. I found this one sunning itself in my front yard the other day and again on my garden steps this morning. I thought at first it was part of the irrigation system, but then it quickly scooted into one of the succulents to avoid a dog passing by.

California Striped Racer

And then I also found a Western Skink, Plestiodon skiltonianus,  in the back yard this morning. This lizard with a very long tail lives up to its racing stripes and moves very fast but hung around just long enough for me to get a photo of it.  

Skink

The large gopher snake may still be around in the canyon somewhere, too, to the peril of the California Ground Squirrels that hang out under the bird feeder.   It pays to watch where you're walking these days.  

Some Kind Of Bug

 As the neighbors have tended their plants in the veggie garden, they've found various forms of insect life crawling on the plants or in the soil.  

The kids are fascinated by earwigs that they call pinch bugs.  Earwigs are scary looking but harmless to humans; they may actually be beneficial to gardens by eating decaying vegetation.  

Earwig

Other forms of insect life are various caterpillars or grubs.  They found this grub in the soil last week; bugguide.net has let me down and not identified it, but I think it might be the larva of some type of beetle, possibly Figeater Beetle larva.  These grubs also eat decaying vegetation, and apparently crawl on their backs, which explains the lack of visible legs.  I've always liked seeing the adult Figeater Beetles; I love their iridescent green color, although they're not the most graceful of fliers as they bumble around the garden seemly at random.  Various critters, including the neighbors chickens, consider the grubs to be a succulent treat.  

Grub

They also found this, possibly a chrysalis.  Still no idea what it is, but it, too, got fed to the chickens.  

Chrysalis?

Today they found this green caterpillar.  I thought at first it was a Cabbage Looper, but it doesn't have the yellow strip on the side and doesn't loop as it crawls.  Instead, it looks like it might be the larva of the Cabbage White Butterfly.  That caterpillar has a fuzzier body than the Cabbage Looper, but they look pretty similar.  

Cabbage White Butterfly Larva.  Maybe.

The garden is literally crawling with life all the time.  

 

"The Love Of Gardening Is A Seed Once Sown That Never Dies"--Gertrude Jekyll

 About a year ago I let a neighbor grow some kale and eggplant in Cindy's raised beds.  See The Gardener Is Gone....  He got busy with other things and didn't have much time to attend to the veggies he had planted, but they continued to grow.  

That left several of the raised veggie beds vacant, so when the family next door found that their own vegetable bed was being raided by voracious raccoons, I invited them to plant their veggies in Cindy's beds.  The drip irrigation was all in place, the soil she had filled them with was waiting, and her security system of anti-varmint panels was ready for action.  

So they came over with their kids, Maggie and Jude, and planted veggies, sowing seeds of carrots, beets and corn, and waited for them to germinate.  Then they added some broccoli and cauliflower plants that were a little further along, and those have been thriving ever since.  

And now another neighborhood family has joined us and has planted their veggies, too, so on Saturday we all had a Ladybug Release Party, turning hundreds of Ladybugs free to feast on the aphids and other pests that were eating the plants. 

Neighbors Tending The Garden

Kids Are Learning Gardening

Release More Ladybugs

Ladybug Ready for Release

It's been fun for me to look out into the garden and see it being productive and full of life, both vegetable and human, again.  And I know Cindy would approve that her garden space is helping educate and encourage a new generation of gardeners.  

A Better Place

 On my recent road trip up north, I took a side trip to check out A Better Place Forest's location at Point Arena, located about 130 miles north of San Francisco.  Cindy and I had had numerous end-of-life discussions over the years, but those discussions had never gone farther than deciding that we both wanted to be cremated.  When Cindy died in December 2020, I had to face the question of what to do with the box of ashes, and I didn't have an answer for that question.  

I had put a small amount of the ashes in the soil under a small "Blue Skies" lilac bush in our backyard last year, and a couple of family members had helped me surreptitiously deposit several "smidgeons" of ash around the grounds at one of her favorite restaurants, but that still left a LOT of ash in the box.  One of her favorite places to visit was the Muir Woods National Monument; every time we went to the Bay Area, we'd have to be sure to stop in for a visit among the towering, peaceful Redwood trees at Muir Woods and soak in the sense of tranquility generated by these magnificent trees.  I thought that her spirit would feel at peace among those trees, but I also felt that the National Park authorities would most likely frown on my efforts to deposit several pounds of ashes in the park.* 

So I needed to find an alternative site, and the Better Place Forest organization presented itself as a good alternative, with five forests in California, two in the midwest, three in Eastern states, and one in Flagstaff, Arizona.  The location at Point Arena seemed especially appropriate; we had spent many vacation days along the Northern California coast, at the old Greenwood Pier Inn at Elk and staying at our friends Eric and Elaine Hillesland's inn Alegria in Mendocino.  Also, the Point Arena location was the only location at the time that had  Coast Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which have always been special to me from the days when my family went camping among them at Jedediah Smith State Park.           

I picked out a tree on-line last summer, but felt that I needed to see it and see the location.  Just to be clear, the trees in this forest are not old growth Redwoods; the area was heavily logged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so these Redwoods are mostly about 100 to 150 years old, but they are still magnificent, stately trees. 

Redwood Forest

View Toward The Ocean

Tree and Snag

Tallest Trees On The Planet

Sunlight Through The Trees

Peaceful Path

 

And it is a peaceful, beautiful place.  I think it's the right place for Cindy, and later, for me, too.  

*  Note:  although ash scattering is permitted in some areas under the National Park Service's jurisdiction, Muir Woods is specifically excluded.  

Watsonia

 I am declaring victory, at least for now, over the Watsonia.  I don't know who planted these plants out behind the garage--they've been there for many years.  I don't think Cindy planted them; she wasn't much into bulbs. They bloom in the Spring with tall spikes of bugle shaped, salmon-ish colored flowers.  They're pretty for about a week, and then the weight of the flower stalks makes the whole thing tip over and drape itself all over the pathway.  https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/watsonia/

Hummingbirds apparently like them, but I've never been fond of them, mainly because of their path-draping habits, and it turns out I've never bothered to take any pictures of them in bloom.  The flowers die, the stalks and leaves dry up, and we've usually just left them alone.

The Watsonia climbed to the top of the "Garden-- Deal With It Now" list recently when the ancient garden hose that feeds the faucet on the wash table I gave Cindy several years ago sprung a leak.  I don't know if the leak happened because the hose was old and deteriorated through exposure to the sun, or whether some varmint decided to chew on it, but the sad fact is that it does leak and needs to be replaced.  

Pretty Clear Why It's Leaking

Replacing it meant that the dried Watsonia leaves and stalks finally had to be dealt with because they were in, around, and over the the irrigation pipes and wires behind the garage, including the hook up for that hose.  

Project Half Done:  Irrigation System Pipes And Remains of the Watsonia

That meant I had to be careful about digging them out without damaging any of the irrigation pipes, wires, or hoses.  So I started digging, carefully but with determination, cringing a bit whenever I hit something solid, which was pretty often.  Fortunately, the solid objects I was hitting turned out to be the Watsonia corms, which looked a bit like flying saucers.

Watsonia Corms

And it turned out that, after years of neglect, there were multiple layers of corms; corms on top of other corms and underneath them all usually a huge monster mother corm, all of which had to be pried reluctantly out of the soil.  

It was hot, tiring work, largely because I had procrastinated so long that the sun was on that side of the garage by the time I started.  I only got about half of it done the first day, so I decided to leave a couple of the corms on the wall to see if any of the local critters would nosh on them overnight.  Nope, they were still there with not a toothmark to be seen on them the next morning.  Taking a break overnight turned out to be a good thing, because I realized that what I needed was a tool that would give me leverage to pry the corms up, and of course, Cindy had such a tool in the garage.  

Corm Killer Tool!

The tool, part chopper and part fangy-toothed rake, worked great and I had much more fun hacking and prying up corms today.  

All Cleaned Out.  Wonder Where All These Pipes Go?

So I got it cleaned out.  Next--fix the hose.  

Now I need chocolate.

Blueberry Bonanza

 The blueberry bushes Cindy planted several years ago in grow bags out behind the garage have been busily producing a bumper crop of big, fat, juicy berries this year.  When Cindy's sister Mary was here a couple of weeks ago, we had fresh berries for breakfast many times, raiding the bushes many times over during her visit.  

Right Off The Vine

The neighbors who are farming the raised beds also filled their buckets several times.  Then they made a blueberry cobbler and brought it down for us to enjoy.  Yum!

Yummmm!

What a great way to get antioxidants!

When The Lilacs Bloom

 Cindy and I both grew up in climates where lilacs thrive, she in northeast Indiana and I in Kansas and southern Oregon.  We both loved the scent of the flowers.  To both of us, nothing says "it's Spring now" like the intoxicating scent of a lilac bush in full bloom.  However, living in Southern California has its drawbacks, one of which is that lilacs generally do not do well in San Diego's micro climate; there simply are not enough chill hours for most varieties of lilacs to bloom.  

Whenever we traveled back to visit her family in Fort Wayne in the Springtime, we would seek out blooming lilac bushes to get a hit of that heady scent of lilac.  Sometimes, if we couldn't find anything we could get close enough to without climbing over somebody's fence, we would drive by with the windows rolled down to get a "drive by" sniffing of the lilac's scent.  See A Drive-by Smelling

Early last Spring, before everything shut down because of the pandemic, she found a variety of lilac called "Blue Skies", Syringa vulgaris 'Monore', at one of the local nurseries that promised to be able to flower in warmer climates.  She put it in a biggish pot out by the mini-greenhouse I had made for her and hand watered it.  When she began to get sick last summer, she was able to spend less and less time in the garden.  The lilac began to suffer, and by the time I noticed what was happening and began to hand water it again, many of the leaves had turned brown around the edges and had begun to fall off.  I was afraid it might not survive, but over the winter the plant began to show signs of budding again.  

After Cindy died, I asked a friend to help me get the lilac planted in the ground near the bird feeder, where there was an existing drip irrigation connection, after I had watered the ground thoroughly so that we could dig a deep enough hole in the hard, compacted and very rocky soil.  

And it did leaf out, although the leaves are still a bit scant.  This variety is supposed to grow quickly to be about 10 feet tall and six feet wide, so it has a bit of growing to do yet.  

And It Bloomed!

The lilac scent was not very strong this time, and there weren't many flowers this year, but the scent was definitely there.  

And, yes, I did put some of Cindy's ashes in with the plant, so I'm hoping she'll always have Lilacs in the Spring.

The Gardener Is Gone, But The Garden Lives On

 Cindy's breast cancer came back late last summer in a very aggressive form called Inflammatory Breast Cancer.  As the disease progressed, it became more difficult for her to get out into the garden to attend to things.  By late August she had harvested and frozen the tomatoes and the beets.   The pole beans ran rampant; she harvested as many of those as she could, but many of the bean pods remained on the vines. 

 Our friend Janet came over one day in September to help me pull out the bean stalks.  We pulled off as many of the pods as we could and Cindy sat at the table on the patio shelling them, but we knew some of the seeds had escaped into the soil.

Cindy died in early December, during what passes for a rainy season here.  Without her time and attention, the garden began to go wild.  There were three foot tall dandelions growing in her raised vegetable beds; whitefly had attacked the dwarf tangerine and lemon trees in the pots in the driveway, and I was too busy and too overwhelmed to do anything about it.  

One day a gardening neighbor called and asked if we had a wheelbarrow she could borrow.  She came down to look at our garden cart; while she was here, she pulled some of the huge dandelions for her chickens, who apparently think they're a special treat.  

A few weeks later I pulled some more of the dandelions and took them down for the chickens.  While I was there, she showed me the raised bed her son had started for growing veggies.  Last summer Cindy had shown him her anti-varmint system of plexiglass and hardware cloth panels.  He had tried to duplicate that system in his beds, but because plexiglass is in such great demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he wasn't able to get enough plexiglass to enclose his beds and the critters were feasting on his veggies.  

I suggested they use our set up to plant their veggies, since the panels and irrigation were all in place, so they came over, pulled all the weeds and planted eggplant, kale and other things.  I showed them the small cages Cindy had made from hardware cloth and electrical ties, so they used some of those to protect the plants from airborne veggie munchers.  Some of the rogue pole bean seeds had sprouted in the bed, and they carefully put tomato cages around for the vines to climb even though I warned them that the beans will take over the space.  

Beware the Beans!

Veggie Cages

Birds Like Kale

It's good to see the beds cleaned up and in use again for more than growing dandelions.  I think Cindy would be pleased.  

The Downside

We've been very impressed with the prolific production rate of the tomatoes and eggplants Cindy planted in the three GrowBox containers this summer.  The plants have been large and the tomatoes have been numerous and delicious.  The Purple Bumblebee tomato planted in the GrowBox was double or even triple the size of the same variety planted in soil in the raised bed:   http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-tale-of-two-tomatoes.html

However, we've also been experiencing a lot more mosquitoes this summer than we've ever had in the past.  And two invasive, non-native mosquito species have recently been detected in San Diego County: the Egyptian Mosquito, Aedes aegypti, and the Asian Tiger Mosquito, Aedes albopictus.  These mosquitoes can transmit the viruses that cause Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya and Yellow fever.  Fortunately, these viruses are rare in San Diego, but this is definitely NOT an insect you want to encourage in your yard.  https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/deh/pests/aedes.html

So we've been scratching our heads trying to figure out why we're experiencing so many more of these lovely creatures this year and where there could be any standing water nearby, and this morning the light bulb went on:  they're probably breeding in the water reservoir in the base of the Grow Boxes.  The two boxes in front of the garage have been done and cleaned out for over a month now, but the one behind the water tank, the one with the gigantic Purple Bumblebee tomato plant in it, is still going and Cindy has been faithfully adding water to it every day.  

That plant is about done now, too, so that box will be cleaned and dried out soon.  But that leaves us with the dilemma of what to do about next year:  we love tomatoes, but definitely don't want to encourage the breeding of mosquitoes.  Any chemical added to the water to kill mosquitoes would probably be transmitted up through the root system into the plants and probably into the fruits as well, so that doesn't sound like an acceptable solution.  

San Diego County does encourage people to use Mosquito Fish, Gambusia affinis to control mosquito larvae, so that may be a solution for next year.  

As Nan Sterman says, "every garden is a science experiment", and our will probably be even more of one next year.  

Return of the Mystery Pruner?

We've had a volunteer rose bush that grows in the planter beside the garage.  Cindy periodically cuts it back and tries to dig out the roots, but it persists and eventually reappears, as it did this year.  It wasn't high on the gardening priority list, but this morning I noticed that most of the canes had been raggedly chopped back, most of them about 5 or 6 inches off the ground.  

Just A Couple of Sticks

And One Long One

One cane was still about a foot long, and one small one had been left completely alone.  None of the other plants showed any sign of damage at all.  I thought it might have been a skunk because I had noticed a kind of skunky smell in the area, but Cindy pointed out that the plant about two feet away is called Skunk Plant for a very good reason--that's what it smells like.  When the leaves are disturbed, it smells very much like a skunk has passed by recently.  

So what kind of critter eats rose canes?  And apparently nothing else.  The last time we had a critter "prune" some of our citrus plants, we eventually concluded it must have been a deer.  See http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2012/01/new-garden-mystery.html  Even though we live in a city of 1.3 million people, surrounded by freeways, deer do sometimes come down the San Diego River, sometime with startling results.   https://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2013/01/yes-deer.html

I'm finding it hard to believe that deer would be such selective eaters that they would prefer a few rose canes to whole garden beds full of tomatoes, green beans, eggplant and other veggie delights.  And although Cindy's anti-varmint panels have been very good protection against the ravages of the California Ground Squirrel population, I don't think they would stand up to a determined deer.

It's still a mystery.  

Mite Busters!

On June 5th, Cindy heard what she thought was a "nesting song" sung by the House Finches.  The next day, twigs started appearing on the beam over our front porch--the porch we had only reclaimed three weeks before from the previous nesting experience.  On June 7th, she saw two female finches apparently fighting over the nesting material on the beam.  Or maybe it was Mama and Papa Finch finishing the nest.  By June 8th, Mama seemed to have settled into the nest and begun to incubate the eggs.  

Location, Location, Location!

We sighed and resigned ourselves to using the back door and having our happy hour on the back patio instead of on the front porch in the afternoon for at least the next month while the birds incubated and hatched their eggs.  

Finally, after about two weeks, we saw Mama Finch poking around in the nest, and a couple of days later saw two little fuzzy heads poking up above the rim of the nest and both Mama and Papa feeding the two chicks.  

By July 1st we were seeing at least three heads and hearing cheeping, but it was several more days before any of them had real feathers.  We were never sure how many eggs and chicks there were in the nest, and they just seemed to keep coming.  Finally the chicks began to leave the nest one by one.  One of the adult birds would sit in the shrubbery across the driveway or on the porch railing chirping at them.  Then both adults would fly up to the beam, fly back down, back up, back down, back up, and eventually one of the chicks would fly off with both parents.  It took several days, but by Friday at dinnertime there was only one chick left, standing on the very edge of the nest looking a bit lonely.  By the time we got up in the morning, the last one had flown.  

So we were "empty nesters" again, but we were determined to not make the same mistake we made last time:  then we waited a couple of days before we took down the nest, wore masks and gloves but no other protective gear and didn't go in and take showers right away.  Bird mites live on birds, and when there are no birds around, they look for another host:  us.  Cindy got the worst of it, with about forty mite bites, and the remaining mites continued to bite us for about three weeks before they all died off.  This time we were ready for them.  We ordered some Tyvek suits with hoods and wore them with gloves and masks.  We looked like space aliens, or something out of Ghostbusters.

Who Was That Masked Woman?

Cindy climbed up the ladder and sprayed the nest with a miticide solution several times before we took the nest down.  Then we sprayed the porch and porch furniture to make sure we got them all.  Then we went in, threw our clothes in the washer and took showers.  

Space Aliens in the Neighborhood????

Our neighbor across the street took this picture of the two of us as we were cleaning up.    

We've always tried to live by Mr. Bennett's dictum in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, "For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"