Before they learn to fly, they have to crawl

If you're freaked out by creepy-crawly critters, consider this a Halloween trick. If you like them, though, it'll be a treat.

I think of caterpillars as spring or summer insects, but a lot of them actually live late into the year and overwinter as pupae. I've seen some new (to me) in the garden in the past couple of months.

This one was on a hawthorn tree I cut down at the end of August. At first I thought it was eating (or being eaten by) a ladybug, then realized the "ladybug" was the caterpillar's head:



I took the photo to the county fair and asked around the agricultural building, with no luck. A friend identified it as a hawk moth larva, but that turned out to be wrong. I finally found it online. It's a beautiful wood nymph -- not to be confused with the pearly wood nymph, though the mistake would be understandable. (Check out the tagline at the top of that site, by the way.)

I don't think I've ever seen one of the adults. I believe I would remember a moth that looks like a stretched-out piece of bird poop.

The second crawler I found was a BIG caterpillar, almost the size of my thumb, covered in scary black spines:



I did a Web search on this one and found it right away. It's a giant leopard moth, a beautiful wedge-shaped black and white moth which I have seen on my front porch. Until I find my photo, however, here's a link. I wasn't brave enough to pick it up with my bare hands, though, like he did (after determining it was harmless).

While pulling up my dead zucchini plants the other day, I disturbed a fuzzy white caterpillar with tan and black markings:



I've since identified it as a hickory tussock moth. It was downright cute -- reminded me of a little fluffy baby animal, like maybe a bunny, all soft and cuddly. I watched it for a while until it uncurled itself and resumed its epic journey across the garden.



Turns out it's a good thing I only looked and didn't try to cuddle this little guy. Those hairs are poisonous and cause a nasty rash!

Before the frost

Okay, I'm still in mourning, but I'm pretty much over the denial phase. I've moved into the acceptance phase. I'm ready to look back at what I lost.

On October 11, before the killing frost, I took a few photos of some late bloomers, including these white dahlias:



They're now black and ready to be dug up and stored for the winter, along with some pink ones and a couple of cannas that I had in pots.

The pole beans not only had lots of beans ready to pick, but were still loaded with blossoms and promise:



At least I picked those that were ready, so we enjoyed a couple more dinners with them. I even had enough to put two meals' worth into the freezer.

The strawberries put out lots of runners. I still have to decide where they're going to go next year (and convince them of it).



Some wildflowers were experiencing a second season, like this chicory:



I even found a big mustard plant that kept blossoming right through the killing frost and is still going strong (this photo is from October 19 -- the dark green behind it is the dead pole beans):



And last but not least, an update on the walking onion. The tops reached the ground, rooted and sprouted, so I now have about a dozen new clumps. One more thing to reposition before the snow flies. And one more thing to taste, too -- I plan to use the parent onions in a dish yet to be determined ...

The REALLY dark tea-time of the soul

That's what my garden is in now. And, consequently, where I am, too. The dark season of destruction, endings and death. Most people know it as autumn.

I haven't blogged because it was just too depressing -- first the rain, then the tomato blight, then the frost.

Oh, woe is me; self-pity, sadness and sorrow. I didn't even want to go outside after the first frost, and we've had a few this month.

We had plenty of beans and cucumbers through the summer, and I even got a few strawberries off the first-year plants. My rosemary did beautifully and is now in pots on the front porch, along with some scraggly basil and a wilting Stevia.

The thyme never recovered from its early-summer haircut, though, and the sage died in situ. I managed a few tomatoes before the blight, but never got to do my salsa or the tomatoes, basil and mozzarella that I look forward to every year.

My pole beans, yellow squash and beautiful Lungo Bianco di Sicilia zucchini vine made it through the first light frost, but I didn't know about the second (harder) frost until midnight. I tried to cover the vine, but it was too late.

I did pick a few beans just before the hard frost, and one yellow squash, which awaits shredding and freezing.

Overall, especially with the tomato blight, I'd say this year's garden was a bust. The high point, however, was this white zucchini (actually light green), my only fruit from the many yards of vine:




I let it grow on the tomato cage until it touched the ground, then picked it so it wouldn't rot. I don't know how big it would have gotten if I'd had a taller tomato cage; it was over 3 feet long at harvest. I used half of it to make this confetti casserole, and the other half went into the freezer (shredded):



Confetti Casserole

2 small to medium zucchini*
1 medium summer squash
4 or 5 carrots
1 good-sized shallot
3 or 4 Roma tomatoes
1/2 lb. shredded cheese (mozzarella or mixed)
1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
1 cup couscous
1 tsp. herbes de Provence (or Italian seasoning)
olive oil

Grease 11"x13" casserole pan with olive oil.
Finely shred zucchini, summer squash and carrots in food processor or by hand.
Finely chop shallot and tomatoes.
Mix vegetables, cheese, couscous, broth and seasoning in large bowl. Spoon into casserole and smooth surface flat.
Bake at 375 F for about an hour. Serve hot.

This can be made vegetarian with vegetable broth, or even vegan with soy cheese. Or it can go the other way with the addition of cooked chicken or other meat for a main dish.

*or half of a 3-foot Lungo Bianco di Sicilia!

It's not a weed; it's a wildflower

I walked around the corner of my shed the other day and came face to face with these earth-fallen bits of blue sky:



Chicory (Cichorium intybus), sometimes called cornflower, is one tough wildflower, growing in dry, inhospitable places like road shoulders and the gravel base of my shed.

Endive and chicory root come from cultivated varieties of Cichorium, although you can also use the wild plant. It's been used as a coffee substitute or additive for generations, and as a vegetable for thousands of years. Horace (b. 65 BCE) mentioned it, along with olives and mallow, as part of his diet.

And while the sky-blue flowers are the ones that catch my eye, I've occasionally seen it with white flowers.

On a completely different note, but still garden-related:

While our growing season is limited here in the Northeast (read: New England), we enjoy beans, peas, carrots, sweet corn, zucchini and other squash, peppers hot and mild, melons, tomatoes, tomatillos, leafy greens, brussels sprouts and probably a score or more of other fresh vegetables. And a lot of us put up some of the harvest in jars or in the freezer.

Even if we don't have gardens, we have supermarkets where we can buy fresh produce year-round. But it's a pretty good bet you have a few cans of peas, corn and/or beans in your pantry.

In England, refrigerators tend to be under-the-counter appliances, and people make more frequent trips to the market for smaller quantities of fresh foods.

But is Old England really this devoted to fresh veg? From an article on independent.co.uk:

"No rational person would buy [canned vegetables] to eat, but sales soar around harvest festival time when millions of churchgoers and schoolchildren have to give a basket of non-perishable foodstuffs for distribution to the elderly. What the elderly do with them is a mystery."

I don't know about you, but I grew up on canned green beans, and for years I wouldn't touch those suspiciously crisp sticks Dad brought in from the garden. Now I like both fresh and canned, for their own particular attributes.

Like the way canned green beans squeak when you bite into them.

I LOVE that little squeak.

Green cheese

When I was a little girl, my mother showed my sister and me the edible "cheeses" of cheese mallow, a rangy, low-growing wildflower.



She and her sister ate them when they were little girls. Their mother and grandmother probably did the same in their own childhoods.



My family wasn't big on foraging for wild foods, but we did pick wild strawberries, and went looking for raspberries and blackberries in season, sometimes going to an old farm and braving a whole field of the prickers to get the fruit. But mostly, snacking on wild stuff was left to the kids (well-trained not to eat anything we didn't know).

I tried wild carrots -- they were kind of tough, but they smelled so good! And we chewed on lavender clover blossoms and red columbine flowers for the nectar. We called the latter honeysuckle, as my mother did; it seemed like an obvious name, since you sucked the honey out of the blossom. I was probably a teenager before I knew the real name.

My mother also showed me "sourgrass" (yellow wood sorrel, Oxalis europaea). That's the delicate shamrock-like plant with little yellow flowers you find growing as a weed in gardens and lawns. I've never been a big fan of sour tastes, so I was never in any danger of overloading on the oxalic acid it contains. Not that I knew about that as a kid.



I found some sourgrass in a friend's garden the other day and had her taste it. Passing on old-timey country lore, I guess.

I'm sure there's a story behind it ...

I try to notice something funny or interesting every day. Sometimes I have a camera or my cell phone with me, and I get a photo. Here's Wednesday's:




It's posted at the entrance to the road leading to the town salt piles (for you warm-climate folks, that's what the road crews spread on the pavement in the winter to melt ice). There has to be a back story. If anyone hears it, let me know.

Just so they don't go to waste, here are a few more recent finds:

You were expecting maybe sour cookies? Or savory? Or salty? Sorry ...




(Notice they're Original Classic ... and also New.)
Or you could just have a nice cookie.





Gee, I thought maybe they'd have a PRO-vandalism policy. (This sign was posted in the public rest room of a supermarket.)





And this one seemed a little sad: found in a Target rest room.

See what I sawed

I did some serious weeding today:



I had the truck all packed up with recycling and trash before I realized it was Thursday. The recycling center is closed on Thursdays. Change of plans.

So I put the truck in the garage and got out the chain saw. Rawrrrrr!

OK, it's just a little electric Remington with a 10" bar and a pole-saw option. But it does what I need -- it takes down trash trees that grow up along the brook and shade my vegetable garden.

Sharp eyes will note that the above "weed" is not a trash tree, but a catalpa. It's one of many babies our old catalpa generated before we had to have it taken down (professionally -- it was a double-trunk giant with power lines running through it). You can see another one growing up against the barn.

This baby was supposed to have been dug up and moved a few years ago, but somehow we never got to it. By this year, it had gotten too big to move and was growing up through the branches of an apple tree, shading one of my perennial gardens.



I was sorry to cut it down, but it had to go. Sigh ...

I had more fun tackling the overgrown honeysuckle bush with a combination of the saw and long-handled pruners, then hitting the stream bank and taking down what I think are ash trees.



I felled a couple of trees parallel to the brook and let them lie where they fell, but I cut most of them up into 15' to 20' sections and dragged them down back to the brush pile.

It's a job I've been putting off for weeks, but I'm glad I tackled it. (And I'm also glad I had extra-strength aspirin and a thermal wrap for my tendinitis -- one of the reasons I had procrastinated!)

They eat celery, don't they?

I am not really a fan of rhubarb. The very idea of cutting up leaf stalks and baking them in a pie is just ... so ... wrong.

Especially SOUR leaf stalks.

Who thinks this stuff up?

But I do have a small rhubarb patch (look behind the walking onion in the photo below), and I was raised with a New England penchant for thrift. I can't just grow the stuff and let it go to waste!

So I finally found a couple of rhubarb recipes that I like. Basically, surround the stuff with enough sweet dough, let me tell myself it's really Granny Smith apples, and I'm in.

Here's the first rhubarb recipe I ever made:

Blubarb Cookies

1 cup shortening
1-1/2 cups packed brown sugar
2 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1-1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped into 1/2" to 1/4" chunks
1 cup blueberries

Cream shortening and sugar. Beat in eggs.
Combine flour, soda, salt; gradually add to creamed mixture and mix well.
Fold in rhubarb and blueberries.
Drop by large tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart on greased or parchment-covered baking sheets.
Bake at 350 F for 15-18 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 1 minute; remove from sheets; cool completely.

Makes 28 to 30 cookies. They will be puffy, soft and cake-like.

I'm baaaaaack

What's the record for longest time between blog posts by someone who isn't actually dead?

I think I broke it.

Yet another gardening season has rolled around and I am in the thick of it. Thick, as in you can't see my garden because of the weeds.

I had a rototiller once, but it conked out, then got stuck in a spring flood. Twice. Anybody want a third-hand, early 1990s, flooded Troy-Bilt for parts? You haul it away, it's yours.

So I dig. And fork. And spade. And trowel. And power up big rocks with a shovel or a pike. It's called aerobic gardening. :)

One fine crop of dandelions has already flowered and gone to seed. I got about a third of them out of the veg bulb garden before that happened, so my leeks and walking onions got to see the sun.

The walking onions are kind of fun. If you like nice, neat rows of well-behaved plants, you would not like these at all. But if you like something a little quirky, they may be for you.











Instead of flowers, they have lumpy and twisted clusters of new onions growing at the top of a fat, hollow stalk. The bulblets fall to the ground (or the stalk softens and falls over), starting new plants where they hit the dirt. Thus they slowly "walk" around your garden!

And yes, you can eat them. I only planted mine last year, so I let them grow, but I may harvest some this summer. I'll let you know. Really. The same year.

Life gets away from you sometimes

It's been most of a year since I started this blog, and this is only my second post. That always happens with my journals, too. And my artwork. And my remodeling projects. And my gardens ...

The first step is not always the hardest. For me, it's the second step. Where do I go from here?

I don't have an exotic background to draw from. I still live in the area where my mother's family has lived for at least five generations. My father was an average guy from Brooklyn who served in WWII and worked a blue-collar job for thirty years after that. English is the only language in which I'm fluent. I have a college degree, but not a master's. I'm nobody special.

So let's stay away from the politics and philosophy for a little bit, and start with ... gardening. Yeah, gardening. That's the ticket.

I have the distinction of having written one article for publication. Here it is:

Beautiful invader: Poison parsnip is lovely, but it burns

You might have noticed it like I did: an itchy rash that turned into blisters. I figured I'd gotten into poison ivy again, though I couldn't remember seeing any.

When it got so bad I went to the doctor for a prescription, he called it "contact dermatitis." That's the medical term for "You got into something that causes a rash."

Somebody tried to tell me it wasn't poison ivy; it was poison parsnip. I just laughed. I'd never heard of the stuff. And the name sounded ridiculous.

When they described it, I told them that couldn't affect me, because I'd played in acres of it when I was a kid.

But after two summers of suffering, I started looking around. What I found was a familiar plant growing around the edges of my yard.

It had leaves like celery and a thick stalk as tall as I was, with a flower like Queen Anne's Lace, but greenish yellow.

I tested it. (Don't try this at home.) I actually rubbed a little of the leaf on my arm.
Guess what? Itch. Rash. Blisters.

I had poison parsnip.

Poison parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) is a fast-spreading import from Eurasia. It grows anywhere, especially along roadsides and mowed areas. Mowing actually causes it to flourish, because it cuts out the competing vegetation and allows the parsnip to shoot up into the sun.

The sap causes a photodermic reaction. That is, it makes your skin extremely sensitive to ultraviolet light.

In effect, it gives you a second-degree burn. It can leave a brown scar that may last for years.

And unlike poison ivy, nobody is immune.

The sap is produced in every part of the plant, including the flowers, and is absorbed into skin in less than 30 minutes. It takes a day or two to produce the rash.

Poison parsnip has a long taproot, so it's as hard to eradicate as dandelions. If you remove it before it goes to seed, though, you have a much better chance of control.

If there's more than you can dig up, check with a garden center for the best chemical control.

I've found by research and personal experience a few tricks to beat the itches:

* Wear sunblock. Lots of it. Everywhere. If the UV rays don't reach your skin, you won't get burned.
* When working around the plant, wear a long-sleeved shirt and heavy pants; use leather -- not cloth -- gloves with gauntlets; and protect your eyes with glasses or goggles.
* Avoid rotary trimmers (weed whackers) or mowers that throw shredded plant material.
* If you are exposed, avoid sunlight -- and even indoor fluorescent lights, if possible.
* If you develop blisters, don't moisturize. Use a drying calamine-type lotion or spray.

Poison parsnip? It sounds silly, but it's no laughing matter.

(Published in The (Glens Falls, NY) Post-Star, 06/08/2003.)

Later edit: I would add that you should take off and wash the clothes that were exposed to the plant right away, and ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS wear sunblock!

Also, a near-heavenly bliss if you do get to the itchy point, but not the yellow blisters: Run water as hot as you can stand -- NOT hot enough to scald -- over the area. It may itch more at first, then sting a little, then feel ooooooooohhhh so good. The effect lasts from a few minutes to a few hours.

There's actually an explanation for this. Apparently the heat speeds up both the production and the destruction of natural histamines, which cause the itching.

The plant is a biennial, which means it flowers its second year. This is what it looks like the first year (this one is about a foot tall):

Beginnings

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Up until now, it's all been in my head. It may be that I'll decide it would have been better left there; we'll see.

Oddly enough, it was the Iraqi blogs (riverbend, salam pax and others) that encouraged me to begin. I guess that's "how 9/11 changed my life" -- through a domino topple of events. I'll be speaking more about that, certainly.

But on another topic, brought up by the phrase in the description of this blog: I miss Douglas Adams. It's too sad to contemplate that there will never be another Dirk Gently or Hitchhiker book. (I miss Johnny Cash, too. Though I think I'd have liked to know Douglas Adams in person; I'm not sure about the Man in Black.)