ATTACKED!! 2020: This Time, It's Personal!

On Sunday, one of the hottest days of the year (so far), I was moving hoses around, preparing to water my garden. Suddenly, an intense sharp pain on my knee made me aware of several buzzing yellow jackets! The back of the other knee got nailed! My shin! I started to flee, and I noticed the dog had gone full Eeyore on me: head down, ears down, tail down, feet firmly rooted in one spot, at least a half dozen yellow jackets buzzing him.

Doomed! The white dust is from the exterminator.
The lower nest is blocked, and the entrance is full of poison.

In an incredible act of courage, I hobbled over to Rocky, and grabbed his collar. The back of my hand got nailed by a stinger. I shrieked at the sad dog, terrified of the numerous persistent pursuing insects, and Rocky planted his feet more solidly and refused to move. I dragged him by the collar, out the gate and halfway around the house, brushing yellow jackets off him and then me as we went. Poor Rocky was stumbling and almost falling, perhaps as terrified by me as by the stingers.

I got us inside, verified we had left all pursuers outside, and assessed the damage. I had at least six stings on arms and legs, and they were already incredibly painful and swelling up fast. Rocky was still in Eeyore mode, but didn't flinch when I patted him.

I've never been particularly bothered by bees. When I've been stung before, it hurts, it swells, and in an hour or two it looks and feels itchy like most people's mosquito bites. (I am even more indifferent to mosquitoes, usually.)  But I am aware that many stings can bring on anaphylactic shock, and I'd never felt anything as painful as this. I raided the medicine cabinet, first for Rocky, then for me - antihistamines and painkillers all round. I texted my BIL to keep checking back with me for the next couple of hours, to make sure I hadn't started gasping for breath.

Of course then I took to the internet to figure out what these infernal pests were, studying the nest through the window. Clearly territorial yellow jackets, not bees. There were DIY solutions for getting rid of ground nests on the internet, but neighbors strongly recommended a local one-man specialty service. With my left hand already swollen so it was hardly functional, I decided to wimp out and go with the expert.

The stings continued to swell, reaching a good six inches in angry painful diameter each. Monday was worse than Sunday, but then they started to recede and now, five days later, they are roughly mosquito-bite itchy, not painful, but still large and red. I have a new healthy respect for all things stinging.

The "Bee-Be-Gone" guy has just left, noting the nest had taken advantage of tunneling mammals - probably voles - so the nest was very deep and long. He had to go with poison, not just mechanical means, to get rid of them. So now the front yard is filled with extremely perturbed angry flying things with nasty pointy ends that pack a poison of their own. It will take up to three days for the activity to die down, and if there is any residual flying activity in a week my guy will come back and do it again.

Bad Nature! Bad bad nature!

BTW, this is only a few feet from where I had a welcome distanced outdoor chat with Liz last week. Luckily, we didn't inadvertently bother the nest, and they didn't bother us then. What a debacle that would have been!

How my Corner has Evolved

If you are not looking at this on a phone, you may have noticed I finally updated the cover photo. Here is how my corner has evolved over the years:

2004: Before I had the stone wall built.

2007: Wall is new and I'm gaga for tropicals in pots

2010: This is what I was using as the blog top photo

2014: The tree behind the "no outlet" sign is small

2020: The shade from the tree, and losing the spruce, has totally transformed the corner

Apres Moi, Le Deluge?

Broccoli, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, zucchini, chard

I harvested yesterday - a much bigger haul than I expected.

I knew I had to harvest the continuing sprouting of side shoots from the broccoli - this is much more broccoli than I ever expected. My first venture into broccoli - highly successful! But when I unzipped my crop cage on the raised bed to go in there, I realized it was time to perform some basic hygiene on all the veggies.

Cherry tomato post pruning

I only have a couple of cherry tomato plants in pots this year, because my plants in the raised bed last year succumbed to what I decided was a virus. I was really sad to see my plants in pots also had yellowing leaves, primarily on the bottom. The internet assured me it was probably the virus, and suggested cutting off all the apparently infected leaves. I suspect the virus got there because I am using plant supports from last year, without actually washing them. I never have, but my books recommend a wipe with bleach at the start of the season, for this specific reason. Tools as well. It's too late for the supports, but I can clean up the tools. I spent a pleasant several minutes pruning and carefully tossing ugly leaves. As always, with pruning the trick is knowing when to stop. Let's hope the plants pull through.

My raised bed is planted very thickly, and the plants are all on top of each other, and there were many yellow leaves at the bottom. Inspired by my tomato pruning, I decided to tackle the whole bed. This would also allow me to really examine what is there, because with it all zipped up, and all of the thick foliage, it's hard to tell what is actually going on as far as blooming and producing is concerned. So I unzipped and raised the sides of the covering, got on my hands and knees, and cleaned and harvested. The chard was almost completely overshadowed by the zucchini foliage, so I decided to take all of the outer leaves and see what happens to the residual plants.

I'm really happy with the way the clean-up went, though I started out planning on spending 15 minutes and ended up spending three hours. There is a specific warning against handling wet foliage (especially bean plants) and it has been very rainy and damp most mornings. Yesterday, Friday, dawned drier and I went to town. Now, there is less rot and better airflow. It can only help.

Broc in the foreground, zucchini in the middle,
cuke on the left, beans on the far end.

My zucchini plants have almost all male flowers. Some years, those are the only flowers I ever have, never any fruit. I have a bad history with zucchini - never have I drowned in them. A large part of that is because of a pest called "squash vine borer" - a butterfly lays eggs in the main thick vine of the plant, the caterpillars eat their way out, and the plants wither. I think the mesh around the bed may prevent that by being a bit too fine for their wings. So could this be the year I have the classic over-supply of squash?

I bought plants and seeds late, and I was stuck with what they had. Zucchini was easy - but then I also bought packets of beans, both pole and bush. I had noted a bean or two, from outside the bed, but when I was down into the details I ended up with a whole pound! Sadly, I'm not so wild for fresh green beans. I'll cook and eat them, since they are mine. But fresh beans are one of the foods where the hassle of tip-and-tailing them, versus pulling a bag out of the freezer, hasn't generally shown me to be worth the effort. What are your favorite bean recipes? I have a feeling there may be a lot of them. 

Prickly climbing cucumber

I never eat a lot of cucumbers, but I bought a couple of plants and they are climbing up. The plant is attractive, but the fruits are funny and spiky. There was a cuke recipe in yesterday's paper (basically cukes with egg salad and dill) and I'll give that a try for the one edible one I've got already. I'm eating a lot of salads, so if the cukes are coming I may be able to keep up with them.

Of the haul in the photo at the top, so far I've eaten the cherry tomatoes (snarfed like candy), broccoli (roasted), zucchini (tossed into a chicken saute), and the chard (sauteed with breakfast sausage this morning). I'm doing a salad for lunch (cuke, I'm looking at you) and will think about the beans tomorrow.

I would have to say none of these, except the tomatoes, are head and shoulders better than the usual vegetables I get at Whole Foods. It's still fun, though.

Blooming Now

It’s a busy time for the garden. It’s doing well this year.

Angel wing begonia, on the patio with sparrow

Tradescantia 

Spigelia

Clematis and rose

Daylilies along the front walk

Red daylilies on side of house

Lilies. These were dug up and replanted for the gas company

Berry Land

My garden is riot of berries, ripe and not ripe, but ripe with potential. It has been a great spring. The birds and squirrels are having a fine old time, and so do I, watching them. I am so easily entertained.

Service berries. The dark ones can be popped right in my mouth

What’s ripe right now are the service berries (also known as shadbush), well known for being the first fruits of summer. Many years ago, I bought a bundle of what were basically shadbush sticks, and I plopped them in the ground all around the yard. I put several on the very steep slope between my house and the neighbor’s, outside my fence. Before this year, I never realized they had actually survived and turned into slender trees more than 10 feet tall, this year serving up a cornucopia of beautiful red berries. This is my view as I lounge on my patio. I’ve seen cardinals, robins, and catbirds pulling off a berry and eating it delicately. I’ve seen squirrels trying to hang on to the tiny end branches where the berries are, scarfing them down by the pawful. I’ve got another large service berry tree in the front of the house, but many of those berries are covered in what I’m told is “cedar apple rust”, a most un-appetizing fuzzy orange coating. (Serviceberry is a close relative of apples.)

The blueberry extravaganza 

It’s really hard to take great pictures of green berries in the midst of green leaves, so bear with me here. Green berries coming along include a spectacular load of blueberries along my front walk. Again, I planted several bushes several years ago. Most have survived, but almost all the berries come from a single giant bush that exploded with growth when the Big Tree fell two years ago and it started getting full sun. I have only once battled the birds and squirrels for the blueberries, and got enough to make a pie. That was ten years ago. I wrapped the bush in bird netting to do it, and those silly birdbrains got stuck inside the netting regularly. Also, the bush was a lot smaller size then. I’m trying to figure out if there is a way I can protect at least some of the berries for myself.  Last year, I ate a few blueberries as I passed by, but it seems the birds like them slightly less ripe than I do, so the berries tended to disappear before I wanted to eat them. Thinking...

Pagoda dogwood

I planted an unusual member of the dogwood family a long time back, the Pagoda Dogwood. It has small clusters of flowers, and the branches form horizontal tiers. The clusters turn into black berries that birds go nuts over. The problem with the two trees I have is that deer destroyed them both several times, variously eating them to the ground or killing them by rubbing off the bark with their itchy antlers. Now both trees are inside my fence and they are coming along nicely, one about my height and the other much taller. I expect these berries to ripen in about a month.

Apples!

Not a berry, but related, is my apple tree. I have one left, and from a distance it’s kind of sad and bedraggled. But close up, there are definitely small little apples coming along. I see this tree from my bedroom window, and again, I wonder if I’ll be able to save any of the apples. I never have yet, though the tree is more than a dozen years old.

I have three kinds of viburnums: arrowwood, mapleleaf, and cranberrybush. The arrowwoods are supposed to have black berries, but I’ve not seen many on my bushes. The mapleleafs have black berries as well.  The cranberrybushes have, as you might expect, red berries. All three sets of bushes seem to be producing nice crops this year. These I won’t try to eat — they are for the birds.

American cranberrybush 

Arrowwood 

Harpooned

Very sparse and lacy, hard to capture

I was weeding the sunny slope by my front steps when I felt a prickle. The prickle quickly turned into a myriad of little stabs. Every time I moved, more stabs. I realized that some new bunches of fairly ornamental grass that had sprung up spontaneously were festooning my pants and t-shirt. Ugh.

So the first thing I did, standing up in my bedroom to change my clothes, was to identify it. Blackseed needlegrass, Stipa avenaceum (Piptochaetium avenaceum), says iNaturalist, the coolest app around. Snap a pick and ask for an identification. It has been spot on when I’ve tried it locally. And “needlegrass” is exactly what it is. It’s native to much of the United States east of the Rockies.

I pulled about a 100 spears out of my clothes before tossing them in the laundry. I had to carefully pull each one out and then run my fingers around the inside of the fabric to see if any spearheads got left behind. Then I studied more about this odd pest. It has perfect little harpoons. It launches them, and they bury themselves in clothes (and presumably animal fur). They are really miraculous. Take a look at how well designed for the purpose they are.

This also gave me a chance to get out my specialized macro lens for an extreme closeup.

Look at the hooks behind the point!

I’ve been turning my mind to how to control this without getting stabbed by a thousand tiny cuts. I think hard surface tight weave clothes, as opposed to the soft cotton knits I wore yesterday, might be more resistant to the stabs.








And then this morning, I found some more spears on my sneakers. I was able to capture what the harpoon looks like when it’s buried in the target. What an admirably persistent and well adapted plant this is. Despite its capabilities, it is listed as disappearing in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Harvest!

I've had more food from my garden already this year than in many previous years. I had lovely lettuce and arugula, planted from seed, in a single large pot. The lettuce has been less slug/bug/rabbit eaten than other lettuce I've tried recently. I finished it up, and ripped it all out by the roots, this weekend. I've put a tomato plant in the same pot, and moved the pot into more sun.

My big harvest this week was broccoli! I planted six plants from Home Depot back in March. By just dumb luck, the deer didn't come by before I got around to putting up the netting recently, and the plants got BIG! I've never successfully harvested broccoli before. I watched the big center heads get bigger and bigger, and worried about when to harvest. I got the first couple of clumps early last week - probably about 5-6 inches across each. That's a lot of broccoli! But then I realized the other four heads were about to flower, so I went for it big time! In fact, I should have picked them a couple of days earlier.

One way I fix cauliflower that makes it disappear quickly is to roast it, and I discovered this roast broccoli recipe from Jose Andres in one of my new cookbooks. Basically, you cut off the stems (reserving for another use) and roast the florets with slivers of garlic and a generous amount of olive oil. Truly, stupid-easy, and truly delicious!

Yesterday, I finished the last of the roasted broccoli in a salad with the last of my own lettuces. I'm finding I can overeat on vegetables - I define "overeating" as eating past the point of optimal fullness, to stuffed. Things could be worse, I suppose. I haven't had a serious ice cream attack in days.

Today, I had the well-cooked broccoli stems with rice, onions, and parmesan cheese in my own version of comfort food. It'll be a while before there is another harvest, though the broccoli plants may produce some viable small side shoot florets. I've got onions, chard, cucumber, zucchini, and two kinds of beans coming along, as well as two small tomato plants in pots. It's been a good summer for growing, so far. Sun, rain, and not too much humidity. The rotating of crops and fertilizing is also helping, I bet.