One....Two....Three?

Toad

Peaches and Cream

Peaches and Cream sweet corn, that is. I'm thrilled by the results of my corn crop this year. This is the first time I've grown  sweet corn on my own. We grew mountains of sweet corn when I was child and gorged ourselves with fresh from the garden sweet corn every day through late summer and fall. This is the first time I have had a garden large enough to plant sweet corn. It came up a bit sporatically and I wasn't sure if I had enough stalks tasseling at the same time to get full ears of corn, but just about every ear we have picked has been plump and full.

Also, somewhat to our surprise, the raccoons have left the corn alone. We had a small amount of damage two weeks ago when the corn was just starting to ripen, but after that first taste, they did not come back.

(Almost) Full Moon

By the End of the Day...

....a wheel barrow full of over ripe cucumbers, green and Italian peppers, red and white onions, one very large zucchini, and a bowl of yellow and red cherry tomatoes has been turned into 9 pints of bread and butter pickles, 3 quarts of rich yellow-orange tomato juice, and 2 quarts of frozen grated zucchini for future zucchini bread.

Does anyone else love the taste of over ripe pickling cucumbers? I remember scraping out the seeds and eating them as a little girl and I still love them. The flesh is a lot juicier and has a tangy, almost tart taste. I sliced a couple of cucumbers up in "sticks" to go in my lunch box for tomorrow.

Wise old frog

Another tree frog. This one is the biggest one I've seen, and the most warted and gnarled. I took a close up of one his eye. He looks so wise and serene.

The Setting Sun

Tree Frog on Basil

Spider Webs

Sun Rays

The sun rising beyond our tree line.

A Gallery of Moths

Hundreds of moths gather every night under the light by the garage door. Moths can be really pretty if you look closely.  These  moths all have a wing span of under an inch. If anyone can ID any of them, let me know. I don't know my moths at all!

(And an update on the tobacco hornworms--I let them go in my herb garden with its volunteer tomato plants. My husband informs me I am crazy and that we will have a plague of them next year. But they simply weren't doing well in captivity even with a constant supply of fresh tomato leaves. They turned a ugly dark green and  took to wandering around aimlessly on the bottom of the jar. They looked so unhappy I couldn't stand looking at them, so I let them go. Maybe I will be seeing a Carolina Sphinx moth in its natural habitat this summer or fall.)

A Walk in the Dark

Tobacco Hornworm

For the past few weeks I've noticed leaves disappearing from my tomato plants. At first I suspected deer, but saw no damage to any other plants. I thought the damage might be being done by tomato hornworms, but couldn't find the culprits. Then last night I found these two giant caterpillars. I've never actually seen a tomato horn worm and went and looked them up. That is when I discovered that hhey are a  close relative, tobacco hornworms. They are distinguished from the tomato hornworm by the red horn on the tail and the one set of stripes. Tomato hornworms have a dark green horn and v-shaped stripes. Click on this link for a photo comparison of tobacco and tomato hornworms.

Hornworms apparently become Sphinx and humming bird moths. Tobacco hornworrm become Carolina Sphinx moths with a wing span of over 4 inches.

Obviously Tobacco hornworms don't limit there diet to just tobacco.  Besides tomatoes, they will eat pepper  and potato leaves and sometimes tomato fruit.

The larger of the two worms measured 4 and half inches long.



They have these cool suction cup feet. I pried the smaller off the stem for a photo shot, but could get the big one off.







So what to do with my tobacco hornworms? The chickens wouldn't touch them and they were just to big to kill in cold blood. I finally decided to put them in a gallon jar and am feeding them leaves from the volunteer tomato plants in the herb garden. Maybe at some point in the future, I will have a photo of a Carolina Sphinx moth to share with you!

Reminder

This was a crazy weekend for work, with lots of patient visits. I'm staying up late tonight finishing up paperwork. It is on days like this that I need a reminder why I love being a visiting nurse. Today I got one of those reminders.

The driveway was a grassy two track through a swamp with willows, cattails, and stagnant water on either side. It wound quarter of a mile through the wet land, then through a thick dark hemlock forest. A tumbled down barn in the woods was the first sign that someone might have once lived here. Finally I came to a little disheveled house covered with spiderwebs. A pond covered with thick green algae stretched out beyond the house. A family of sand hill cranes--the parents and their half grown craneling--stood almost as if they were guarding the house, and made no move to flee when I stopped my SUV and got out.

I stood there for a few minutes just taking in the complete silence and the green darkness of the forest and water. Despite the eeriness, it was incredibly peaceful and beautiful.

When I knocked on the door, I half expected it to be answered by a little old lady with a broomstick and a tall black pointy hat. No such luck, but the 81 year old home bound woman who lived there was quite a character. You would have to be, to live alone in a run down house in the middle of a swamp by yourself at age 81!

Our goal as visiting nurses and therapists is to keep people home as long as it is safe for them to be home. It is a great privilege to help a person like this woman, live independently in the house she and her husband built together, surrounded by the wild animals, birds, and the wet lands she loves.

Milkweed isn't just for Monarchs

On my milkweed plants today, I counted three tree frogs....

...five monarch catapillers...

and lots of these fuzzy strange looking catapillers. (I hope they are destined to turn into pretty butterflies.)

Boys Toys

It isn't just all about flowers and frogs on our 13 acres....

Garden Photos

The garden is coming in lush and green, and is starting to produce. The garden I left behind was near a black walnut tree. Black walnut tree roots secrete a toxin which harms many plants. In that garden it was a constant battle to keep things alive. Somehow, for the most part I managed to have a healthy, productive garden. It is such a treat not to have to constantly  battle a black walnut! It is also nice to have enough space to plant everything in wide straight rows. I had everything very crammed in my previous garden.

So far I've picked and frozen lots of green beans, and we've had plenty of kale. Tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, peppers, carrots, and onions are finally starting to come in. In a previous post several people asked what I do with all the produce. I can and freeze a lot, and give some away. Next year the garden should have several rows of flowers as well as vegetables.

The chickens enjoy the garden and amazingly have done very little damage.

A turkey family with 3 adults and 8 chicks roosts in the tall pines near the edge of the garden every evening. When I am out working in the garden around 8 pm, I often see them making their way up the hill to the pines. Some times they come up through the woods, sometimes they wander across our lawn. They always get excited and bolt for the trees when they catch site of me, so I haven't yet been able to get anything but a blurry photo. I'm pretty certain they are the culprits who ate all the raspberries, blueberries, and bog cranberries. I didn't get a single berry off anything, even though the there were plenty of green berries on the bushes. Nothing made it to ripening though.

Besides the berries, the other loss was the most of the fall crop of green beans. Moles seem to have gotten most of the beans even before they came up. I was wondering why the beans came up so sporadically, and when I dug around in the soil to see if I could find any seeds, my hands sank into mole tunnels. They appeared to have tunneled under the rows and eatten almost every bean. This bed should be filled with bean plants, not mostly empty spaces. Yesterday I replanted the empty spaces with fall greens--endive, spinach, lettuce, and a spicy greens mix.

There hasn't been any rabbit, woodchuck or deer damage yet. I do see deer tracks in the garden on a regular basis, and yesterday I watched a still spotted fawn wander through the garden for half an hour.

Some of the harvest.

Kitty in the Corn

Nemo likes to hang out in the garden while I work.

Watching butterflies dance.

Inspecting a cricket.

                                                                 Just relaxing.

Cedar Waxwing Fledgling

Yesterday while I was working in the garden, a Cedar Waxwing fledgling fluttered down from the tall  pine trees on the edge of the garden. Despite his best efforts he couldn't seem to get airborn again. Since Nemo, our cat, was nearby, I decided to help him and put him on a branch in the maple tree near the garden. He had no problem flying from branch to branch once he was back up in the tree.