Scamperings

Last week I was surprised and delighted to see a mockingbird beating the absolute tar out of what I think was a Manduca caterpillar. I don't bear any ill-will towards Manduca, mind you; it was just so unexpected. I didn't know anything ate those! The bird must have plucked it out of someone's home garden on that block.

I was also able to locate the nest -- very loud cheeping in a nearby tree. :-)

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A neighbor was giving out some ham from Walden Local Meats, a Massachusetts meat-share program with good standards. (So this is from pasture-raised pigs.) It's "uncured ham", which apparently actually means "cured, but with less gross ingredients". I accepted, and now we have to figure out what to do with it. Ham has not been much a part of my life. It's too fatty for me to enjoy directly on a sandwich, but I fried up some thin slices and I guess that's basically the same thing as bacon. Amazingly tasty. The fat mostly comes out into the skillet, so we can fry up other stuff in that instead of using olive oil.

These days I also make "tempeh cutlets" pretty often -- slice two packages of it thin, then marinate in 2 Tbsp soy sauce, 1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar, and 20 drops liquid smoke until absorbed. Pan fry in copious olive and toasted sesame oil. Pretty incredible in sandwiches, especially with burger/hot dog condiments and sometimes cheese.

I made some last night and fried up the first couple in the pork fat. And you know, I think they actually weren't as good as the ones fried up on the other oils! That was a bit of a surprise.

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Such drought here. A lot of trees have brown leaf margins. Many lawns are covered in brown grass, which I guess is good, considering; that means people aren't watering them. There are watering advisories in effect but this isn't a drought-prone area, so I don't know how well-publicized they are.

Two rain barrels continue to be sufficient, but I'm also starting to measure how much water is coming out of the dehumidifier. It looks like 1-2 gallons per day, which is honestly a huge amount. Again, a terribly energy-inefficient way to collect water, and it wouldn't be enough for hygiene, but that's enough to keep a couple of people in probably-OK-quality drinking water in an emergency where you have electricity but not water. I don't think it's actually enough for my garden by itself, but it's supplementing rainfall enough that I haven't had to use tap water.

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The hopniss poked a tendril out of the pot the other day and just sort of sat there for a few days, but when I wasn't looking it shot a good 10-15 cm up. Maybe because I gave the pot a good soak. I'm looking forward to sitting with the plant and learning its shape and how it moves. Right now I wouldn't be able to tell hopniss from wisteria foliage, so I can't be sure whether I saw one in the wild or not a couple weeks ago. A little embarrassing.

I've been thinking about how one would grow starchy root plants in a no-dig manner. Carrots and beets can be pretty much pulled straight up, maybe requiring the soil to be loosened a bit first. Potatoes can be done totally no-dig by piling up mulch around them as they grow, so the base soil layer remains undisturbed; the tubers form in the soft mulch, not the firm soil. But sunchokes and hopniss probably don't work that way? My best thought is that you might be able to pull up the plants in the fall and bring some of the tubers up for harvest, and leave the rest int he ground for next year. It's still going to be disruptive, but not as disruptive to the soil structure as traditional digging.

1. Theory of lockpicking

(Not practice, partly because at 6yo I don't think she's ready to do it delicately enough and probably doesn't have the patience for it either -- and partly because honestly I'm not that good at it myself. I can only open about half the practice locks I have, and not reliably.)

2. Riding around in the basement on her hand-bike

(Funny little kid-sized thing similar to a Radio Flyer "Cyclone", except there are no visible branding marks. No idea who made it.)

3. Figuring out what parts of the basement ceiling map to what parts of our apartment

(So many pipes and wires! And learning about how the two units are sort of interlocked.)

A couple days ago I was talking with a neighbor and she offered to do me a favor, which I didn't think I needed at the time. I declined, and then later changed my mind, so I gave her a call and left a message. I got a confused call back asking what I was talking about.

Turns out they're totally separate people! Now I need to figure out which of them does the rowing crew stuff, which is the one from Alabama, which one baked us that nice dessert that one time, etc. Ugh.

I'm usually only *moderately* bad at faces (and really quite bad at names), but this one really takes the cake.

Busy farm day. (We have a CSA half-share at Waltham Fields, and generally take half the day to wander around the farm after we pick it up.)

Another CSA member found a big tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) in the frost-bitten cherry tomato field and happily gave it to me. I'm going to feed it tomato leaves from a plant that has stopped producing until it is ready to pupate. I'm going to try to give it a natural outdoor habitat, and expect that it will likely enter diapause and overwinter. But if it doesn't, we should expect to see an adult emerge in about 18 days. The adults are really cool -- they hover like hummingbirds. I found two other hornworms myself, and all three had tiny white elliptical bumps on their bodies that might be some kind of parasite, so this one might never become an adult. The kid has been warned of this possibility, but is super excited. She has never seen a hornworm before and is quite enamored with it.





The hornworm was a nice surprise. Yesterday I found a queen carpenter ant (probably Camponotus pennsylvanicus?) and suddenly, desperately wanted to start an ant farm. (Not that I needed a new project, or a pet that could live up to 10 years.) She was beautiful -- almost 2 cm long, golden brown wings, deep black body with golden hairs. But I learned that since she still had her wings and it was October rather than June, she was likely a new queen out of season and would not have mated. I regretfully let her go on the big dead Ailanthus stump. More power to her, if she can find a mate. Anyway, now I have a hornworm as a substitute.



I found a bunny's tail at the farm, and backtracking a bit, some other clumps of fur. Hawk? Coyote?



I also saw several monarch butterflies. One landed and held still long enough for me to get a good look. The kid was *very* excited to see one up close for the first time.



There were two more windthrown or broken trees along the west treeline of the farm -- a few weeks ago there was an enormous mulberry tree down, heavily covered with bittersweet, and now there's an oak as well as a cherry tangled up with some maple branches. On the east treeline, there are two windthrown oaks. We've been having unusual winds recently. Sad to see, especially on the very sparse western side. I wonder if there's some opportunity to do a little sneaky forestry and help ensure that an oak or other native fills the gap, rather than a Norway maple or Ailanthus or whatever.

Biking to the farm, my chain started making periodic awful grinding/slipping noises. It was difficult to reproduce with the bike upside down, but after riding around a bit I eventually determined out that the derailleur was being pulled *forward* somehow. And then I discovered a broken tooth on the 2nd gear up front, sort of split down the middle so that it had a groove. The plate of the chain would periodically land in this groove so that two adjacent links were offset relative to each other, bind up on the teeth, and get sucked around the front gear -- which then pulled the derailleur forward. I stayed in first and third gear for the rest of the ride.

I collected about 11 kg of good-looking black walnuts. These I won't use for dye, but will husk tomorrow and start drying in some kind of squirrel-proof environment. (I need to post the results of my dyeing experiment.) The ones I used for dye I may have let sit too long before husking, and one that I cracked open experimentally this weekend did not look and taste good, so I'm hoping to do better with this batch.