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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.
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.
