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Travel part 2
Jun. 30th, 2022 10:02 amWe're in Virginia now, and nearing the end of our trip.
It's great being at my parents' place. The garden is wonderful, full of big healthy plants and innumerable insects and innumerable *kinds* of insects on every surface. And there are woods.
The woods are not the kind of woods I grew up in, despite being just a few miles away; those were older, more mature woods typical of the Blue Ridge foothills: Beech, maple, oak; various medicinal plants that I know; relatively open understory and thick canopy. A familiar smell. Hundreds of acres (belonging to the neighbors) to tromp through, with streams and fields. But the woods they have now are in a subdivision, and the red clay comes right to the surface; it must have been bulldozed some decades back, and is given over to invasives. The mature trees are tulip tree, pine, and Ailanthus (invasive), and choked with Oriental bittersweet, English ivy, stiltgrass, multiflora rose, porcelain berry (all invasive). The understory has a good amount of pawpaw, spicebush, and Carolina buckthorn among others, which we're hoping to encourage -- and keep from getting covered up.
My dad has been killing the Ailanthus with herbicide (downward hatchet cuts into the trunk, with glyphosate drizzled in) or fungus (blue oyster mushrooms spores in drilled holes) and there are now clearings opening up. Dangerous clearings, with trees unpredictably crashing down. Not a place to be on a windy day. Stiltgrass has spread through the clearings. I guess it could be worse? But there really does need to be something to replace the Ailanthus. When slippery elm and oak pop up in the garden, he transplants them out there, but the deer eat them, so they have to be caged. Some of the deer here will eat damn near anything, even holly sometimes. They're overpopulated. The regulations in this county apparently require killing antlerless deer (does, but also young males) before you're allowed to kill antlered deer, and that probably helps bring the population down, but I wonder if they should push a little further towards killing does. Maybe expand bow-hunting season, too? (Or reintroduce wolves. I can dream.) Anyway, the deer really aren't helping the effort to restore native plant populations, given their (understandable) preference for eating the native plants. But the reintroductions are working in some areas: Goldenseal, bloodroot, and wood anemone are pushing out into the woods, and I've been pulling bittersweet from the edges of that patch. Elusiveat has convinced me that this is the correct strategy -- it's not really worth pulling the invasives unless you're replacing them with something, and working the edges of expanding patches allows the native plants to do some work for you. Let the invasives compete with themselves in the worst areas; don't worry about that until the "front" reaches them.
I've thrown some inedible fallen fruits from the blueberries into the clearings. And I dug up some hopniss tubers that had escaped their planter box and buried them at the north edge of clearings after removing invasives. Maybe some will take, next year. Gotta keep throwing spaghetti at that wall.
The garden... oh the garden is gorgeous. 3000 sq ft, bark mulch paths and beds deep and soft with composted sawdust, a mix of perennials and annuals. Some things are in the garden just to keep them away from the deer and squirrels: Jerusalem artichokes, a persimmon tree, blueberry bushes, thornless raspberry and blackberry. (Multiple pints per day of berries.) The blueberries are under pond netting to keep the birds out, but the birds are free to have at the raspberries. Cardinals even made a nest in there. Squash, beans, tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes, various medicinals, some hopniss (groundnut), strawberries, kale, okra... My dad keeps the garden bare of weeds these days, which I feel mixed about; with the seed company and ~8000 sq ft of garden, the paths were often grass and weeds, and the planting areas allowed to cover over with chickweed and other weeds when fallow. It was a different kind of beautiful then, more wild. My own preference is to let certain weeds run unchecked to provide free salad greens, but I might feel differently if I had 3000 sq ft instead of a tiny front yard.
I spend a lot of my time here happily pulling invasives, harvesting crops, weeding, and picking bugs. The pest burden is considerable, and my dad has had to stop growing Cucurbita pepo entirely (yellow summer squash, jack o'lantern, acorn squash...) due to pickleworm and other pests. The local predators, parasites, and pathogens seem to have largely put brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSBs) in check, which is a huge relief, and Japanese beetles are no longer the total defoliators they used to be. Squash bugs are a perennial issue, and I collected probably 50+ egg masses over a couple days. (Persistently hunting and finding small things that do not want to be found is one of my sharpest skills.) I also learned that squash bug adults like to hang out on the cattle panel, and especially in the channel between the panel wires and the posts; we may put out some PVC tubes for them to "hide" in to more easily collect them. But there are always new pests. The squash lady beetle has moved in, and can do significant damage. I only found a few of those, and no larvae, which is odd. I'll keep looking.
Something new and exciting is that I spotted a zebra swallowtail, a butterfly I only saw once or twice as a kid. Their caterpillars basically just eat pawpaw leaves, and the adults are lovely large zebra-colored butterflies with some red highlights. I had told my dad about watching a cabbage white lay eggs on a horseradish and then being able to find the eggs later, which I suppose inspired my dad -- yesterday he spotted a zebra swallowtail laying eggs on his pawpaw trees. They tend to defoliate his trees, and the pawpaws are a bit of a project for him, with some anxiety about whether he'll get to the few fruits before the raccoons find them. In the past he has even sprayed the trees with pyrethrins to stop the defoliation, which I very much disapprove of, and find out of character for him. (They fully defoliate the small trees, which then recover, and only defoliate the large trees by about 1/4th. That seems like acceptable damage to me.) We went and looked for the eggs and managed to find them, and then I spotted a couple of caterpillars. I was a little nervous about showing them to him, but I think he's fascinated enough by them that he has formed a bit of attachment, and will be more gentle with them in the future. He's going out each day to look at them now and watch what the caterpillars do, and how the eggs mature. :-)
The other big excitement for me is the giant syrphid flies (dunno the species). Unlike the little syrphid flies I'm used to, these are *enormous*, maybe 3 cm long, looking like hornets. They love the massive elderberry bush out back of the garden (which produced a gallon of fruit last year) and my dad has seen one catch a carpenter bee. Apparently they also had a habit of hanging out by the brown marmorated stink bug trap and catching incoming stink bugs.
Edited to add: This year, almost no June bugs, although we're slightly earlier in the season. Far fewer of the really smelly, thin, millipedes in the house. Fewer skinks. No robber fly sightings. No live BMSBs in the house, and very few outdoors. The amaranth and cleomi, allowed to grow randomly in the garden as trap plants, show no harlequin bugs and very few cucumber beetles, although there's certainly defoliation from the latter.
It's great being at my parents' place. The garden is wonderful, full of big healthy plants and innumerable insects and innumerable *kinds* of insects on every surface. And there are woods.
Woods
The woods are not the kind of woods I grew up in, despite being just a few miles away; those were older, more mature woods typical of the Blue Ridge foothills: Beech, maple, oak; various medicinal plants that I know; relatively open understory and thick canopy. A familiar smell. Hundreds of acres (belonging to the neighbors) to tromp through, with streams and fields. But the woods they have now are in a subdivision, and the red clay comes right to the surface; it must have been bulldozed some decades back, and is given over to invasives. The mature trees are tulip tree, pine, and Ailanthus (invasive), and choked with Oriental bittersweet, English ivy, stiltgrass, multiflora rose, porcelain berry (all invasive). The understory has a good amount of pawpaw, spicebush, and Carolina buckthorn among others, which we're hoping to encourage -- and keep from getting covered up.
My dad has been killing the Ailanthus with herbicide (downward hatchet cuts into the trunk, with glyphosate drizzled in) or fungus (blue oyster mushrooms spores in drilled holes) and there are now clearings opening up. Dangerous clearings, with trees unpredictably crashing down. Not a place to be on a windy day. Stiltgrass has spread through the clearings. I guess it could be worse? But there really does need to be something to replace the Ailanthus. When slippery elm and oak pop up in the garden, he transplants them out there, but the deer eat them, so they have to be caged. Some of the deer here will eat damn near anything, even holly sometimes. They're overpopulated. The regulations in this county apparently require killing antlerless deer (does, but also young males) before you're allowed to kill antlered deer, and that probably helps bring the population down, but I wonder if they should push a little further towards killing does. Maybe expand bow-hunting season, too? (Or reintroduce wolves. I can dream.) Anyway, the deer really aren't helping the effort to restore native plant populations, given their (understandable) preference for eating the native plants. But the reintroductions are working in some areas: Goldenseal, bloodroot, and wood anemone are pushing out into the woods, and I've been pulling bittersweet from the edges of that patch. Elusiveat has convinced me that this is the correct strategy -- it's not really worth pulling the invasives unless you're replacing them with something, and working the edges of expanding patches allows the native plants to do some work for you. Let the invasives compete with themselves in the worst areas; don't worry about that until the "front" reaches them.
I've thrown some inedible fallen fruits from the blueberries into the clearings. And I dug up some hopniss tubers that had escaped their planter box and buried them at the north edge of clearings after removing invasives. Maybe some will take, next year. Gotta keep throwing spaghetti at that wall.
Garden
The garden... oh the garden is gorgeous. 3000 sq ft, bark mulch paths and beds deep and soft with composted sawdust, a mix of perennials and annuals. Some things are in the garden just to keep them away from the deer and squirrels: Jerusalem artichokes, a persimmon tree, blueberry bushes, thornless raspberry and blackberry. (Multiple pints per day of berries.) The blueberries are under pond netting to keep the birds out, but the birds are free to have at the raspberries. Cardinals even made a nest in there. Squash, beans, tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes, various medicinals, some hopniss (groundnut), strawberries, kale, okra... My dad keeps the garden bare of weeds these days, which I feel mixed about; with the seed company and ~8000 sq ft of garden, the paths were often grass and weeds, and the planting areas allowed to cover over with chickweed and other weeds when fallow. It was a different kind of beautiful then, more wild. My own preference is to let certain weeds run unchecked to provide free salad greens, but I might feel differently if I had 3000 sq ft instead of a tiny front yard.
I spend a lot of my time here happily pulling invasives, harvesting crops, weeding, and picking bugs. The pest burden is considerable, and my dad has had to stop growing Cucurbita pepo entirely (yellow summer squash, jack o'lantern, acorn squash...) due to pickleworm and other pests. The local predators, parasites, and pathogens seem to have largely put brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSBs) in check, which is a huge relief, and Japanese beetles are no longer the total defoliators they used to be. Squash bugs are a perennial issue, and I collected probably 50+ egg masses over a couple days. (Persistently hunting and finding small things that do not want to be found is one of my sharpest skills.) I also learned that squash bug adults like to hang out on the cattle panel, and especially in the channel between the panel wires and the posts; we may put out some PVC tubes for them to "hide" in to more easily collect them. But there are always new pests. The squash lady beetle has moved in, and can do significant damage. I only found a few of those, and no larvae, which is odd. I'll keep looking.
Something new and exciting is that I spotted a zebra swallowtail, a butterfly I only saw once or twice as a kid. Their caterpillars basically just eat pawpaw leaves, and the adults are lovely large zebra-colored butterflies with some red highlights. I had told my dad about watching a cabbage white lay eggs on a horseradish and then being able to find the eggs later, which I suppose inspired my dad -- yesterday he spotted a zebra swallowtail laying eggs on his pawpaw trees. They tend to defoliate his trees, and the pawpaws are a bit of a project for him, with some anxiety about whether he'll get to the few fruits before the raccoons find them. In the past he has even sprayed the trees with pyrethrins to stop the defoliation, which I very much disapprove of, and find out of character for him. (They fully defoliate the small trees, which then recover, and only defoliate the large trees by about 1/4th. That seems like acceptable damage to me.) We went and looked for the eggs and managed to find them, and then I spotted a couple of caterpillars. I was a little nervous about showing them to him, but I think he's fascinated enough by them that he has formed a bit of attachment, and will be more gentle with them in the future. He's going out each day to look at them now and watch what the caterpillars do, and how the eggs mature. :-)
The other big excitement for me is the giant syrphid flies (dunno the species). Unlike the little syrphid flies I'm used to, these are *enormous*, maybe 3 cm long, looking like hornets. They love the massive elderberry bush out back of the garden (which produced a gallon of fruit last year) and my dad has seen one catch a carpenter bee. Apparently they also had a habit of hanging out by the brown marmorated stink bug trap and catching incoming stink bugs.
Edited to add: This year, almost no June bugs, although we're slightly earlier in the season. Far fewer of the really smelly, thin, millipedes in the house. Fewer skinks. No robber fly sightings. No live BMSBs in the house, and very few outdoors. The amaranth and cleomi, allowed to grow randomly in the garden as trap plants, show no harlequin bugs and very few cucumber beetles, although there's certainly defoliation from the latter.
