Diplomacy or War

The wood pile is one of the favorite hibernation sites of yellow jacket queens. They crawl in between pieces of wood hoping to be able to spend the winter there. We have learned to check each piece carefully before bringing wood into the house. Otherwise the queen warms up, figures spring has come and starts flying and buzzing around the house. When she figures out that spring hasn't come she looks for another place to overwinter and boots, sleeves of jackets and under pillows are favorite sites.

Now, I am not a sentamentalist where animals are concerned. These things have nasty stings. I'm not allergic and neither is anyone in our family, but those stings still hurt so we try and avoid them. But I have learned over the years to have a huge lot of respect for these small creatures. These queens carry in their bodies all the eggs for an entire colony for next season. They have to stay alive not only for themselves but for 4000 or 5000 members of their colony. In the spring she will come out of hibernation and make a small paper nest in a tree or in a hollow space in the ground. She will lay enough eggs to get a corp of workers going and will feed them until they are ready to take over the jobs of making a bigger nest and feeding the rest of the young.

As long as her nest isn't on a major traffic path or in the wall of the house (that happened one year) we leave them alone. They are major predators of cabbage worms and aphids and in the years when there aren't a lot of yellow jackets around we immediately notice an increase in those two garden pests. So we don't engage in an all out war against them but try diplomatically to not harm them when they are in situations where they aren't going to harm us.

Smells Like Coffee?

Joel planted lettuce seedlings in one of our hoophouses yesterday and the place smells like.....coffee? Last year's lettuce crop in the hoophouse was seriously damaged by wireworms. These are small, stiff, yellow grubs, the larva of the click beetle, that burrow into the stem of the plant and eat it out from the inside. All you see is a suddenly totally wilted, dying lettuce. If you pull it up and check the soil right around the stem you can sometimes find the culprit and dispatch it. We had been unable to find a successful organic solution for the pest until we talked to our friend who brought us all those potatoes a while back. Seems he was gathering up coffee grounds from a number of local restaurants as something to add humus to his soil. But as he grows several acres of potatoes he never had enough coffee grounds to treat the whole place. He noticed that he had no wireworm damage to his potatoes in the places where he had put the coffee grounds. Potatoes are another crop that we have had a lot of wireworm trouble with, so we are trying it, first on this lettuce bed and hopefully next spring on some potato plantings if we can gather up enough grounds by then.

Cowbirds and Crickets

While Siri and I were sitting at the Orcas ferry dock after the wedding waiting for the ferry to Friday Harbor we noticed two little baby birds on a log next to the road. They were fluttering around in typical baby bird fashion, plaintively asking to be fed. Imagine our surprise when a tiny little yellow bird, about half their size flew up and fed one of them. They could only be cowbird babies. Cowbirds are brood parasites. The females lay eggs in the nests of other birds who then raise the young often to the detriment of their own young. The bird that was feeding them was, I think, a yellow warbler. Cowbirds fascinate me because in spite of being raised by all sorts of other birds, warblers, finches, and song sparrows for example, they grow up to know how to be cowbirds and to mate with other cowbirds not with members of the species that raised them. We often see cowbirds sitting on top of our sheep. They wait for insects to be disturbed by the sheep's grazing and then fly down to the ground to feed on them.

P.S. We heard the first cricket this evening. That is the real beginning of fall for me. This is the time of year, half way between the summer solstice and the fall equinox, the traditional beginning of fall in the Celtic calendar, that begins to feel like fall. The light has changed, the angle of the sun different than high summer. The air smells different and you hear crickets. This is actually my favorite time of year with the imminent harvest with its feeling of wealth and well being.

Cinnabar Moth

A number of years ago the cinnabar moths were introduced to San Juan County because they eat tansy ragwort an introduced weed that is harmful to livestock. We did at one point have tansy growing in our fields probably brought in inadvertently with hay. Joel and Siri would go out each spring and search for the plants to remove them. It is easy to find them when they are in flower with their characteristic yellow bloom, but Siri as a small child was especially good at spotting the plants when they were small and not blooming. Between the two of them they eliminated it from our place. And then a few years ago the moths showed up here. As they were never actually introduced to this small island they have to have flown over from one of the larger islands.


They are incredibly beautiful with their bright red and black wings.


And the caterpillars are also wonderful, yellow and black striped. Although we do not have any tansy for them to feed on, they will also feed on a common weed in the senecio family and as we like to keep them around just in case tansy reappears here we make a point of not pulling all their favorite weeds out of the garden.