2008 June Archive at Beside the Stream

Archive for June, 2008

Walking Onions

Published on June 30, 2008 in gardening. 0 Comments

My walking onions are about to take a hike.

These are also called tree onions, top-setting onions, or Egyptian onions. They’re originally from Canada, and became popular in kitchen gardens in the 1790s. Instead of making seeds, the flowers turn into little bulbils that drop off and form a new plant.

It’s kind of a standard-looking onion flower

but instead of making seeds, each little floret turns into a tiny bulb (this flower top has two more florets and the rest are already little bulbils.

These are mature bulbils, and if you look closely you can see new flowers forming at the top of some of the bulbils. When those top flowers form bulbils, the stalk is so overloaded that it bends to the ground and new onions will form where the little bulbs touch the earth. That’s the ‘walking’.

I saw this in a friend’s garden last year, and he gave me a few clusters of bulbils that I planted 15 miles away. In plant speed, that would be running really, really fast.

[bul·bil (bul′bil′) noun

a small bulb or fleshy bud on a flower stalk, as in some onions, or in the axil of a leaf, as in a tiger lily.]

A grasshopper instar

Published on June 27, 2008 in Insects. 2 Comments

If you like chartreuse, you’ll love this bug.

It’s a grasshopper nymph. Grasshoppers hatch from eggs, and cast off their exoskeleton time and again before they become adults.

All of the little grasshoppers are called nymphs, but when you get more precise a nymph goes through five different instars before it becomes an adult. You can tell from the wing size that this is the fourth instar–the wings are present, but don’t extend beyond the second abdominal section.

Locusts and grasshoppers differ only in density: when grasshoppers swarm, they become locusts. There are over a hundred types of grasshoppers in Colorado, and I didn’t identify this one. I can be certain it’s not a Rocky Mountain locust, though, because North America’s only swarming locust was extinct by the early 1900s.

Like the passenger pigeon and the buffalo, Rocky Mountain locusts were once among the most successful creatures on the continent. They would periodically swarm and sweep out of their breeding grounds in Rockies onto the Plains.

This 1880 map shows the permanent breeding grounds as the cross-hatched area, while the dotted area is their temporary range. They were fierce. A swarm described by Laura Ingalls in her book <On the Banks of Plum Creek> had them eating everything down to the tool handles, and in 1874 entomologists recorded a swarm that covered 198,000 square miles. The Guinness Book of World Records still cites this as the ‘greatest concentration of animals’ in the world, containing at least 12.5 trillion individuals and weighing 27.5 million tons. Less than 30 years later, the species was extinct.

No one really knows why the Rocky Mountain locust disappeared, but it is usually chalked up to grazing and agriculture. It is said to be the only time in the history of agriculture that an endemic pest species has gone extinct.

We can surely agree that the grasshopper nymph has its charms–it’s a great shade of green. Can’t say I’m sorry about losing that Rocky Mountain locust, though.

A strange twilight

Published on June 27, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Last night Sam said, you need to take some pictures of this sky.

So I did.

The next morning we had the first good rain in a month.

The chickens staged a break-out

Published on June 26, 2008 in birds. 3 Comments

I looked out the window around dawn, and there were 20 little Dutch boys in grey pantaloons racing around the back field. The chickens had staged a break-out.

They got out in a corner where a few staples were missing. They stretched out the wire and left blood and feathers behind in their desire to be free. When I looked closer I saw one chicken was still inside, but he had a big flap of skin and feathers hanging from his bloody neck.

There was a group finding insects on the lawn,

and another group working the forest floor.

These chickens want such simple things. They want to scratch,

and to eat the delicious grubs they turn up.

I stapled the chicken wire back into place, and got the chickens back inside by 8AM. And the flock went from 20 to 18. Bob found one set of body parts out back, and the other’s just gone. Our local predators have marked us as the home of 20 tender tasty bites.

Meanwhile, we have two 14-yr-olds visiting from Ohio, so I called to make rafting reservations. The owner of the rafting company said they started the winter with 23 peacocks, and at the end of the winter they had 3 left, which they gave away. A bobcat took them one by one.

The bobcat at Suzy’s has now killed two geese and one duck.

And Miss Roberta says her mother loved her chickens, always had a flock loose in the yard, and there was never any problem at all. Never. Eighty years ago, there wasn’t a coyote or bobcat in the county.

You can have a world that’s safe for chickens, or one that includes predators. But not both.

PS. I was told that the chicken with the flap of feathered skin hanging from his neck will be fine. People said, chickens are tough.

Garden Peace

Published on June 25, 2008 in gardening. 1 Comment

Bob thought it’d be no problem to catch that squirrel. He went to grad school at Harvard, for Pete’s sake. He was sure that he could outwit a rodent. But he was wrong.

So he declared Peace. No chickenwire, no mesh, no traps

and of course the squirrel suddenly disappeared. Funny thing how declaring peace changes the atmosphere.

I sprinkled the lettuce bed with dried blood (thanks wkf) and the plants with cayenne, and if that doesn’t do the trick I’ll put it under strawberries for next year.

I integrated some vegetables into the flower beds this year. I put onions grown from seed amongst the daffodils. They were threads in May,

but not anymore. The daffodils are dying back and the onions, with the same kind of spiky foliage, are taking over. I have fifty onions tucked into the daffodils, and you can see they’re kind of cute–the crashed-over leaves are the daffodils, and the perky blue-green spears are the onions.

Here I have a half-dozen fennel tucked in amongst the coreopsis. Doesn’t look like much right now, but in August they’ll be four feet tall.

And my favorite plant of the moment is

patchouli. They’re annuals at this altitude, and I put in three. They’re getting racked by the sun but are setting their roots down nonetheless, and will be fine in a month. Sam said, Patchouli? I said, You know: Hippy perfume. According to Wikipedia, patchouli is in the mint family.

Mark Twain called brussels sprouts “a cabbage with a college education”. Would that make patchouli a mint that dropped out, turned on, and had a lot of casual affairs?

A kayak slalom race

Published on June 24, 2008 in Celebration, Small town life and water. 0 Comments

Animas River Days slalom races were held on Saturday. This is a paddling town, and these kids are fast. World class fast.

This path goes beside the rapids and the race course is set right on this stretch of river. People leave their boats and gear on the grass until it’s time for their class to race.

A kayak slalom course has 18 - 22 gates and takes a few minutes to run. You go through the red gates against the flow of the river, and the green gates with the flow. Each gate is hanging from a cable stretched across the river, so the race course can be changed from race to race. When there isn’t a race, the gates are pulled over to the side of the river.

In an eddy near the head of the course, the paddlers wait their turn to run the gates.

Here’s a kid approaching the first gate. He makes the drop before the gate, and then starts turning his boat upstream

rotating around that firmly set paddle blade.

He clears the gate, quickly turns his boat for Gate 2

and squeaks through.

And then he’s gone around the bend.

A Raft Parade

Published on June 22, 2008 in Celebration and water. 3 Comments

The Animas River Days, a weekend celebration of the Animas River, kicked off Friday evening with a raft parade. I think there were about sixty boats and lots more kayaks.

Dory men led the parade. These dories are used to go down the Grand Canyon, and they’re the same type of wooden boats as the ones used by Major John Wesley Powell when he led the first geographic expedition through the canyon in 1869. Dory men are the most radical whitewater enthusiasts. They are extreme pilots.

Water people and their dogs all wear PFDs (personal flotation devices, or life preservers).

College kids don’t. (Q and A in newspaper - Q: What is the most unusual sight you’ve ever seen on the river? A: A raft without beer.)

The people on the bridge with me thought this cupcake had zero chance of making it through Smelter rapids.

And there they go floating down the river from their mass start, everyone paying attention to the first stretch of rapids ahead.

Painted Lady Caterpillar

Published on June 20, 2008 in Insects. 1 Comment

This caterpillar is hanging out in the yarrow. To identify it I looked up the plant it was eating, Achillea. The Painted Lady butterfly is listed as having Achillea as its host plant, and by gum I found a web photo of unmistakably this caterpillar identified as a Painted Lady, larval stage.

The caterpillar pretends that the top of this photo is the head, except you can see that those are ~~pseudopods~~ prolegs on that end. The six ~~insectile~~ thoracic legs are at the bottom of the photo, along with the real head.

I thought this picture was remarkable because you can clearly see the holes in its abdomen that the caterpillar uses instead of lungs. Those two bottom spiracles are visibly exhaling in this photo. And apparently this complicated little creature will resolve into this graceful Painted Lady

(the butterfly photo is not mine). That caterpillar plans to turn my yarrow into butterfly wings. Now that’s alchemy.

Garden wars

Published on June 19, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

We try to grow a year’s worth of potatoes, onions and tomatoes. These crops don’t excite the deer. Last year we just ran a string around the garden at deer-chest height, and that was enough to keep it safe.

But when Bob built raised beds, there’s suddenly room for beans, lettuces and spinach. And everybody loves lettuces, beans and spinach, so we fenced the garden. (It’s a black plastic mesh that doesn’t show up in photos, but it’s there).

A brown squirrel (which isn’t detered by fences, wire mesh or chicken wire) eats all the lettuces most every day. Bob’s trying to catch it with a Havahart trap. He would then heartlessly drown it in the ditch. He is ruthless.

But that’s not all. The beans were being ripped out of the ground and tossed aside. Who could be so mean? There were magpies in the Havahart two days in a row, and our neighbor clued us in: when beans first emerge, they look like worms.

The magpie plucks the worm, realizes that it’s a sprout, and tosses it aside… so two beds of beans under mesh.

And a coyote ate three chickens. I don’t mind fencing the vegetables, but I hate locking up the chickens.

Clear Water Farm

Published on June 18, 2008 in Colorado women and gardening. 2 Comments

My friend Suzy asked me to take some pictures so she could make a poster for Farmer’s Market.

There was a hard frost just last week–the farm is at 8200 feet– and these lettuces are covered every cold night.

The lettuces are in the new garden, surrounding the house. And there are lots of old gardens.

Here’s another garden of perhaps a dozen total. It’s a miracle anyone survives planting season.

This is the irrigation ditch, with a garden to the right.

This is the solar greenhouse, with a small garden in front of it,

and this is the workshop. Those barrels are so stuffed with pansies because she harvests them for salad mix.

Having so many gardens makes it harder for the pests to zero in on a crop. Which is lucky, because she has gophers. Bob has extreme prejudice against gophers, who can settle in and undermine gardens. He poisons them.

He asked, what do you do about the gophers?

She said: I tell them, Go away, Gophers. I say, Shoo.

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