I’m so thrilled.
It has rained and rained and rained the past couple of days.
There is a puddle in the little slough out front.
It is cold and windy.
Sleet pings on the window.
The rain barrel is full.
The ground squishes when I walk.
Fire crackles in the log burner.
The cat purrs on the alter of his god.
The seasons are back in their rightful places (at least for now).
Some of the girls, enjoying what’s left of the peas and eyeing up the newly planted broad beans, protected by netting.
I don’t know whether I appreciate my chickens more for their eggs or for their winter garden maintenance.
I turned the girls out into the vegetable garden for the winter today, and was happy to see them rooting around for grass grubs, which were a serious problem this year, and eagerly grazing on weeds.
I used to injure myself every spring when it was time to clear the winter’s weeds and prepare the garden beds. Now I employ the chickens in the garden all winter, and my springtime bed preparation is a breeze (comparatively speaking, anyway).
They keep the weeds down and reduce the pest populations, and the love the rich foraging the garden offers, as their summer paddock is practically bare by now.
Of course, there’s always a risk—now and again the chickens will get into the winter crops—but the benefits are worth it.
The chickens think so, too.
Photo: Janine, Wikimedia Commons
Gwen paced back and forth across the foyer’s wooden floor, her satin heels clicking out the rhythm of her racing heart. Her skirts rustled with every step.
Her mind changed with every turn she made.
Should she or shouldn’t she?
Through the heavy doors, she could hear the organ playing her favourite songs. She’d spent hours choosing them. They sounded stupid on the organ. She’d known they would, but her mother had insisted they’d be lovely.
Just as she’d insisted that Gwen would be lovely in this mound of tulle and satin, with three-inch heels.
She hadn’t been wrong on the dress. It was lovely, if you liked the Disney princess look. Gwen didn’t. But it was easier just to say yes to the dress—it pleased her mother so much.
Bill pleased her mother, too. He was tall, handsome, polite, and had a good job. He and Gwen had dated for so long that her family considered him their own. He was there for every celebration, and had been named godfather to Gwen’s niece, on the assumption he and Gwen would eventually marry.
It had been fun, planning the wedding. Though she’d given in to her mother on the dress and the organ, she and Bill had chosen the reception venue, and the band—no organ music, but the hard rock both of them liked.
They had also had fun planning their honeymoon—two weeks on the Gold Coast of Australia. Gwen looked forward to the beach and the snorkelling.
She continued to pace. The organ had gone silent, and she knew the wedding march would start in a moment. She could visualise Bill taking his place at the front of the church, the pastor standing on the steps of the alter to welcome her. She could see her bridesmaids—all five of them—arrayed in a spray of kelly green, with gold leaves braided into their hair, just like the ones in Gwen’s own.
But she couldn’t see herself in the scene. She stopped pacing and concentrated.
No. She wasn’t there. She tried to force the vision of herself standing next to Bill, gazing lovingly into his eyes as the pastor pronounced them husband and wife.
But the vision wouldn’t come.
She tried to see herself in a suburban house, Bill’s shirts lined up in the closet beside hers. She tried to see herself pushing a baby stroller through the park.
Nope.
With a flourish, the organ began the wedding march.
Gwen took a deep breath, turned her back on the heavy doors, and ran down the steps to the car waiting by the kerb.
“Just Married!” said the hand-written sign taped to the back. She tore it off, opened the boot, and grabbed her suitcase.
A block away, she hailed a cab.
“To the airport,” she said as she got in the back.
Where should she go? She leaned forward and asked the driver.
“What do you think? Fiji or Hawaii?”
“Oh, Hawaii, for sure,” replied the driver.
Gwen sat back with a smile. Hawaii it would be.
He wants to be a goat and a writer…
My daughter and I have been feeding the new goats by hand every afternoon, to help them become more friendly.
But it seems everyone wants to get in on it now.
Of course, Artemis, my remaining Saanen, is quite jealous of the attention ‘the boys’ get, and feels the need to eat the majority of the food, or at least keep the other goats from getting it. She alternates between gobbling up as much as possible, and beating the stuffing out of the others.
That’s no surprise, really. Artemis is a goat, after all.
But today, the cat decided he needed to get in on the feeding, too. He meowed from outside the paddock for a few minutes, and when we didn’t come out, he came in.
He and Artemis have always had an adversarial relationship—she’s been known to tear after him if he gets in her way as she’s going to the milking stand. But the new goats, after a few rather curious sniffs and head-butt feints, seemed to accept him as just another goat, albeit a rather odd one.
She’s occupied the same plant for weeks. Her neighbour, on the next plant over, is equally predictable.
There isn’t a huge body of research on why people don’t like insects and spiders, but the studies that have been done have concluded that one of the main problems people have with creepy crawlies is their unpredictability. They could jump, bite, sting, run, fly…and most people can’t predict what an insect will do next.
But I’ve come to realise that insects and spiders are, in fact, highly predictable.
For three years (its entire adult life) there was a metallic green ground beetle underneath the goats’ water barrel. It was there every time I looked, and I came to depend upon it to be there for Bugmobile programmes (along with two or three others whose ‘addresses’ I knew).
Until age and winter claimed her, I had an Australian orb weaver who I would pluck from her hiding place in the morning, take to a bug program, and return to her home in the afternoon—day after day, week after week.
A bee or wasp will always be the first insect to fly out of a sweep net, so you can quickly let them go before seeing who else you’ve caught.
If you put two adult male crickets together in a cage, they will always chirp.
A ladybug will always climb up an object, and fly away when it gets to the top.
A bee will not sting unless it feels threatened.
Most spiders will quickly rappel to the floor when frightened.
In fact, because insects and spiders behave largely out of instinct, they are incredibly predictable.
But, of course, you have to spend time with them to know that. You have to pay attention to them, instead of just stomping on them when you see them. You have to learn their ways. You have to behave predictably around them, in order to note that they are predictable themselves.
Somewhere, there is an insect research project going on to try to figure out why insects are so frightened of people. I suspect the bugs will find it’s because we’re so unpredictable.
The lowly barnacle is well-known. Most people can point to one and say, “that’s a barnacle.”
Well done, but how many people know exactly what a barnacle is?
“It’s this…thing…that lives on rocks at the beach.”
“Don’t they grow on whales?”
“Ships get covered in them.”
As an entomologist, I know a bit about barnacles, because they are Arthropods, just like insects, spiders, millipedes, crabs, and lots of other creepy crawlies. In fact, they are crustaceans, closely related to crabs and crayfish.
Wait, you say. Don’t Arthropods have ‘jointed legs’—that’s what the word means, after all—but barnacles don’t have legs.
Or do they?
Barnacles are perhaps the strangest of the Arthropods. The free-living larva is a weird, tiny, spiky creature with one eye. It goes through a metamorphosis, like insects do, in which it changes shape dramatically. In its last larval stage, it finds a nice place to spend the rest of its life, presses its forehead against it, and secretes a calcium-rich cement from near the base of its antennae that permanently affixes its head to the spot.
In its adult form, a barnacle grows a protective shell, complete with a clever two-part ‘door’ that it can snap shut to conserve water at low tide, or to protect itself from predators. Its legs grow long and feathery, and act as tentacles to waft particles of food to its mouth.
As you can imagine, adult barnacles don’t have much of a social life. Most species are hermaphroditic, meaning individuals are both male and female. Surprisingly, though, self-fertilisation is rare. Like other arthropods, most barnacles have what’s euphemistically known as ‘internal fertilisation’—that is, the male has a penis, and he deposits his sperm inside the female. How does an animal glued by its head to a rock get together with another to mate? The answer is a very long penis.
So the next time you feel like your life is rough, be thankful you’re not a barnacle.
Newly sprouted, out-of-season apple leaves.
The weather finally turned last night. After five days of hot, gale-force winds, after seven months of summer weather, we finally got a hard southerly storm. Three centimetres of rain, a bit of hail, and howling winds—a proper ‘winter’ storm.
But it’s too little too late. By yesterday afternoon, half a dozen shrubs around the property had simply given up in the heat and dry. The apple trees, having lost their leaves to drought six weeks ago, had already flushed again with the unusually warm weather. Those leaves will almost certainly be killed by frost, if not tonight, than another night soon. The trees will struggle to leaf out in the spring, because of their wasted effort now.
The lawn is little more than dirt in patches. If anything resprouts, it will be weeds, not grass. And the winter crops in the garden had already bolted from the heat.
I’m thankful for the rain. I’m pleased to have a full rainwater tank, and the early spring crops that are just now putting on growth will benefit from the water now.
But for the sake of the groundwater, I hope it keeps raining, because we need a lot more.
We love waffles at our house, but I make them only occasionally. There are two reasons for this—I don’t get to eat breakfast with everyone else when I make waffles, as I’m stuck tending the iron, and waffles have a tendency to set off the smoke alarms.
A well-seasoned waffle iron is…frankly, disgusting. It’s covered in a perfect layer of burnt butter. Unfortunately, that butter smokes every time you use the iron.
Even if I turn the extractor fan on, the smoke alarms go off.
So I’ve learned I can only make waffles on days it will be warm enough to open all the windows at 6.30 am. A good breeze blowing through clears the smoke and prevents the alarms from going off.
That usually means waffles only in summer, but since it’s been unusually warm, I decided to make pumpkin spice waffles on Sunday.
The morning was warm, so I opened the windows and turned on the extractor fan.
But the air was so still, the smoke hung indoors.
My son wasn’t yet out of bed when the alarms went off…
Well, no one was late for breakfast, at least.
Here’s a double recipe, so you’ll have waffles left over for breakfasts all week.
2 cups all purpose flour
1 ½ cups whole wheat flour
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground nutmeg
ÂĽ tsp ground cloves
2 cups cooked, mashed pumpkin
4 large eggs, separated
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
2 ½ cups milk
200g butter, melted
Combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, egg yolks, and brown sugar. Add the milk and whisk until the sugar dissolves. Gradually whisk in the butter.
Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry and mix just until all the flour is moistened.
In a medium bowl, whisk the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Fold the egg whites into the batter.
This batter is thick, and you will need to spread it with a spatula to get it evenly spread in the waffle iron.
Try them with warm applesauce!
It’s been over a week since we got the new angora goats, and I was beginning to stress because we still hadn’t named them. At lunch today, we talked over the options, and nothing seemed quite right.
Pavarotti, Carreras, and Domingo (the three tenors)? Meh.
Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (the three musketeers)? Too hard to remember.
Larry, Mo, and Curly (the three stooges)? Too dumb.
Well, we named all our dairy goats after goddesses, perhaps the wethers should be named after gods? But their behaviour isn’t godlike, and who can imagine a castrated god?
Bumble, Fagan, and The Artful Dodger? No.
Mars, Neptune, and Uranus? Er…no.
So we sent my daughter out to the paddock to ask the goats what their names were.
She came back saying the goats were giving confusing answers. She said that they claimed their names were Dennis, Darwin, and Dale.
Darwin!
That was it! Scientists!
So out in the paddock there now graze Darwin, 
Einstein, 
 and Newton.
Aaaannnnnd they’re off!
The contestants are off to a quick start! Jill takes the early lead, with three pods shelled, to Carla’s two. Kelly seems to have pulled a difficult one for her first—bad luck there, as she’s fallen behind.
For those of you who might be new to competitive pea shelling, these ladies are using Greenfeast peas—the only variety allowed in international competition. To attain the skill required to compete on this level, these women have been training eight to ten hours a day for the past six months. They’ve worked hard, and it all comes down to this moment.
And their intense training has paid off. These ladies know what they’re doing! And now Kelly has caught up to Carla. They’re running neck and neck for second place. Jill is still out in front, just finishing her sixty-third pod. But, OH! She’s dropped one! That’ll cost her!
Jill has suffered a number of setbacks this season. A touch of arthritis kept her out of the Iowa Open this year. Let’s see if she can come back from that fumble.
Oh! She might not get the chance! Kelly’s racing up from behind! She’s passed Carla, passed Jill. She’s going for the finish! Ninety-nine, one hundred!
Kelly! Champion of the World Pea Shelling Competition!
Robinne Weiss 