gardening

An Unusual Moth

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-04-22 15.36.36One day last week I was folding the laundry, which had been hanging out on the line all day. As I shook a t-shirt to fold it, up flew a tiny moth. When it landed again, I noticed that it looked odd. It sat with wings wrapped around it, a bit like a grass moth. But it held its spiky back legs high in the air, unlike any moth I’d seen. I took a couple of photos, none of which came out great—the iPhone just wasn’t made for macrophotography.

Still, even with a grainy photo, I was able to identify the moth to the genus Stathmopoda.

That’s where it started to get weird.

Everyone knows that butterflies and moths start off their lives as caterpillars, and that caterpillars eat plants, right?

Not so, in the genus Stathmopoda. Instead of munching leaves, the caterpillars of Stathmopoda eat other insects.

Yes, they’re carnivorous caterpillars.

They prey primarily on scale insects, so some species are actually used as biological control agents to help control these pests.

They are not the only carnivorous caterpillars. Though carnivory is rare among butterflies and moths, it has evolved separately several times in at least eight different lineages. Most carnivorous caterpillars eat small, slow-moving or sedentary insects, as you might expect from an animal that is neither speedy nor particularly formidable itself. As far as we know, there is only one moth that is carnivorous as an adult—the ‘vampire moth,’ Calyptra eustrigata, which feeds on the blood of ungulates.

I’m quite happy that this little Stathmopoda is carnivorous. Our currants suffered a bad case of scale insects this summer, so I hope there are lots more Stathmopoda out there. Here’s wishing it great reproductive success in the garden!

Crazy Corner Farm

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-04-17 11.13.55 sm“So, what do you grow here at Crazy Corner Farm, eh?” asked the man who delivered 500 bricks earlier this week.

I laughed.

“Well, it’s basically a subsistence farm. A little milk and cheese. A lot of vegetables.”

It was a good enough answer, and appropriate to the situation. But other things came to mind.

What do we grow here at Crazy Corner Farm?

A lifestyle. A lifestyle of hard work rewarded by the fruits and vegetables of our labour.

Kids. Kids who know where their food comes from. Kids who understand the work that goes into a simple block of cheese. Kids who can tell a bee from a syrphid fly, use a machete and an axe safely, and design and plant a garden.

Creativity. Creativity in food, garden, crafts, DIY problem-solving, circus arts…everything. By providing the space, materials, and encouragement to let it flourish.

Stories. Or, as my husband said it, “Organic hand-picked words available in convenient poem, economic story, and family-size novel packs.”

So, we grow a lot here on our tiny farm. More than you might guess at first glance.

Managing Water

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2016-04-22 15.51.16 smMake hay while the sun shines, they say.

They could also say fix your roof while the sun shines.

The sun shone so much over the summer (and now well into autumn), that it would have been easy to forget the leaky roof and broken gutters. And we did manage to ignore them both all summer, but one of these days (hopefully very soon) it’s going to start raining again. It was time to get the work done.

I enjoy being on the roof. But roof work is never fun—wrestling sheets of corrugated iron roofing around in the wind, pulling rusty lead-topped nails, dealing with rotting roof beams, and doing it all on an angle four metres above the ground.

Still, it is good to have roof and gutters repaired. And after we prepared for rain, I weeded the artichokes.

2016-04-22 15.50.14 HDR smIt was a lesson in dry—the ground was dust, and the poor water-loving artichokes were suffering. So I turned the sprinkler on them, dealing with an extreme lack of water after preparing for an overabundance of it.

Some day I do hope it begins raining again. It would be good to know if the roof and gutters are properly fixed, and it would be nice if we didn’t have to water the garden all winter. Either way, we’ll be managing water—either too much or too little of it.

When it rains, it pours, as they say.

Jack-o-lanterns

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-04-17 11.17.03 smWhile you folks in the Northern Hemisphere are cleaning out your pools, dusting off the barbecues and planting seeds, we in the South are enjoying all that autumn has to offer.

And something we always look forward to is carving pumpkins. Growing up in the US, it was one of my favourite Halloween activities. Here pumpkin season falls inappropriately near Easter.

That doesn’t stop us from celebrating the season with jack-o-lanterns.

All my pumpkins are grown for food, but the edible part of the Austrian oilseed pumpkin is its seeds—the flesh is only suitable for goat food (and even the goats aren’t excited by it). So once I scoop out the delicious seeds, I have no problem using the shells for artistic purposes.

A nice crop of Austrian oilseeds this year means there is plenty of raw material for our artwork.

Naked Ladies

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2016-04-14 08.43.56 smDo I need to say more?

These are some of the most delightful flowers in our yard. When we first moved in, there was a row of non-descript green plants in front of our hedge. They were uninspiring. I planned on removing them.

The plants died back over summer. We mowed the remains down.

Then one day I looked out to see a row of gorgeous pink blooms! What a lovely surprise! When I described them to my mother, she immediately said, “Oh! Naked ladies!” My response was, of course, to giggle. But the name is apt, as these lovely ‘girls’ bloom long after the leaves have died back.

We did end up removing the naked ladies…in order to put them in a better spot, as the hedge was smothering them. Every year, I forget they are there, and every year I have the joy of heading outdoors one day and finding them in bloom.

They make me smile. What more can you ask from a flower?

Touched by Frost

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

2016-04-14 08.42.53 smIt happened. The first frost hit the vegetable garden. Not hard, but enough to show. Most of the tender and unprotected plants were already done for the year, anyway—the tomatoes had largely succumbed to drought, the cucumbers had given up, the melons were done, the pumpkins were already harvested, and the basil had gone to seed. The summer squashes were only lightly touched—a few of the leaves browned, but most of the growing tips in good shape.

Of course, at this time of year, any day could be the last.

So we savour each day—enjoying the tastes of summer while they last.

Corn

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This year's popcorn harvest.

This year’s popcorn harvest.

What would life be without it?

Even ignoring the highly processed corn oil and corn sugars found in so many products, what would a movie be without a big bowl of butter-laden popcorn?

What would chilli be without a slab of corn bread to go with it?

What would summer be without corn on the cob?

And how dull life would be without polenta, corn dodgers, corn chowder, corn and pea succotash, roast corn, caramel corn, tacos and tortillas, nachos…

And then, there’s chicha fuerte…

Um…well…we can just forget chicha fuerte. It’s a corn alcohol brewed in Panama. Tastes a bit like vomit, and even a sip leaves you with a hangover the next day.

But hurrah for all the other forms of corn!

Many thanks to the people in what is now Mexico who bred corn from its ancestor, teosinte, about 9000 years ago! I doubt they had any idea how ubiquitous corn would become, but they hit on a winner.

Pumpkins

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About a third of the harvest.

About a third of the harvest.

Autumn wouldn’t be complete without the requisite wheelbarrow loads of pumpkins and other winter squash. In spite of some late-frost drama this spring, the harvest wasn’t bad.

My kids ask every year, “Which are the pumpkins and which are the squash? What makes a pumpkin a pumpkin?”

The short answer is that a pumpkin is a squash that we call a pumpkin. There are four species and countless varieties that variously get called pumpkin and squash. Some fruits are known as pumpkins in one place, and squash in another.

I don’t bother with the distinction. The important distinctions are between varieties. Some are best made into soup, others make splendid pies. Some have robust, dry flesh that holds up well in savoury galettes. Some are just the right size for baking whole. Some keep well, and others need to be eaten quickly after harvest. Some have flesh only useful as goat food, but have naked seeds that are wonderful toasted with salt and spices.

Which is, of course, how I justify planting so many pumpkins of so many varieties. I need them all!

The Aphipocalypse

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2016-04-09 11.19.43 smIt has been years since I’ve seen an aphid infestation quite this bad, and rarely at this time of year.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I usually have aphids in early spring, and then the predators and parasitoids knock them back to almost nothing through the summer.

But somehow, the predators and I all missed the aphids on the pumpkins. I expect the warm dry summer was perfect for their growth. I rarely take note of the pumpkins from December to April—they need little weeding, and are generally pest free.

So when I went to harvest, it was a bit of a surprise to find millions of aphids on the underside of nearly every leaf in a back corner of the pumpkin patch.

All summer, the aphids have been cloning themselves, producing dozens of replicas every week—an army of little green girls. Only girls. It wouldn’t have taken them long to build up the population level out there right now. Some of the generations of aphids had wings (you can see some on the left side of the leaf in the photo), and dispersed to other plants, but most stayed put, slowly spreading across one leaf after another.

But, as big as the population is today, they will all die over winter. About this time of year, the females will start producing a few males—also genetically identical to themselves, with the exception of a missing sex chromosome. Only in the fall will females mate and produce eggs. The eggs will overwinter, hatching out in spring (all female) to start the cycle over again.

I think I won’t wait for these girls to lay eggs. I’m afraid that, now that the pumpkins are gone, the infested vines will be dunked in a bucket of soapy water and buried deep in the compost pile. No sense in letting them get a head start on next spring!

 

 

Standard Time

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2016-02-04 07.21.17We came off Daylight Savings Time last Sunday. And though it doesn’t change the actual day length, it does seem to shorten the days.

I’m still milking in the dark—an hour doesn’t change that. But now, it is all but dark by the time we’re doing the dinner dishes. There is no time to potter in the garden in the evening. The dinner leftovers destined for the chickens have to be saved until morning, because the chickens are already roosting for the night by the time we’re done eating.

But the truth is, there isn’t much still to be done in the garden. Oh, there are pumpkins and popcorn to harvest, and at some point I need to bring in the remaining carrots, but all those tasks can be done on the weekend. Large swaths of the garden don’t need to be weeded anymore—the crops there are done, and the chickens will appreciate the weeds when I turn them out into the garden for the winter.

So instead, I have time to read a book after dinner, which is a luxury I don’t have during Daylight Savings Time. I’m actually quite excited by it this year, as we have a new book nook my husband built along with some beautiful cabinetry for the bedroom. The perfect place to curl up with a book.