Husband: “How about we go for a walk on the beach after dinner?”
My brain: What? No. I have to write today’s blog, finish the story I was working on, tidy the office, make granola, sweep the floor, fold the laundry, weed the garden, pick tomatoes, sort the recycling…
My brain at the beach: Yeah…Whatever…Did you see this cool pebble?
This year has apparently been good for the green orbweb spider (Colaranea viriditas); I usually see them only rarely, but I’ve run across quite a few this summer.
These beauties are pale green with a kelly green leaf-shaped mark covering the abdomen.
As the name implies, these spiders make orb webs—the spiral-shaped webs everyone’s familiar with. Though they’re primarily nocturnal, I’ve regularly seen them hanging out in the middle of their webs during the daytime (often snacking on an insect). These sharp-looking spiders apparently like a tidy web; they rebuild their webs nightly, and the webs are always as attractive as their residents.
The green orb weaver’s main predator is the native potter wasp, which paralyses the spiders with a sting and stuffs them into its nest for its larvae to feed on. However, the green orb weaver appears to be better at hiding from potter wasps than the non-native Australian orb weaver (at least on our property). Earlier this summer, the potter wasps decided that the screw holes in the bottom of the dining room table were perfect nest holes—every one of the dozens of orb weavers they crammed into the table was an Australian orb weaver.
I enjoy finding these little green gems in the garden. They’re as beautiful as they are helpful.
Okay, call me a complete geek, but I’m inordinately pleased about today’s find in the vegetable garden—Noddy’s flycap. This striking and mysterious mushroom showed up last year, causing great excitement and a blog post. The word from the scientific community was we weren’t likely to see it again for a long time, as it doesn’t seem to fruit every year.
Ha! Another thing we can tick off as an unknown for this fungus. Second year in a row Noddy’s has popped up in the garden.
As far as I know, the fungus still has no official scientific name, and its origin remains as mysterious as it was when I wrote about it last year. So for now I’ll simply enjoy the whimsy of this most delightful of fungi.
It’s the time of year when one of my favourite moths emerges—the magpie moth (Nyctemera annulata). Magpie moths are in the family Arctiidae—a family including many brightly coloured day-flying moths that threaten to blur the line between moth and butterfly. N. annulata is endemic to New Zealand, though it has a closely related Australian cousin, N. amica, with which it can interbreed.
Magpie moth caterpillars eat plants in the daisy family, especially in the genus Senecio. Common host plants include groundsel (Senecio vulgaris), ragwort (Senecio jacobaea), and cineraria (Jacobaea maritima, formerly Senecio cineraria).
We have large quantities of groundsel, and a few sizeable cineraria on the property, so we always have a healthy population of magpie moths. The caterpillars are black with orange ‘racing’ stripes, and somewhat hairy.
As you can guess from their colouration, magpie moths are poisonous. As caterpillars, they sequester toxins from the plants they eat. These toxins deter most predators. The shining cuckoo, however, is apparently quite fond of magpie moth caterpillars. It avoids the poison by eating only the insides of the caterpillar, leaving the bitter-tasting exoskeleton behind.
In addition to eating weeds like groundsel and ragwort, the magpie moth is a beautiful, colourful addition to the garden. It always makes me smile.
Thursday’s dawn farewell of Gita.
Gita blew through earlier this week, dumping 96 mm (nearly 4 inches) of rain on us. She also seems to have ushered in autumn. Sultry summer heat has given way to crisp air in Gita’s wake. The sun is still hot, but the nights have been chilly. The crickets sing their welcome to a new season. Even the garden has taken on an early autumn look, tired plants beginning to look tattered and yellow. Before Gita, I had ordered my firewood for the winter. It seemed too early at the time, but now, I’ll be happy to see it arrive.
Summer fruits and vegetables should still roll out of the garden for the next six to eight weeks, but the end is in sight. We’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
The rock at Hanging Rock Bridge.
Years ago, when my husband and I were Peace Corps volunteers in the Republic of Panama, we visited the famous Arboles Quadratos (the Square Trees) in El Valle de Anton. The Arboles Quadratos were, according to the guidebooks, amazing freaks of nature—trees with perfectly square trunks. These remarkable plants grew in a special grove in the rainforest behind the hotel in El Valle, and were one of the town’s main tourist attractions.
So we went to see them.
They were buttressed trees, like many rainforest trees are. And the buttresses made them…sort of squarish, if you had a little imagination. I think there were, maybe, four of them in a cluster along the trail. Their beauty was completely overshadowed in my mind by the rest of the forest around them.
My daughter and I recently had a similar experience. On a road trip, we kept passing signs for Hanging Rock Bridge. It seemed all roads led to Hanging Rock Bridge. We figured it must be something pretty spectacular, if so many signs pointed the way to it.
So we went to see it.
And, yeah, there was an overhanging rock near the bridge. It was kind of cool. But the landscape around the bridge, with stunning limestone outcrops in every paddock, was far more spectacular than the bridge’s rock. If you’d gone out of your way to see the rock at Hanging Rock Bridge, you’d be disappointed.
Plenty of other ‘natural wonders’ fall short of the hype surrounding them. Others, unknown by anyone but locals, are truly stunning.
Like the Iglesia de Piedra, the Rock Church, near our village in Panama. This narrow chasm was carved by a small stream, and it’s one of the most incredible places I’ve ever been—maybe 30 metres deep, and so narrow you can touch both walls. Vegetation covers the opening high above, and makes everything look green below. The stream is shallow, and frogs hop away from every step. At the back of the chasm is a waterfall plunging all the way from the surface.
No tourists make pilgrimages to the Iglesia de Piedra. Few outside the surrounding area have ever heard of it. But it knocks the socks off many a popular tourist destination.
The world is full of these hidden gems, and one of the most wonderful things about living in different places is finding the local wonders. The beautiful places tourists never hear about.
I’ll still go to see the Square Trees and the Hanging Rock Bridges of the world, but much of the wonder of the world is reserved for those who live with it every day.
Just some of the weekend’s harvest.
I have been AWOL from the blog for longer than usual. I have good reasons, one of which is whirling toward New Zealand as I type. Cyclone Gita is bearing down on us, and though we aren’t likely to bear the full brunt of her damage at our place, we will get heavy rain and gale-force winds.
So I’ve spent the last two days bringing in the crops that might be damaged by her—wheelbarrow loads of corn, soy, black beans, borlotto beans, tomatoes, and apples. This summer’s intense heat and sufficient rainfall have not only encouraged excess cucurbits, but also increased my bean harvest—picking took far longer than I expected, and I will spend the next week shelling them all.
But when the rain starts later tonight, I’ll be able to relax, knowing I’ve done as much as I can to protect the crops. And the rush to bring them in means the job isn’t still hanging over me, lingering on the to-do list.
So I may not have posted the blogs I’d hoped to, but I’m ready for whatever Gita throws at us.
Spent some time at ‘our’ beach today, watching waves, birds, dolphins. Here are a few little poems I wrote there:
Terns wheel and bob
Above each dolphin
Like balloons on a string.
****
Wave rises, crests
Wind blows foam back
Like errant strands of hair.
****
The hiss-swoosh of wave
And rolling pebbles
Rounds all edges.
****
Shag arcs and dips its head.
The body follows
And is gone.
I realised a shocking thing the other day. My son will finish high school in December this year. We all hope he’ll be leaving home for university shortly thereafter.
Next year, my teenage boy won’t be here all summer to eat vegetables.
Next year, I’ll need to plant a smaller garden, or be completely overwhelmed with food we can’t eat.
This is the last summer I will ever have a garden this big.
I’m having a harder time adjusting to that thought than I am the thought one of my kids will leave home in a year. Oh, I always knew that someday I’d scale back the garden, but ‘someday’ in my mind was always when I grew too old to manage so much garden.
But ‘someday’ is next year.
How am I going to cut back? Which varieties will I not plant? How will I curb my zucchini problem? What am I going to do with my time, if I’m not forced to spend every daylight hour in the garden from September to December?
It’s a good thing I have several months to prepare. This is going to take some getting used to.
The courgettes (zucchini) will recover, in spite of all the broken leaves.
The remnants of cyclone Fehi hit New Zealand yesterday. We didn’t receive the brunt of the storm, and I am thankful for that. But we didn’t escape damage.
After Fehi’s wind dumped rain on the West Coast, it swooped over the Southern Alps and raced down the other side, heating up as it went. We were blasted by the hot, dry wind—gusts at least 130 kph (and higher, by the damage inflicted), and a temperature that reached 35ºC by early afternoon.
Parts of the garden will not recover. I’m glad we ate our first sweet corn earlier in the week, because it might be our last—the corn lies flat on the ground today.
The greenhouse plastic was shredded, and the stakes holding the greenhouse in place were pulled from the ground. Only my paranoia about the greenhouse taking flight in the wind saved the structure—years ago, I’d tethered it to y-posts driven deep into the soil. They were the only things left holding the structure in place.
Today is cool and rainy. The change will help the garden recover from yesterday’s thrashing, but it can’t bring back the stripped fruit, broken branches, and fatally flattened vegetables. It won’t fix the greenhouse.
We pick up the mess and get on with it. The damage is discouraging, but I am not discouraged. If gardening (and life in general) were not laced with setbacks and disaster, we could take no pride in our accomplishments. I will be extra-pleased with every tomato and cucumber we eat for the remainder of the summer.
And, by the way, if cyclone Fehi did nothing else, it reminded me where the name Debbie’s chutney came from—cyclone Debbie stripped the apples from the trees before they were ripe. We made chutney from those apples, and named it Debbie’s. Perhaps we will be making Fehi’s chutney this weekend.
Robinne Weiss 