Here we go again

We started digging garlic Friday, beginning at the south end. It was nasty, mucky work. I loosened the bulbs with a pitchfork and tossed them to the grass, where Hilda cut off the roots and associated clump of mud. Shaking the roots free of the soil was out of the question. About 2/3 of the way to the north, the soil seemed dry enough that rotting was not imminent. We stopped. I was spent, and we still had to hose them off and hang them up.

I mentioned earlier that I was feeling pretty low Saturday morning. We’d been cleaning up wet, muddy messes for days while we waited to see what would and would not survive in the garden. I went out to do my chicken chores at 6:00. I noticed that the brown box was still wet and had some nasty looking stuff in the bottom. I took everything out with the intention of giving it a good rinse. It seemed like an easy enough task, but it was complicated by the fact that the lid is attached and does not open all the way. So when it came time to flip it over to drain it, I had a problem. I pulled over a little patio table to elevate the box so the lid would be out of the way when I turned it over. I didn’t think to close the box before lifting it, and in the process the lid fell on my face, knocking my glasses off my nose.

When my mother reads this, she will think, “Why didn’t you ask me to help?”

And I will respond right here, “I didn’t know the lid was going to fall on my face, did I?”

Fortunately, there was neither blood nor bruising. It did nothing for my crappy mood however. I cried a little when I told Jane about my morning, my garden, my miserable, sucky, mud-filled life. Good friend that she is, she only laughed briefly when I told her about dropping the lid on my face.

The Bee Blitz was a good diversion. I felt perkier by the afternoon.

It was dry enough Monday that I got out for a good assessment of the damage. Hilda helped me pull off the row cover and roll it up. The should-haves don’t count, but I should have done it right away. It might have helped it dry out. The news was not good. Here is a picture showing the green north side of the garden fading to the brown south side. In my infinite wisdom, I planted three pattypan squash on the north and the zucchini to the south. The pattypans look great. The first of five zucchinis looks okay. The second is severely stunted.

Summer squash, left, with healthy pattypans and struggling zucchini. Beans, right.

The last three are not just merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. Note that the amaranth looks just fine.

Former zucchini with dried, mud-covered leaves splayed out in all directions.

Take a guess: of zucchini and pattypan, which variety of summer squash does Terry love, and which one will he not even try?

The beans suffered a similar fate, although the survival of the north end is more tenuous. These are the beans at the south end.

Drowned beans

The cantaloupe looked amazing! Even the ones that had been underwater for a day looked fine. Who knew they were so robust?

Cantaloupe resilence

Same story with the tomatoes. The north tomatoes were recovering their turgor.

Tomato (and eggplant in back) on the north side

To the south, we had lost 12 to 14 of the 36.

Tomato on the south side

We finished harvesting the garlic on Monday. Here is Hilda cutting away the mud. As you can see by the ones on the ground, the clumps were still considerable.

Hilda cuts mud away from garlic roots

The cleaned garlic went in a muck bucket for transport.

Big bucket o'garlic

And here it all is, washed, bundled, and hung to dry. At least we have garlic.

Garlic hanging to dry

I worked in the garden pulling weeds and trimming the dead leaves off the beans. I only got through the north half of two rows. I thought maybe they might pull through. It seemed like the buds were still viable.

I gave up on the beans to see what was going on with the coles. We had some pretty good looking cabbages, but about half were dead. There were more Brussels sprouts among the weeds than I thought at first glance. We had direct seeded some of them, and I thinned them down to one. I wished that I could have transplanted the extra, but I know better. I’ve done that experiment before

While I was pulling weeds, Hilda was seeking out replacements for the dead tomatoes. She came home with these, which are leggy, but alive.

Replacement tomatoes

Somehow, optimism returned. We've lost 30 or so days of the growing season. If we have a late fall...I started soaking beans Monday night to sprout on paper towels for planting as soon as I could get the rows cleaned up. Tuesday found me going through the leftover plants at Klein’s like a sailor on shore leave. I bought two kinds of cabbage (6 each), 3 kale, and 4 zucchini plants. I also found some fennel that purported to be good for seed. Seed fennel is hard to find, as it seems most people grow it for the bulb.

Replacement cabbages and kale

I got home in the afternoon just before we got 2.8” of rain in 2.5 hours with the ground still saturated and the creek barely contained in its banks. Another flood. Not as bad, but demoralizing, nevertheless. I just kept telling myself that we wouldn’t lose anything that wasn’t already dead. When I said that to Hilda, she responded, “Are you sure? Have you seen the garden?”

“Fine,” I said, “you worry about that and see how much good it does.”

Luckily, she laughed rather than being offended. We were all a bit testy last night.

View to the west

The garden underwater again

We had another downpour a few hours later, bringing the total rainfall to 3.4”.

Rain gauge at 8:15 p.m.

There was more wind with this one. One of Terry’s pear trees split and fell over. He said it had a bad trunk to begin with, and he was going to replace it anyway.

Pear tree with split trunk

And we’ve gotten better with practice. I watched the water level closely. Terry and I put on our Wellies and moved everything off the floor of the garden shed when the water was just up to the threshold. We took the brown box out of the chicken run as a precaution.

View to the south. Note water right to the bottom of the shed door.

Now we wait again for the ground to dry and the plants to recover or pack it in. And all the while, I can only think of the immortal words of my late Uncle Carl, who always knew what to say in a crisis: “Well, God damn.”

Bee Blitz

I participated in my first Bee Blitz on Saturday. I got the invitation from a former student of mine, Cindi, who is now a wildlife ecologist for the McHenry County Conservation District. While I cannot claim a large role in her success, my class was one of the first she took when she decided to go back to college and change careers. I feel a great deal of undeserved pride that she has done well. I am impressed that she was able to land a job in wildlife ecology without relocating.

I’m not sure when Bee Blitzes began. Colony collapse disorder has increased awareness of bees in the last 10 years or so. Bee Blitz is a citizen science program to get volunteers out to photograph bees. The University of Illinois has a Bee Spotter website (beespotter.org) where anyone can submit bee photos for identification. U of I then assembles all the data for bumblebees and honey bees in the state, which is also publically available. It’s a great idea because the volunteers don’t need to know anything about bees. The experts in Champaign-Urbana take care of all the hard stuff.

The Bee Blitz volunteers assembled at the Visitor Center. Promptly at noon, Cindi broke us up into four groups to visit different areas. She explained the degrees of difficulty of the different hikes. Cindi led the group with the easiest walking. I picked that one, even though I would have deferred to anyone who was more feeble. Most of the volunteers were younger than I was, but even those that were older volunteered for the most vigorous hike, probably because it was going through the highest-quality vegetation. Cindi’s group was the smallest. We walked a short way from the visitor center to a field where butterfly weed, purple cone flowers, and coreopsis were blooming. The butterfly weed had the most activity. We spread out and snapped away. After I'd taken many photos of honey bees and bumblebees, I tried to find smaller bees. That was harder because I couldn't hear them buzzing. 

The good thing about photos is that you can study them carefully after the bee is long gone. The bad thing is that the bees don’t always pose in the best positions. I also found that autofocus is a real challenge because at the last second, the focus will shift to something that is not the bee, such as the flower the bee is on. By the end of an hour in the field, I had 103 photographs. I deleted 30 right off the bat because they were blurry. Cindi uploaded the remaining 70 images to her computer so she could go through them and pick out any that were Bee Spotter worthy.I know a little about bees. Many years ago, I attempted to develop a bee lab for the Honors class I was teaching. I had a fantasy that some of the students would be so enamored with bees that they would pursue bee censuses as independent research projects. Nope. But I studied up on bees anyway. Distinguishing characteristics include jointed antennae, double wings, and hairy bodies. They also have characteristic mouthparts, but that does not seem very useful for field identification. Honey bees and bumblebees have pollen baskets on their back legs. I can see those if they’re full, but not otherwise. There are many species of bees that are small and solitary, unlike the honey bees and bumblebees that we know so well.

I won’t presume to identify any of these bees, but here are the best photos I got. There is one bee that I can identify, and that is the honey bee. They were everywhere. They are also alien invaders that compete for pollen with the native species.

Honey bees on butterfly weed

When I was taking the pictures, I noticed that some bumblebees had blacker thoraxes (I will refer to this as the “back”) than others. When I looked closely at the pictures, I was able to distinguish four different types. It should be noted that males and females of one species sometimes look different, so these may not be four different species. The back of this one is mostly yellow with a small black patch. It also has two yellow bands on the top part of the abdomen (under the wings).

Bumblebee on purple coneflower

The back of this one is like the previous one, but the abdomen seems to have an orange patch or band. The position of the wings makes it hard to see exactly what’s going on. It would be very exciting if this were an endangered rusty patched bumblebee. Cindi thought it could also be a brown belted bumblebee, which is more common.

Bumblebee with an orange patch on its abdomen

This bumblebee has a black back and one yellow stripe on the abdomen.

Bumblebee with a black back and yellow stripe on abdomen

This one has either a solid black abdomen or a mostly black abdomen with a brown stripe.

Bumblebee with an all-black abdomen (or maybe a brown stripe)

This photo shows the bent antennae of a sweat bee fairly well.

A solitary bee with the characteristic bend antennae

This bee on a penstemmon flower is a sweat bee that is all black.

An all-black solitary bee on a penstemmon flower

I also saw a green metallic bee.

Metallic green solitary bee

This “bee” is not a bee at all but a fly. You can tell because it has only two wings and its eyes are large and almost touch each other.

 A fly that looks like a bee

When our time was up, we went back to the Visitor Center. Just outside, several people were gathered around this black swallowtail that had just emerged from its chrysalis. The chrysalis is the light yellow structure to the right of the butterfly.

A black swallowtail just emerged from its chrysalis (pale yellow just to the right of the lower wing)

I enjoyed taking the pictures and studying the differences in the bees I saw. I should do this exercise at home some time.

Outside at last

In the silver lining department, the ground was very soft following the heavy rains. I put up the chick fence around Coop 1 with little trouble, getting the fence as straight and taught as possible. We have learned from experience that chicks will climb right up a sagging fence, much like kittens on the drapes. I was proud of my work. Until I realized that the enclosure looked small because we have TWO rolls of chick fence. Well. I’m not doing it over, at least not until the chicks are big enough to need more space.

We didn’t let the chicks out right away because the cold, rainy weather persisted. Finally on Friday, we opened up the door to the outside world. The chicks were unimpressed even though there was a feeder with no waiting right there. They came right up to the edge, but would not step out.

I'm not going out there--you go first

I'll go down to the board, but no farther!

This video shows them taking some interest in the plants outside the door, although they seem suspicious of actually stepping outside.

By evening, however, they were lounging on the grass.

Out for an evening stroll

I didn’t see anyone in the run at dusk when I shut the coop. It was time to clip the pullets’ wings, but I didn’t have the moral fortitude for it before bed. I thought probably it would be easy enough to grab them during the morning feed frenzy. In case you don’t remember, we take the food away at night so the meat chickens don’t grow faster than their legs and get lame.

Saturday morning, I went out to Coop 1 and found the scissors. I put the feeder in the coop and started grabbing pullets and clipping the feathers on their right wing. Three Dominiques, one white true blue, one tan true blue—Where is the dark brown true blue? At first I thought she was under the heat table, but this proved not to be the case. Shoot! I had not counted when I put them to bed the night before. Where was she? I went back to the run and looked everywhere. It didn’t take long, since it is such a small enclosure. Nothing. I didn’t know what to do. If she had spent the night outside, she might have died of exposure or been killed by a raccoon. Nothing to do but carry on with the chores, I suppose. I got the outside waterer from the run and took it around by the hose. I dumped, rinsed, and filled it. As I walked back to the run, there was the little brown true blue running along the outside of the fence! I don’t know where she spent the night, and she was not forthcoming with that information. I held open the fence, and she trotted right in, going straight into the coop. I went around to verify that she was, indeed, the missing chick and to clip her wing. I named her Amelia (as in Earhart) for her wanderlust and sense of adventure. Other than having cold feet, she seemed no worse for the wear.

Amelia, the Wanderer

All the pullets are working on their grown-up feathers. Here is Madeline. When I took this picture, she was cheeping loudly and trying to find her way back to her comrades after going through a hole under the windbreak outside the coop door. She was alarmed to find herself all alone, but she figured it out quickly. Soon they will be wandering all over without care.

Madeline trying to find her way back to the coop

This picture of the True Blues shows their size relative to the meat chickens.

Amelia, Bianca, and Unnamed Tan Pullet with four meat chickens.

The little white one, Bianca, is experiencing delayed development. About a week ago, I noticed that she was looking puny. I hand fed her chick feed and yogurt for a couple of days. She perked up but is still behind in her growth. She gets right in there at the feeder, so I’m not worried about her anymore. She has developed an unhealthy attachment to one of the meat chickens. She follows him around and snuggles up next to him when she’s cold. That relationship is going nowhere, I can tell her that. Chickens do seem to bond with chickens of similar color (bird of a feather…), and Hilda worries that she will be the only white hen. I remind her that chickens have the attention span of a gnat, and she will not pine for long.

100-year flood

It started raining about 5:00 Monday evening. Raining HARD. It started raining hard just to our north in Wisconsin. Before the night was out, we would have 4.8” of rain. At 6:10, I took this picture of the field with the water coming up to the fifth oak. The fact that the water is unbroken to the edge of the field suggests that the creek was over its banks.

6:10 p.m.: The creek is over its banks

I don’t have pictures of the rest of the flood because it just got too dark. At 7:15 or so, I looked out to check on the chickens. Juanita was pecking around in a puddle under an apple tree. The chorus frogs were already going crazy with mating calls. How does that work? Are they dormant in the mud until the Big Rain comes? It’s absolutely instant. Rain then frogs.

I went back to watching TV. The speed of the approaching flood took me completely by surprise. Hilda came down at 7:30 to report that the orchard was flooded, but the chickens were not all in the coop yet. There wasn’t anything to do at that point as chickens are about as easy to herd as cats. Fifteen minutes later, all the chickens were in the coop. I put on my Wellies, which are 12” above the ground. The water was not to the top yet, probably 10” deep. The chickens were all on the roost, well above the floor of the coop, so as long as the coop didn’t float off the trailer, they would be okay. If the water got high enough to flood the coop, it would be a huge mess, not gonna lie.

I went back in the house, took off my boots and sat down briefly. Then it occurred to me that there was a bucket of food in the brown box next to the coop, and I should check on it. Terry went to his shop to get his boots to help me move the box to higher ground. Swear to God, it could not have been 20 more minutes, and the water was 3” higher, over the top of the Wellies. Note to self: wear sandals. My boots are still drying.

While I waited for Terry, I moved a new bail of wood chips from the top of a plastic patio table out of the flood area. I also dragged the coop ramp out where it would not float into the deer fence and possibly poke a hole in it. The brown box was full of water. The scratch grains, in a plastic bucket, were dry. I put them on the patio. Terry and I floated the box out of the orchard and a good distance beyond the line of the water. Who knew how much farther the water would come? The feed, in a galvanized bucket, was mostly dry, although clumps were forming around the holes where the handles were attached. Terry and I took one handle each and put that on the patio. We tipped the box to drain it. I took the gloves inside to wash and dry them.

The garden was completely submerged. All I could see was the tops of the tomato cages. All of the row cover was underwater. I fully expected that it would all be in crumpled rags when the water went down. Our poor seedlings would be buried in silt. And what could we do? Not one damned thing. So I went to bed and worried. And something that I thought of for the first time was the wooden garden shed which was merely set up on blocks. If that thing floated off those blocks, we would never get it back on. And what if the hens couldn’t come out in the morning? Would the whole garden die? Think positive, I told myself. What fun we will have this summer buying produce at the Farmers’ Market! At least we’ll have potatoes! Yes, it was unconvincing. Completely.

I did not sleep well. I was up every hour, peering out trying to discern in the darkness where the water was. In the wee hours, it seemed like the water was behind the fifth oak again.

When dawn finally came, gray and drizzly, the water had gone down. A light rain in the morning washed some of the mud off the plants. The floor of the coop was dry. Whew. The girls were eager to run out and look for worms.

The red maples were still in water.

Flood in the red maple forest (left) and south field

Miraculously, the row cover was largely intact. Unbelievable!

The row cover was still largely in place!

The seedlings were not covered in silt. The pattypans look a bit bedraggled, but still alive.

Pattypans look bedraggled but alive

The tomatoes had mud on the lower leaves and bits of dead grass here and there. The soil was still saturated. And what can we do about it? Not one damned thing. We wait and we watch. We won’t be able to answer the dead or alive question for a few days yet. Meanwhile we debate whether or not to harvest the not-quite-mature but might-rot-if-left-in-ground garlic.

Muddy tomatoes in saturated soil

The garden shed was, praise be, still on its foundations. The inside was what one would expect for a bunch of plastic stuff floating in muddy water.

A muddy mess  in the garden shed

I saw this unusual deposition of mulch in the grass behind the garden. It must have come from the fifth oak, as that was the only mulched object in the upstream direction, but it didn’t seem like a place where an eddy would have formed.

Odd clump of mulch in the field behind the garden

The mystery was solved when I got to the fifth oak. A clump of mulch, presumably glued together with fungal hyphae, floated up in one piece, moved to the field, and settled.

Missing patch of mulch under the fifth oak

I walked back to the creek. Along the way, I saw that our catalpa trees were blooming.

Blooming catalpa

The catalpa flowers have some fancy nectar guides.

Orange and maroon nectar guides

Terry’s nurseries really took it in the shorts. This fence had floated open.

Deer fence opened by the flood

The deer fences caught a lot of flotsam, weighing them down and bending the trees underneath.

Fence pushed over by accumulated flotsam

Broken fence post at the corner

Some of his pots had floated to the nursery edge and tipped over. It looked to me like most of these plants were dead anyway.

Pots floated away

My woodland garden was not as bad as I feared. The straw floated to the lowest corner, but most of the plants seemed to be in good shape. I’ll have to go back and redistribute it if it ever stops raining.

Straw rearranged on my woodland garden

The plants all around the creek were laid flat. The creek was just barely it its banks.

Matted vegetation by the creek. The flag marks where my ramps were in a cage. The cage was downstream several feet.

More matted vegetation

The deer had been out.

Deer track

The burn pile that Terry had been assembling in the fire ring was long gone. The ring was swept clean with the ashes and gravel deposited just outside the rocks.

Fire ring swept clean in back; ashes and gravel in front

I looked for the wild black currants on my way back to the house. For as many blossoms as I saw, berries were hard to find. Pollen limitation, perhaps? I wonder what normally pollinates these flowers.

Just about the only black currants I could find

The upper garden and raised beds came through fine. One of the beds had an interesting plant growing in it. Hilda thought it was a weed and asked me if we should pull it. I thought it looked like something good. And it was! It has grown into larkspur. How did it get there? No idea. When we first moved here, I planted larkspur behind the tractor shed. But there’s been no sign of that for years. Life is a sacred mystery, John-Boy.

Larkspur growing mysteriously in one of the raised beds

Tuesday night (and every night since), a great blue heron has been stalking frogs in the field. This is the best picture I could get. Just after I snapped the shot, the red-wing black bird seen to the right swooped back to attack the heron’s back, and the heron took off.

Great blue heron hunting frogs while being pestered by a blackbird

Yesterday morning, Terry and I took everything off the floor of the garden shed and put it on saw horses to dry. I hosed off the silt while Terry swept. It seemed ridiculous to put more water on the ground, but it was the best way to clean it up. When it comes to silt, the water giveth; the water taketh away.

We had more rain this morning, but no flooding. We need a few sunny days before we can really assess the damage to the garden. Still could get more rain tomorrow.

And one more random nature observation was this moth I found in the house one morning. It is perfectly camouflaged for a tree. On the bathroom wall, not so much. The thing I found interesting is that it not only has perfect bark-colored wings, but also has a behavior of elevating its abdomen to look exactly like a thorn.

A moth doing a thorn imitation on the bathroom wall