Bald eagle and corn sex

 It’s fun to have early vegetables from the high tunnel, but it keeps me busy. Here’s a picture of the harvest from June 30. Normally, I don’t harvest much before the middle of July. The bin has carrots, peas, green beans, zucchini, and cucumbers. Even this early, there’s more than we can possibly eat.

High tunnel harvest on June 30

My pollinator garden is doing very well. I did spread more seeds this year, but because of the drought, they have just recently germinated. All of these plants are either perennials or seeded themselves from last year.

My pollinator garden

Most of the coreopsis are yellow or yellow with a brownish red center. There is one individual with all red petals. Probably a mutation. I wonder how it will impact pollination. I’ll never know.

An unusual all-red coreopsis in front of the more common yellow-with-red-center

Terry called my attention to an iridescent green bee on one of the purple coneflowers. The pollen sacs on its legs were stuffed to the max. If my research is correct, it is a rather common green sweat bee (because they are related to sweat bees, but are actually uninterested in sweat) of the genus Agapostemon.

Iridescent green bee on a coneflower

I was pleased that two plants gave me plenty of potatoes for the traditional 4^th of July new potato salad. The red potatoes are so vibrantly magenta when they first come out of the ground. Digging potatoes is like finding buried treasure.

Lovely new potatoes

On July 6, I harvested the first Early Girl tomatoes from the high tunnel. That is at least three weeks ahead of our usual schedule. I’m getting some cherry tomatoes from the high tunnel also.

Ripening Early Girls

Here's one of my two watermelons.

The melons are getting big

And with all those high tunnel cucumbers, it wasn’t long before I lugged out the canner and made pickles. I’m going to try to only put up as much as we might reasonably eat. Three quarts is probably enough already, but I imagine I’ll be tempted to put up more. The outside cucumbers have just started to blossom. God knows what we’ll do with all those.

My first three quarts of pickles for this year

The corn is flowering. Here are some fascinating facts about corn sex that you might not know. First, the tassels are the pollen producing (boy) parts. Each little anther hanging down releases pollen.

Tassels with the anthers hanging down

The pollen needs to land on the silks of the ear (the girl parts) in order for the kernel to develop. Each kernel has its own silk. Think about that for a minute. If you have never grown corn, you have probably not seen the luxurious silks that emerge from the ear. They are a bit sticky, the better to catch the pollen. After pollination is completed, the silks dry up into the form that you’ve seen before. Next time you have corn, look for the silk scar. It’s a tiny bump on the kernel at the opposite end of the cob scar, which not surprisingly is where the kernel attaches to the cob. Duh. If a particular silk does not get pollinated, there will be no kernel. If you see a gap in the row of corn, that’s what happened.

Long, flowing tresses of silk

Even though the corn is far from ripe, the deer thought it would be a good place to forage. Terry and I put up the fence around it yesterday. We like seeing the deer, but wish they would stick to eating the grass in the field. Or, as Terry pointed out, “They could eat all the field corn they wanted across the street, but NOOO!”

A well-behaved doe foraging in the field where she belongs

During supper one day last week, Terry mentioned that he had seen a crow and a vulture in the middle of the field that afternoon. He hadn’t had a chance to go see what they were picking at. The next day I saw a big black bird in the middle of the field and thought it was probably the vulture. Until it lifted its head. A bald eagle! Don’t see those every day.

A bald eagle in the back yard

Terry investigated and found it to be a raccoon “that stinks to high heaven.”

The eagle came back the next day, and I also saw a fox in the same area at dusk. When Terry checked on the carcass again, something had dragged it away. All gone.

The ancestor of the domestic chicken is the red junglefowl. You can take the fowl out of the jungle, but the chickens still don’t like to be out in the open. Here is what the chick run looks like in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

The run is absolutely deserted in the middle of the day

But where are the chicks at dusk when it’s time for them to roost so I can go to bed?

Answer: Everywhere other than in the coop

I’ve gotten pretty good at herding them in with the walking stick that Hilda left in the coop for that purpose. No one has escaped the fence yet, although they are clearly able to fly up to roost on the windbreak by the door.

For the first several years we lived here, the orioles left during the last week of June. Here it is July 13, and I have purchased the last jar of grape jelly for the year three times. The orioles are still abundant. Here’s a fight between a juvenile male orchard oriole (on the left) and a male Baltimore oriole (right). The Baltimore oriole won.

Juvenile orchard oriole confronts, and loses to, an adult Baltimore oriole

We see many fledglings as well, so it might be that there will be four “last jars” of grape jelly this year.

Baltimore oriole fledgling, still looking mottled

 It won’t go to waste, however, because just about every other bird we have has learned to eat grape jelly, including a red-bellied woodpecker that has an enormous beak that could easily put out an eye. He has no challengers when he wants to eat jelly.