And July is over

 It’s my last chance to squeeze one more blog post into July! It’s such a busy time of year in the garden. It makes summer pass far too quickly. I love “shopping” in the garden every afternoon for supper. I’m doing better this year at using the herbs I grow. Often, I just end up drying them at the last minute before the frost. So far I have made two new chicken recipes with fresh herbs, and am very proud of myself. Forgot to take pictures, though. I made fresh pico de gallo with tomatoes from the high tunnel, and onion, peppers, jalapeno, and cilantro from the outside garden. I don’t recall what variety of jalapeno I bought, but I have named it “Ass in Space.” Good Lord, it’s hot! And huge! The peppers are a good 4” long, which is big for jalapenos. Hoo-wee!

Pico de gallo made with fresh everything

We did not get any peaches this year, in spite of Terry’s early prediction that we would. Jane and I split a box of peaches from the fruit truck that brings them up from Georgia. I’ve eaten most of my fresh with yogurt. I made a cobbler last week. Even cooked, the fresh ones are better than canned or frozen.

Peach cobbler

Speaking of things that are only truly awesome in the summer, we started eating sweet corn two days ago. Terry planted varieties with different maturity times, so most of it isn’t ready yet. Soon, though.

Sweet corn tasseled out and maturing rapidly

We said goodbye to the orioles. We could feed jelly to every other bird on the property forever, but enough is enough. Terry took the jelly feeder down. At least one cardinal dad is still feeding a fledgling.

Papa Cardinal feeds sunflower seeds to his baby

The 13-striped ground squirrels are stocking up on sunflower seeds, as usual. The stretch of their cheek pouches is impressive!

How much more can it stuff in there?

One evening as we were closing up, Terry noticed a tree frog in the glass greenhouse doing its best to look like a watering can. The frog had moved on by morning.

I'm just part of the watering can. Move along. Nothing to see here, folks.

Terry mows most of the field to keep the invasive Canada star thistles from taking over the whole world. He leaves one strip full of milkweeds for the monarchs and another grassy strip for ground-nesting birds. Personally, I think the ground-nesting birds need a great deal more real estate before starting a family, yet weed control is important. Anyway, I walked out the the “milkweed forest,” as Terry calls it, to see what was going on. Terry often reports seeing “monarchs everywhere” when he is mowing. I saw one and could not get a picture because it would not sit still. I have looked for monarch caterpillars in previous years without finding any. This year, I found one!

Rare sighting of a monarch caterpillar

I also saw numerous red milkweed beetles. Evidence suggests that these little critters are responsible for most of the leaf damage on the milkweeds.

Common sighting of a red milkweek beetle

I also saw some honeybees

Honeybee on open milkweed flowers

And the ubiquitous Japanese beetles. This one is cheating because it is eating the flower before it opened and therefore not doing anything helpful such as pollination.

The ubiquitous Japanese beetles

The bee balm (genus Monarda) is in full bloom and attracting lots of insect attention. I was able to get a not-so-hot picture of a red admiral.

Uncooperative red admiral that would not open its wings for the camera

I took about a million pictures of insects that looked like tiny flying crayfish. When I looked at the photos, I saw that I had two different species of sphinx moths, a hummingbird moth and a bumblebee moth. My Golden Guide to Butterflies and Moths came through for me again. I’ve had this little book since I was a wee child and am just amazed at how comprehensive it is. Of the ten thousand or so butterfly and moth species in North America, I’m impressed that the authors of the Golden Guide included every species I’ve ever come across in a pocket guide of 150 pages. This means I only see common species, but still.

Flying crayfish

This is the bumblebee moth. The Golden Guide doesn’t do a great job of describing the difference between it and the hummingbird moth, saying only that it has “an unscaled cell on the front edge of the forewing near the body.”

Bumblebee moth with clear area on forewing, maybe

Hummingbird moth without a clear spot on the forewing, maybe

It’s not that easy to see the wing, as the wings move very fast. In fact, these moths are also known as “clearwings” because the scales fall off shortly after they start flying due to the excessively vigorous flapping. When the Golden Guide was written, I expect there was an assumption that the moth would be killed for close examination. Those were the days.

Google produced more useful information to identify living species, namely that the bumblebee moth (a.k.a. snowberry clearwing, Hemaris diffinis) is black and yellow and the hummingbird moth (a.k.a. hummingbird clearwing, Hemanis thysbe) has red coloration.  

Here’s the hummingbird moth with its proboscis curled up.

Curled up proboscis, obvious red pigment on abdomen

Here it is feeding. Imagine trying to manipulate a tongue that is as long as your body.

Hummingbird moth with proboscis in beebalm flower

Pretty amazing little creatures!

Midsummer

  A great pleasure of midsummer is watching bird parents feed their fledglings. We have more orchard orioles this year than we have before. I have seen three adult males at once, the first time I’ve seen more than one at a time. This is also the first time I saw a dad orchard oriole feeding a chick.

Feed me!

Nom, nom!

After a long absence, the goldfinches are back at the feeders. I assume this is because their parenting duties are done for the summer. The house finches are always around.

Goldfinch and house finch flinging/eating sunflower seeds

One tom turkey has been helping himself to the sunflower seeds on the ground, which are numerous thanks to the goldfinches flinging 9 seeds for every one they eat.

Tom turkey

I have witnessed but was unable to photograph a redwing blackbird chasing the turkey away from the feeder. The blackbird attacks from behind, and the turkey flees, in spite of being several orders of magnitude larger than the blackbird. It could be a riddle:

Q: When is a turkey a chicken?

A: When he’s being chased by a blackbird.

A green heron has apparently taken up residence here or nearby. I have seen it fly over every day for a few weeks now. Terry has spotted it perched in the third oak, which was struck by lightning a few years ago and is half dead. In a recent heavy rain, the heron was grounded by the orchard. It took off when I went out to get a picture.

Green heron

I’m pleased with how my wildflower garden is coming along. The original garden was at the end of the garden shed. I have moved some plants, but most of them have moved themselves to the vacant ground at the end of the garden. There are also a few poppies and asters that have seeded themselves from a commercial mix of non-native flowers.

The wildflower garden started at the shaded end of the garden shed

The beebalm attracts numerous bumblebees, but for all the flowers growing here right next to the beehive, I rarely see any honeybees. Where they are foraging remains a mystery.

Beebalm with two bumblebees and no honeybees

The pullets have not yet integrated into the rest of the flock. The hens are no help in that process as their behavior can hardly be described as welcoming. They chase the pullets away from the food and water. There seems to be an uneasy and unstable establishment of territory on the perch at night, pullets on the left, hens on the right.

Pullets on the left side of the perch. A Wyandotte is next to the wall, then Doriann Gray and Goldie. Another Wyandotte is absent from the photo

Hens on the right side of the perch

Some nights Henrietta Houdini (the one who ran away from butchering) stakes out the left and pecks at any pullet trying to get up there. The pullets are growing fast. They will be better able to defend themselves soon.

I also love the bounty of this time of year. I’m not overwhelmed yet and can actually use produce from the garden for meals. Soon I’ll be spending all day at the stove blanching, peeling, canning, and be too exhausted to do anything but warm up Tundra Surprise (leftovers from the freezer) for supper night after night.

Summer bounty

I harvested the first standard tomatoes from the high tunnel yesterday. I’ve been getting cherry tomatoes for a week or so. The arrival of the big tomatoes means that we can BLTs for supper. That’s quick and easy.

Tomatoes from the high tunnel

I noticed a large number of black raspberry canes growing in the Nanking cherry shrubs that border the road. I remembered them ripening the last week of June and thought I’d missed them. The last time I mowed, however, I saw that they were ripening. I’ve been picking for a week. If I’m lucky, I’ll get enough for a batch of jam. If not, I will have to do math and make a partial batch of jam. That’s okay. I can do math. Picking black raspberries makes me happy. It is something my mom and I used to do together from the time I could walk. What is better than free food?

Black raspberries

The amazing chicken plucker

 What a week! The deck was finished on Friday. We butchered chickens Saturday. Our morning began by rounding up the meat chickens and the old Wyandotte hens. We had one two-year-old Americauna, Brownie, who should have been butchered, but Terry has bonded with her. We gave her a reprieve.

Death Row

You may recall that the chicken butchering last year was an exhausting marathon lasting something like 15 hours. When chicken pluckers went on sale at Farm and Fleet at the end of August, I bought one. Plucking is definitely the most time-consuming part of the process. The side of the box said, “Roaster ready in 15 seconds.”

Yeah, right, I thought. I was most skeptical of the plucker’s ability to get the feathers off the inside of the wings. Well, let me tell you, the chicken plucker was PLUCKING AMAZING! All that we hoped for and more. Here is the plucking station with the hot water bath on the left and the plucker on the right.

Thermostatically controlled water bath, left. Plucker on the right.

This is the inside of the plucker. 

The inside of the plucker

There is a hose at the top with holes at regular intervals to squirt water on the chicken in all directions. (The plucker can do two at a time, but I can’t scald at that rate.) The tub spins around while the dead, scalded chicken flails madly against the numerous rubber fingers. The feathers are washed to the bottom. There is a gap between the bottom plate and the side where the feathers fall. Three rubber fingers pointed in the opposite direction (you can see them at the bottom right) whisk the feathers into a chute that empties into a bucket. In theory, the bucket should have holes to let the water out, but we did not have proper drainage on the patio, so Terry dumped the 5-gallon bucket into a larger holey muck bucket between each chicken.

And by golly, those chickens came out clean as a whistle! It was AWESOME. 

These chickens are so plucked!

We dispatched, scalded, and plucked 17 chickens in two hours, and that includes a break of 20 or 30 minutes to warm up clean scalding water halfway through. Best $300 I ever spent, that plucker. Really, we should have done 18 chickens, 15 broilers plus 3 Wyandottes, but one of the hens got loose. The best we could do was get her back in the apple orchard. She is now named Henrietta Houdini.

I was busy again on Sunday making baked beans, potato salad, and deviled eggs for the Fourth of July.

Terry wanted to burn the brush he’d been accumulating all spring before a flood came and scattered it all over the field. In addition to all the branches that came down in various windstorms, we had the old stairs and leftover wood scraps from the deck.

The burn pile. Stairs, cut in two pieces, at right with scraps on top.

Monday was a little rainy, but a break at 2:30 allowed us to go back to the creek and torch the burn pile. Terry started it with gasoline. Boys will be boys.

The fire took off in a hurry. Pretty soon, the stairs started smoking.

Stairs, right, start to smoke.

And burst into flame without having direct contact with the fire.

Stairs start burning

Terry circled the fire with a pitchfork, throwing the sticks at the edge toward the middle.

Terry tends the fire

At 4:00, thunder started rumbling too close for comfort. We went back to the house to play a few rounds of Mexican train while the rain poured down. It stopped in time for Terry to fire up the grill and cook brats and hot dogs as well as our first zucchini, pablanos, and jalapenos from the garden. For dessert, we had chocolate cream pie. So good, if I say so myself.

Chocolate cream pie

Our guests did not stay long with more storms coming. It got bad during the night. My internet went down and stayed down until just this minute. I called my provider a couple of times and got automated messages about a tower being down. They thanked me for my patience. I don’t get much cell phone signal where I live either, so I had no email access at home from Tuesday through Friday. Another storm rolled through Tuesday. Between the two storms, we got nearly 4” of rain. It speaks to the extent of our drought that we did not flood. All that rain ran into the giant cracks in the ground. Nevertheless, we were glad the burn pile was gone!