One of the things we planted this spring was a couple of rows of kohl rabi (or is it kohlrabi? I have seen it both ways…).
They have not done well.
Of all that we planted, there were about 4 surviving plants that sprouted.
Of those, a couple got et by deer.
The last two, however, were getting quite big and leafy and looking to have some potential, though there was as yet no sign of a bulb forming.
Then, something got at them.
At first, it looked like the caterpillars from cabbage moths. I found a whole bunch on the underside of the leaves, wreaking havoc, and got rid of them.
Soon after, however, the leaves were looking even worse.
I took this picture yesterday. These are the culprits.
The leaves are absolutely infested with these teeny, tiny black beetles.
I hosed them off after taking the picture, but when I checked them today, they were back, and there’s hardly anything left of the leaves, but the veins and stems.
So… kohl rabi is a bust for our garden!
Darn. I was looking forward to having our own. It’s one of those “treat” vegetables that we buy only once in a while.
At least whatever those beetles are, they are completely uninterested in anything else we’re growing.
Last night, I was able to spend some time on the log seat near the junk pile, and work on getting Butterscotch’s kittens used to human interaction.
I saw all four were out when I was heading to the nearby garden beds, so I left the garden for later. They all ran off, but after I sat down, Butterscotch came over for pets. After a while, she started making some comforting noises, and the kittens emerged.
I had a twig to wiggle at them, and one orange kitten in particular really likes that. Mostly, they just sort of wandered around me, then hid, then tried to sneak around behind me.
I could hardly see the kitten in the above picture, from where I was sitting, but was able to reach my arm around to get the photo.
They really love the collapsed barrel!
Now that I’ve cleared away some of the undergrowth, I realize I was wrong about it. It is a half-barrel, not a full barrel like I’d thought, and I can now see the dirt inside, so it was, indeed, another barrel planter that got knocked over.
The kittens are using the dirt as a litter box! :-D
The one kitten that really likes to play with the stick is also the one that is willing to come the closest.
Yes, I got to touch him. I was even able to pick him up for a few moments! He wasn’t too sure about that and wanted down very quickly, but he also came back again, quickly. Mostly, as long as Mom was around, they were willing to play with me there. So that is some major progress!
Now, if only we could do that Junk Pile’s babies! It’s much harder when the Mom isn’t willing to come near us, herself.
It’s a good thing we started so many squashes, and ended up transplanting them as such different times. The ones that sprouted later and got transplanted later got missed by that last frost of the season, and have been quite prolific. A couple of frost damaged ones in the first bed, both zucchini, recovered enough that they got quite large and are producing green and yellow zucchini for us.
Others…
They’re still working in it.
Some have started bravely blooming, putting out flowers bigger than their leaves!
With the tiniest of yellow zucchini!
I finally remembered to get a picture of the back row. The plants with the bamboo poles marking them are all ones I have been able to confirm as the birdhouse gourds. I put bricks or rocks under some of them, to support the weight of where the leaves are growing out, as the stems are a bit long and gangly.
You can see a pumpkin mound to the right of centre in the background, and way at the far end are the squashes from the second planting that have done so well.
While there were very few squash to collect this morning, there are so many new flowers right now, and lots of pollinators, so I am expecting a second wave of squash to harvest, soon.
I am looking forward to having enough to make more of the quick pickles!
Last spring, we picked up a bug hotel, to encourage the local pollinators. The top has slots for butterflies, the sides have bamboo tubes, and the middle has pieces of wood cut in such a way that, stacked together, they create holes. These were for native bees, such as mason bees, which do not build nests.
It did not get used at all that summer, so when winter came, I just left it hanging on the tree I’d put it on.
This year, it’s being used!
I can’t tell if the openings at the top are being used by butterflies, but the bamboo on both sides have quite a few tubes used. The middle section doesn’t look like it’s been used by anything at all.
So this fall, when the insects are done with it, we’ll clean it out and take it inside for the winter, as the instructions that came with the packages said to do.
Mostly, it needs to be cleared of spider webs. The roof is just covered with them!
I’m glad to see it being used, and we’ll likely pick up more of them, over time. The native pollinators come out at times more in tune with the local plant life, and that will be important as we plant more food trees and berry bushes over the next few years.
While doing my rounds this morning, I made sure to check where I’d found wasps while trying to clean up yesterday.
I was surprised by what I saw.
First, there was the hole in the ground. I didn’t expect to see an actual hole like that.
Also, do you see the light brown stuff scattered around? Particularly in the grass to the left?
Those are pieces of nest cells.
When I was spraying the area with the hose, I couldn’t see any of this. I’m not sure if it was because I was so focused on the wasps, themselves, or if some critter came through during the night and dug things up even more.
I also zoomed in to the root or stick across the hole in the ground.
The wasps on the stick/root itself were quite still and just sitting there. Like they were sleeping or something. The other wasps were more active.
I don’t know what kind of wasps these are. They are smaller than the yellow jackets I’m used to seeing, and have more black to yellow on their bodies.
Well, whatever they are, we have to get rid of them.
I used the hose again, filling the hole. I saw a lot fewer wasps flying around than before, so I hope that means they are moving on to somewhere else. Until they do, we’re going to have to be careful. Especially when trying to interact with Butterscotch’s babies.
Which one of my daughters was able to do, last night!
I saw through the window that all 4 of them were out and playing, so my younger daughter went out, sat on the ground and wiggled a stalk of wheat (self-sown from the straw we’ve been using as mulch this year) at them.
Two of them even came close enough to sniff her sandal, and when one of them turned away to start eating, she was able to pet its back – until it noticed that she was touching it! *L*
It was a little bit cooler today, so I decided to do a bit of clean up around the spruce grove perimeter. Eventually, we want to clean out the junk pile, but it’s got kittens in it, so I am just working my way towards it.
Here is where I started working.
All those thistles and crab grass are growing out of a pile of … dirt? I’d already cleared a path to the chokecherry tree behind it, and now I wanted to clear the pile itself.
Which meant pulling the thistles and crab grass up by hand.
Yes, the row marker I used in the spring was still there!
It is now leaning against the garage, where there is at least a bit of shelter from the elements.
As for the pile itself, I’m not sure what it is. Stuff was pulling out of it easily, so I thought it might be an ash pile from cleaning out the old wood furnace over the years?
It’s really quite sandy in texture, though.
I’m sure this pile was made for a purpose, but if it’s not an ash pile, I just can’t figure out what that might have been!
After clearing most of the pile from both sides, I continued working my way towards the junk pile. I had seen branches piled there early on, and had added a few myself whenever I needed to clear something but didn’t have a chance to take the wood to one of the piles outside the yard at the time. Like part of the cherry tree by the house that broke off when I tried to move it around the post with an old bird house on it. In the above photo, I’d already cleared that out – and dragged out a length of those tiny decorative wire fences for around flower beds, in the process. It was pretty bent up, so that ended up on the junk pile that will eventually be hauled away.
My first load of very old branches that I dragged out after pulling away more thistles and years of crab grass.
I never did get another full load…
The closer I got to the junk pile, the more old branches I uncovered – as well as something yellow. It looks like a large piece of very thick plastic… tarp?
It was at about this point that I got stung, and found a small, yellow and black wasp stuck in my shirt.
After brushing it away, I kept a close eye out while pulling out a few more branches.
Aaaaannnddd… yes. There were more wasps.
To the left of centre in the above photo is the remains of a log. The wasps seemed to be coming out from under it.
So I took a hose to it, then eventually used a long metal pipe we use for poking around when doing a burn, to lift it over.
Yup. It looked like the opening to a ground nest was right under it.
I hosed that for a while, too. I don’t know if it was enough to drown out the nest, but there were quite a few wasps flying around. They don’t show up in the photo, but they’re there!
At which point, I was done.
I have never seen so many wasp nests in my life, before this summer. They’re all over the place! There is the tree in front of the kitchen window, and one beside the beet and carrot beds, that are nests. Then there are 3 active paper nests in various places, plus the one above the garage door that I got rid of, and the one under the eaves of the house at the old kitchen that I got rid of. There appears to be a nest inside the branch pile near the garage, and now this ground nest by the junk pile.
And those are just the ones I know of.
There isn’t much we can do to stop them from building under the eaves, but this is just more reason to get rid of the junk piles, debris and branch piles!
And those Chinese elms.
Meanwhile…
This is the pile of thistles and quack grass, with a couple of spirea I pulled up near the end, that I cleared up and added to the new compost pile. With so many thistle seeds, I plan to give them a few days to dry, then burn them. That will help with breaking down the old tree stump in the middle, and making sure more saplings don’t start pushing their way through again.
So, I think this is going to be it for clean up in this area for a while. I’m not sure what to do about the wasps, other than hosing the area down repeatedly. With the kittens living in the junk pile, I don’t want to be using wasp poison.
I think it’s time to pick up another wasp trap. The one I got before is currently being used to catch fruit flies in the house, which suddenly became a problem.
Well, a bit of progress is better than no progress at all!
Little Braveheart was willing to come closer for a wiggling flag, than a wiggling stick. :-D
The bit of fur visible at the bottom of the picture is Potato Beetle, who really, really wanted cuddles!
I didn’t stay too long, though. Tabby was hanging around, and I spotted their even more elusive sibling making several attempts to get to the freshly refilled food container. I didn’t want to keep any cats from being able to eat!
Today was another hot one, which made it a good day to finally go into the basement and see what I could do with the various pieces of wood I’ve brought down there.
Since getting my wood carving kit, I haven’t had much chance to make things with it. I used the spoon blank it came with for my first attempt. Then I used some of the lilac wood pieces to make a hair pin for my daughter. I have since made a longer, plainer lilac hair stick for my daughter, and tried to make one out of cherry for myself.
I say “tried” because when I got a bit decorative at the thick end, it ended up breaking, twice. The inner core of the piece of cherry I was using was rotted just enough that when I tried shaping the wood, it was just too weak. This was true of the lilac wood, too, but I hadn’t tried to carve anything that would affect the integrity as much, so they were fine.
Today, I wanted to make something with some of the maple pieces from the tree I had to cut part off, earlier this year, so it would be safer for my brother to move around on the shed roof he was patching.
I had a branch of it set aside, waiting for a day like today, and I cut a short piece to work on.
I was thinking of going very simple, and making a spreader or something like that.
Thinking of the lilac and cherry wood, though, I decided to split the piece and see what it was like on the inside.
Well, crud.
I’m not going to be able to make a spreader out of that.
So I cut a piece from a larger branch I had set aside.
Dangit!
I really hope it isn’t all like this. The stuff I want to make uses the heartwood. For the larger pieces, I’m thinking of cups or bowls. Stuff I plan to actually use.
In fact, there was a particular piece of dead maple I’d found while cleaning up the maple grove, I think in our first summer here, that I was looking forward to using.
It doesn’t look like much on the outside, but when I cut it, this particular maple had red rings inside it.
I cut a piece off the end and took a look.
That does not bode well.
So I split it.
*sigh*
Yup. The middle is rotted.
However…
What about the edges? The parts with the red it in still looked solid.
So I split it again.
It did not split well, but the wood did seem pretty solid. Could I do something with this?
I wasn’t sure.
Over the next hour and a half or so, I hacked at it with a giant knife (which I’ve been using in lieu of a hatchet), decided to try the sloyd knife to carve out a spoon bowl, gave up on that and tried the Dremel (the two different tips I tried did the job, but the friction actually charred the wood!), finally broke open my new set of rasps and used a bar rasp with 4 different surfaces, and yes, even the carving knives.
Part way through, I dragged one of the chimney blocks from the old basement to use as a lower, solid surface. Especially for when I was hacking away with the big K-bar.
So that hunk of wood up there?
This is what I got out of it.
I didn’t stop to take any photos while I was working on it because, to be honest, I didn’t think it would work!
So here, I am at the stage of using my coarsest grit sand paper.
As I moved up to finer sandpaper, I would sometimes use my little vice.
You can really see the gouges left by the rasp. The vice made it much easier to just use a narrow strip of sandpaper around the handle and pulling back and forth.
Working my way through ever finer grits of sandpaper took probably another hour and a half.
Sanding the inside of the bowl was the most difficult. While I could use the curved sloyd knife a bit, the wood was really too small for the blade. What I really needed was a wood gouge, but I don’t have one. So that’s where the Dremel came in handy, to get the bulk of the wood out of the bowl, but I still had to cut out the bits that charred from the friction and shape it. I ended up using the other carving knives more than the sloyd knife, because of that.
Here it is, after final sanding.
You can see on the scrap wood, where the knife was hitting while I was chopping away the excess wood on the spoon. :-D
I also included the bar rasp, to show the different surfaces.
Of course, I just had to get a picture of it next to a piece of the wood it came from.
I still can’t believe I was able to get this out of that chunk of wood!
As I was sanding it, I noticed black showing up in the non-red parts of the wood.
Having done my research before I started with my first attempt at carving, I recognized it as spalting. There are people who go out of their way to use spalted wood. It’s basically a sign of the wood’s decomposition.
It was very faint as I sanded, but how would it look after being oiled?
And how would that red show up after being oiled?
Let’s find out!
Wow!! What a difference!
I could have cut this part out, but I kind of like it.
Unfortunately, I find the spalting makes it look like it’s dirty. :-(
On the back, you can still see some of the roughness of the would that I didn’t quite get rid of completely. They look a bit like scratches on the lower part of the spoon. The part that became the outside of the spoon bowl had some chunks missing from how the wood split. It meant less excess wood to remove in that area, at least.
So this experiment was a lot more successful than I had dared hope! Not only was I able to get something out of a partially rotted piece of wood, but I was able to start and finish a spoon in one sitting!
One of these days, I want to try making a fork. :-)
It was on the same plant as the other mutant squash that I’m leaving to get big.
Such an adorable little mutant. :-D
There have not been as many squashes to pick lately, but there has been a surge of male flowers blooming right now – and the pollinators are just loving it. So I am expecting another burst of new squash before the season ends. :-)
The Re-Farmer 