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Unexpected surprise

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In which the universe shows its sense of humor.

This year I decided that I wasn’t going to try and grow tomatoes. Every year I kid myself about the amount of sunlight I get in my  garden and optimistically plant tomatoes. I end up growing tall, somewhat spindly plants that produce either nothing, a tiny tomato, or a tomato that a slug or squirrel eats before it ripens. It’s just so heartbreaking, that I decided to concentrate on things that grow well in my garden like basil, and other herbs.

I compost anything I can, so sometimes I get volunteer plants popping up here and there. I usually let them grow just to see what will happen. This year I got several tomato plants popping up. Since I decided that I am not growing tomatoes this year, I pretty much ignored these plants. They trailed on the ground, or over the stairwell as I didn’t even stake them.

We went away for 2 weeks and what do you think I found when I got back??

A big, beautiful, perfectly ripe tomato!

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Back and an Attack!

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We’re back from Iceland! It was a truly amazing vacation. If you are even slightly considering going to Iceland, I want you to go! I am editing my photos now, so more will come.

We are now trying to get back into a routine. Lindsay has her first full week of school this week, which is helpful for getting more things done at home. One of the things we haven’t gotten back into a routine again, is locking our chickens up at night. Our coop is predator proof, but we built an extended run that isn’t. So every night when they tuck themselves into bed, we lock the door between the runs. Except last night we forgot.

I woke up around 3am to the most painful screeching sounds. I knew instantly that the chickens were in major distress. Neil and I ran out there to chase off whatever predator was after them. Neil saw something run away, but isn’t sure if it was a cat or a small raccoon.

Fortunately we seemed to be in time. The girls were agitated, but there didn’t seem to be any blood. This morning I checked again and didn’t see any injuries. I just saw this clump of feathers ripped from Andie in the coop. Poor girl. They still have the little sheaths over them, which means that she just grew them. It looks like they came from her head, but I couldn’t see a bald spot.

We just re-set the chicken alarm on our phones to remind us to lock them in at night.

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Mushrooms Finally!

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Last summer was my first summer learning about and hunting mushrooms. What I didn’t know at the time was that it was a special summer, filled with rain and mushrooms. This summer has been extremely dry, which has resulted in almost no mushrooms. We have finally started getting some rain here and there and you can practically hear the mushrooms bursting out of the ground. City trees have reishi mushrooms popping out of their trunks and various mushrooms are peeking out of the mulch.

We went up to the Berkshires this weekend and were able to get in a short hike. I found 2 different trees with bright orange chicken of the woods mushrooms growing on them. These are delicious mushrooms that have the taste and consistency of chicken breast. Unfortunately the ones I found were just past their prime, so we didn’t pick them. It’s very, very hard to leave a choice edible mushroom behind, but you can get sick from eating an old mushroom.

We left our hike empty handed, but on the drive back to Neil’s parent’s house, I wanted to stop and look at a tree I noticed on our drive to the hike. Sure enough, it was covered with lovely oyster mushrooms. There were many that were past, but we were able to harvest a pound of nice, fresh ones.

Sautéed with garlic and olive oil, they were delicious.

If you are interested in learning about wild mushrooms, get yourself a good guide book and join a mushroom (mycological) group in your area. Please, don’t use these photos to identify your finds!!

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A Butterfly!

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On Thursday morning, Neil looked into the butterfly habitat and noticed that our little chrysalis friend had opened up and a beautiful butterfly was flying around the inside of the netting. It must have emerged early in the morning because its wings were already pumped up and ready to fly. In case you haven’t read as much on raising caterpillars as I have (and really why would you?, here’s a good site. When a butterfly emerges their wings are soft and they spend some time “pumping” them up. Visions of butterfly gyms are coming to mind, aren’t they? Soon they harden and the butterfly is ready to fly off. This is quite clearly a very vulnerable time for the butterfly.

We seem to have a female, so hopefully she will lay lots of eggs and we will see her descendants in the years to come.

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Plum Cake

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Is there anything better than summer fruit? Fresh tomatoes maybe? We have been enjoying our weekly CSA pick ups of fruit and veggies. It’s fun to be surprised each week at pick up and to cook seasonally. I think our heirloom tomato share will begin next week!!!

We went to dinner at friend’s this week and I made a plum cake. We improvised and put a peach in the center ring. It’s a simple cake and is equally delicious with coffee at breakfast. Here’s the recipe.

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Finished Teacher’s Shawls

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Finally getting around to posting photos of the 2 shawls I made my daughter’s teachers. I gave them their shawls at an end of the year party in June. The white shawl will be worn with her wedding dress. The other shawl is a very pale peach color, which doesn’t show well in the photos.

So remember this lumpy pile?

Here it is all blocked.

Here’s the other shawl, which is really a loop. It can be worn as a wrap or as a long loop scarf.

Have you ever seen such sweet teachers?

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Apple Tree Massacre

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Today I was dealt a crushing blow to my apple harvest. I had noticed that squirrels were slowly stripping my puny dwarf apple trees of apples, but today they totally cleaned one tree off. What’s so maddening is that they pick the fruit, take a few bites, and then leave it on the ground ruined. I feel like they are flipping their little furry finger at me when they do this.

I was able to find 2 apples that didn’t have rodent teeth marks in them. Hopefully they are ripe enough that I can taste them. I don’t know what to put around my second tree to prevent this from happening. Thoughts?

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Transformation

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This past weekend we went away to visit Neil’s parents. I picked some queen anne’s lace to bring back for our caterpillar to munch on. Lindsay and I looked and looked for it, but couldn’t find it. I was worried it had gone the way of it’s sibling, but then I spotted it.

You can see the little bungee cord threads it spun to secure itself to the parsley plant. These caterpillars can make either a brown or a green chrysalis depending on what plant they choose to latch onto. I think the green is prettier than the brown.

I’m really looking forward to seeing this little critter hatch (or eclose). We’re going away in the middle of August, so fingers crossed it will do it sooner. Otherwise, I will need someone to pupae sit for us.

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Eastern Black Swallowtail

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Last week we got fennel as part of our CSA share. I made a yummy shaved fennel salad with a lemon dressing and tossed the ferny tops into my chicken scrap tub. When I went to take the greens out to the chickens I noticed 2 interesting caterpillars munching away. Upon checking the internet (what caterpillars are on my fennel?) I found out that they were Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars. I found this site to be particularly helpful.

I thought it would be a fun project to raise our caterpillars indoors. Besides fennel, they like anything related to carrots, such as parsley and queen anne’s lace. I pulled a parsley plant out of my garden, stuck it in a pot and laid the fennel greens on top of it. I also borrowed a Butterfly Garden enclosure to contain the critters. They really move around when you aren’t looking. I had a funny moment when I was looking at my parsley plants outside and thinking about these beautiful, exotic caterpillars that would *never* live in Brooklyn. Well, there was one sitting right on top of my parsley plant. I decided to leave that one in the great outdoors and concentrate on the 2 I had. After a day, one had doubled in size and the other one died.

The one we have left, which we affectionately refer to as chubby, keeps doubling in size and eating up a storm. I added carrot tops to the enclosure and it seems to be thriving. Here’s a video of the little guy munching away on the parsley. I shot still frames and made a kind of time-lapse video. It only took about a minute for him to eat all those leaves!

I can’t wait to see it transform! My sister raised some Anise Swallowtails in her garden. You can read about them in her blog here.

Black Swallowtail Caterpillar from Martha Lazar on Vimeo.

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