So cool but so ew ew ew

I was pretty excited when I found out the caterpillars returned to our dill plants this year, but even those cool striped creatures pale in comparison with this three-inch-long garden discovery:

I haven't seen anything like it, but I guessed it was one of the tomato hornworm caterpillars I've heard about, since it was on the tomatoes, it's a caterpillar, and it has a little horn. I checked into it, and it's actually the related tobacco hornworm, apparently.

But it's a parasitized tobacco hornworm. That means those white things on its back are wasp eggs, laid in the back of a host caterpillar that will eventually be killed by emerging parasitic wasps!

I probably should just have let it be, but since the caterpillar was still alive, I plucked it off my tomato and moved it across the yard, trying to disturb as few of the eggs as possible. The caterpillar squirmed, and even though I was wearing gloves, I squealed in an enthralled-but-viscerally-disgusted kind of way.

I wonder what my neighbors think if they overheard my gardening pursuits. Meanwhile, Joe and I have been trying to work the word parasitized into our daily conversations. And I should soon have a little squad of defender-wasps protecting my garden in their own parasitic way.

Nature is weird.

About harvest time

Some of our tomato crop

We've finally been harvesting our tomatoes... they make a really great sauce, but are best just fresh from the garden. I think they are better than candy.

I felt like stretching my legs today, so I tried mowing the lawn a bit, but I can't do it very well anymore, so I gave that chore back to Joe pretty quickly.

I look like I've swallowed a basketball.

Very hungry caterpillar

About those caterpillars... I think they may not leave much dill for me and Joe after all.

They look as if they have doubled in size in the last two days. There are seven of them, and though they spend a lot of their time sitting still, a few were eating as I watched today. They can eat well over an inch of dill a minute! At that rate they have totally stripped one of the plants and have moved on to some others.

I think I'll leave them, though, because I like watching them hang from their fat feet almost as much as I like butterflies. Though I told Joe that if we did want to save the dill bed, we could attempt a middle-of-the-night caterpillar transplant to some Queen Anne's lace growing along a house down the street.

Did you know that if an ant crawls along the nose of a caterpillar (because the caterpillar ate the dill flower the ant had been enjoying), the caterpillar will start to shake?

Today I had something like "walk barefoot in the grass" on my to-do list, and I got to cross it off at the end of the day! It was a really nice day.

We have guests

This is not as important as babies, but...

I do believe our dillbed has become home to some black swallowtail caterpillars.

I think it's handsome

I counted about a half-dozen, as well as some skins they left from when they molted! They make beautiful butterflies, and we should still have plenty of dill left over for our cucumber salads.

In other garden news, I had to tear out the squash plant (blossom end rot, augh!), but our tomato and pepper plants are sagging under the weight of ripening fruit.

We also have a pretty flower.

That is our clematis!

Grins

I was going to write about my life, but then I found out that my friend Heather, my heretofore partner in pregnancy, has just today given birth to a beautiful baby girl!

Nothing else seems nearly as important.

And I am now a bit more impatient to meet this baby in me!

Good thing I got some fabric in the mail today. Sewing and planting my spinach bed will at least keep me busy for now.

This is not for the faint of heart

Is it bad that I take comfort in reading about the gardening failures of others?

I think my squash plants have a problem caused by irregular watering and a problem cause by wet weather... at the same time!

Firstfruits

One more happy thing...

We've had some violet leaves to eat, a bit of spinach, and some dill, but today we have something new from the garden:

A squash!

I'm so happy!

It will be dinner!

(If I'd done a better job at all this gardening, we'd have had lots of squash by now. Oh well... we should still have a harvest, if a late one, and I know a lot more for next year!)

Feathering my nest

I think I may be nesting.

So far, I haven't had the near-superhuman bursts of energy that some other mothers say keep them up all night so they can rearrange closets and scrub all their floors with a toothbrush. But this building nervous wanting to do things -- cleaning things, preparing-for-the-baby things -- it is a bit out of the ordinary even for a binge-cleaner like me. I wouldn't mind being able to think a bit less about diapers and things!

Joe and I have been sharing a cold back and forth this week, but things are good overall. Here are a few nice ones:

• The African violet on the dining table and the peace lily in the kitchen are blooming beautifully.
• So is the clematis we just planted in the back yard.
• Digging holes to plant things has become much easier now that I am 30-some pounds heavier. I just stand on the shovel and in it goes!
• I've had a few nice chats with neighbors in the last few days while working outdoors.
• A sweet friend is getting married tomorrow.
• A family in church just had new baby.
• The baby in me moves so much sometimes, Joe has asked whether it's having a party in there!

I thought I knew how to garden

I was talking to my mom about my garden this morning and feeling pretty hopeful. Even though a few of the plants I planted had died, I'd planted other ones in their place and figured I'd learned lessons for next year.

What I forgot was to go out and shade some of my seedlings from the sun. This is not something that's usually necessary, but I didn't get my wimpy seedlings very used to the sun, and they have been frying in it. So I just remembered now and went out to survey any damage.

What I found was half-empty beds. A few seedlings that were doing fine yesterday were gone completely -- and I found their shriveled remnants, uprooted, elsewhere in the garden. One of the strongest ones had its stem snapped - by what? - and it will finish dying in the next few hours. Some others were sun bleached and dead of natural causes, including a couple I planted just yesterday. Just a few look okay.

I'm not sure what happened. What would uproot my plants? I'm going to plant a few more homegrown seedlings this evening and buy some better ones to fill out the beds at the farmer's market on Saturday. And maybe the squash seeds I planted will come up stronger, since they've known nothing but the outdoors.

The blackberries and raspberries are my consolation. They look happy, it seems.

Wowee

Going out to mow the lawn a little while ago, I stopped with my toes at the screen door as a four-foot-long snake slithered past. Eep!

Wildlife doesn't scare me generally, but snakes that big do make my heart pound a bit, especially if I'm not expecting them.

It looked like a black rat snake (that is, black), but I'm really not sure what it was. In any case, it's not poisonous and probably something that will keep the mouse population down a bit, which is fine by me as long as it stays out of the house and preferably out of sight.

In other news, Joe and I have had fun mail and visitors lately, most of them of the non-reptile variety. And most of Joe's big family is coming over for dinner Sunday to celebrate various birthdays. Whee!

Parenting I

Joe and I were at my parents' house on Saturday, taking care of the dog and my grandmother while everyone else was gone. Joe played his guitar while my grandmother listened and I played my kokle, and Vecmamma even played a little herself, just picking at the strings.

In the evening, we went to  Mass near there, like we used to. A tiny little baby was being baptized, and after it received the holy water and the holy oil and the priest was talking about how wonderful it all was, the baby broke out into the most radiant little grin! Those nearby let out little squeals of laughter.

But I think I paid more attention to the  young couple in front of us. Both their toddlers were pretty squirmy, and they kept handing them board books and snacks to try to keep them calm and quiet. The little girl piped up when everyone else was singing, but her "la la la!"s were not nearly on tune as the liturgy, and she kept going even after everyone else was quiet. The father's attempts to shush her were in vain. The mother told their boy to be "quiet as a mouse!" but he didn't really listen, either. Then the boy threw up in the pew and the parents made a hasty cleanup and exit. 

(Note to self: when we go to church with kids, we should bring along something to absorb bodily fluids so we don't have to catch them with our hands.)

I don't really remember the sermon. But I really had a lot to ponder about parenthood, and the baby was kicking besides.

Joe made me stand up with the other mothers to receive a special blessing for Mother's Day coming up. On the way out we got little flowers -- marigolds! Mine is so pretty. I already planted it in a pot outside.

Finding peace

Now my spinach is growing up and the sunny days make me want to find all the outdoor chores I can. Apparently Thomas Jefferson felt a bit of the same way: 

On Jefferson developing the American garden, from The Washington Post

And here is a really interesting article on a man's repentance, also from the Post. What I wonder about the most is his wife and their marriage, which is so little discussed. What would it be like living with a man so full of hate? Why did she? What did she think of it all? 

Personalities

Peter's commentary on our cherry trees blooming so much later than their neighbors: 

"The little girl trees haven't learned what their aunts are doing yet."

They are sweet cherries, by the way. In a year or two, once they are bearing a few fruits, one should have yellow cherries with pink cheeks, and the other should have deep, dark red cherries.

Cherry blossoms

After a few weeks of cherry blossoms all over La Plata, the little treelings in our backyard finally burst their first buds. 

I have meant to write about the cherry trees since Peter came over to help me plant them in the fall. They were wedding presents, and once we had them growing up among the grass in the backyard, the yard started to feel like a place worth being.

Fall is a good time to plant cherry trees, apparently, but was disconcerting to watch them lose their leaves right away. So I was really happy when their buds started swelling a little while ago, and I was really happy when I saw the first white blossoms this morning!

I was going to take pictures of the pioneer buds, but then we had a thunderstorm. By evening, the open blossoms were missing most of their petals. 

So no picture today! But maybe I will have one soon, once a few more of the buds open.

One more thing

I asked the internet how many tomato plants it takes to feed a family. The numbers recommended for a family of four range from 6 plants to 24. Ack.

Dreaming of greening

I've spent much of the morning planning this year's garden. It is not a big yard, but I got down to mapping it out, and there's a lot of plantable space. More than I can probably plant this year, actually! I hear the way to do it is to expand the garden a bit each year, and that does seem the most manageable way, but oh, I wish I could just fill the yard with flowers and fruits and vegetables.

A corner of the yard doesn't drain very well. I'm going to try to see if I can get things together enough to make some raised beds, but it will still be wet underneath. Are there any plants that like such conditions? Other than rice, I mean...?

Ice

Come this morning, the tubs in our kitchen had accumulated a few days worth of fruit skins and vegetable peelings. Normally they would have gone out to the compost bin earlier, but the bin is in the yard's icy patch, where our southern fence blocks sunshine in the winter. Several days after the storm, our bin still looked something like this. 

Coolest compost bin on the block

Well, I finally went out to wrestle with the ice today. A chunk fell off the lid, landed on the ice next to the bin, and shattered into a dozen pieces! Then the pieces slid down the little hill of our yard, making happy twinkling sounds along the way.

You can imagine how the rest of the ice on the lid met its end after that. 

It was really great.