Insects, Plants, Fungi and Animals
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Taste of July
This has been the summer of cucurbits, especially Seminole pumpkin and watermelon which have taken over the organic beds for the season. We are not disappointed, and neither are our birds or the way-too-tame deer that abuses Cactus Island as its personal salad bar. Despite the relentless young buck that thinks I’m playing tag with it when I try to chase it off the property at dusk, Mom is still filling the cornucopia and freezer with an excess of its favorite beans for our enjoyment. She has put in several long shifts baking, freezing or canning our harvest while I tend cactus, but I’ll be helping when the lion’s share…
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Eleven Months from First Flower
Last year’s seed project from my Caribbean tree cactus from Puerto Rico was wildly successful. All those germination trays with tiny green plants kept growing and have been up-potted to plug trays where they’re quickly gaining size and white wool. Some seeds made it around the world and even into a botanical museum in Thailand. With that success and joy comes the challenge and stress of keeping crop pests from eating them. Spring has been all about watering and frequently misting with Bacillus Thuringiensis Kurstakii to control army worms. The loss count is only about 20 out of at least 10,000 so far but still too high for my comfort.…
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More Bugs, Things that Eat Them and One that Would Eat the Observer
More crawlies – not sorry! Here are some unusual living things, mostly from the yard. I’ve never seen such unusual and large sphinx moths, especially the mourning sphinx moth parked on my hand that looks like a weird experimental Soviet aircraft, with those aerodynamic tail fins. And the Tersa sphinx moth has an Art Deco or Iron Man thing going on. Our native grizzled mantis, green anole lizard and toad (probably Southern toad) wouldn’t have turned down these treats, and if I had gotten a little closer to that lounging gator at Payne’s Prairie, I might have become a snack too. Part of me (thankfully whole still) would love seeing…
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The Cactus Tents – Three Videos
Three years since sowing the first seeds and I have a lot to show for the effort. Growth is accelerating after up-potting into 1-3 gallon containers, and I’m finding myself at the edge of being able to walk into a forest of cacti fairly soon. I’d better get some new tunes and audio books because I’m facing three months of straight potting of large and small plants. A mix of Mozart and Motley Crue blasting away under the Hard Nursery will kick things off. I have yet another armada of tropical Caribbean, Mexican, Brazilian and South American seedlings to be decanted from the baggie rigs this week, as I did…
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An Adventure of Growing Madagascar Lace
One of the most exotic and unbelievably beautiful plants in all of Plantae is the Madagascar lace plant. Conspicuous for its lacy, or fenestrated leaf appearance (Latin base word for window – fenestra), Aponogeton Madagascariensis is a fully aquatic bulb plant that is endemic to shallow, cool and shady streams of Madagascar. These monocots begin life as tiny green seeds that form on double flower spikes emerging above water to attract pollinators, dropping into the water and taking hold in the streambed where they slowly grow into bulbs, or more specifically rhizoming corms. If given a chance these eventually form large rosettes of leaves that undulate in the natural current.…
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Signs of Life
Thought Tony the Tortoise (or Toni, if it is a she) – “The buffet is looking a little understocked in this joint, but at least I can cross the drive without worrying about that madman FedEx guy barreling through”. Even the coldest Winter in 25 years here has shown some color and signs of life, often delicious, though much of it wouldn’t be alive if we hadn’t gone to great trouble to protect the delicate things. The sweet potato vines from edge of the Mt. James bed yielded this gnarly monster, and we enjoyed about 25 huge pomelo citrus in November and December. A rare sight, Indian pipe root (Monotropa…
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The Big Freeze
We’d experienced several frosts and a hard freeze even before Winter formally began, with Nov. 30th changing us out from extended Summer conditions to plant-killing anomalous cold blasts. But the last few nights have been a straight dive into the low to mid 20’s with dangerous wind speeds and potential for freezing rain. I wasted no time and went on an expensive shopping spree at Lowes to get a huge roll of 6mil plastic, spring clamps, two more 1500 watt electric milk house heaters, a second Cat 6500 watt generator and a remote temperature sensor. My mom was right out there with me to put up the thick and heavy…
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A Sweet Week
Ma’s new chicken shoes arrived, and the birds each had to strut over to inspect. Style, comfort and cleanliness make tending the coop more enjoyable for everyone. I added to the fun by feeding them a couple of “treat sticks” that had trespassed on our plants. Across the yard at the banana bed, just below the mulch line and attached to sprawling vines was a jumbo yield of sweet potatoes we weren’t expecting the first year. These grow better in enriched sandy soil but put all their growth into leaves and vines, not tubers, when growing in recently built-up composting mulch. Such had been the case twice in Estero, but…
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Lots of spiders and a Few Other “Bugs”
You know, I just LOVE these things. Yuck, you don’t like? Awww, c’mon, it’s Halloween anyway! How about a hand-sized golden silk spider to brighten (frighten) your evening? We’ve got tropical tent spiders, fuzzy spiders, cute lil’ spiders, dotted spiders, huge spiders, green lynx spiders, extra large centipedes, flying ant lions and even a big undertaker beetle (red and black Nicrophorus burying beetle) to make the holiday real. But I did squash the invasive tropical brown widows and their egg clusters hiding in a couple of flower pots before I even thought of whipping out my camera, because the screams would have been deafening if Mom had found them first.…
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Bugs…..again.
But they’re wickedly cool, and everywhere. I archive what I come across as I go each day, stumbling upon interesting insects with a regularity that is unreal. Some encounters, like the predacious wasps dragging their prize kills across the patio, really should come with comical incidental music. Many of the solitary wasps we’re seeing paralyze their prey, drag it to a nearby burrow, lay an egg on it which produces a hungry grub that will eat the host alive as it matures. This is pest control that is downright Medieval. The three rust-colored, horned beetles in the lower photos also drew the short straw, having the misfortune of emerging above…
