insects

garden log : insects

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Male Polyphemus Moth in our backyard.

This has been a great summer for sighting large insects in our backyard! I can’t take too much credit, as they’re attracted to food sources already present that I simply leave alone. The cicada killers love our yard, possibly more so than other sandy-soiled backyards in our town because I don’t use pesticides on our lawn which makes the ground a friendly habitat for them to make their burrows. I imagine they can find cicadas pretty much anywhere, but clean ground is more rare out here in the suburbs. We’ve had several swooping around our backyard these past couple of weeks, and little hills of dirt are starting to pop up. Not to be confused with the mole mounds that are also appearing, although I’m now wondering if some of last year’s hills that I attributed to the mole were actually from the wasps. For the first time this year I also spotted dragonflies in our yard, which tells you how bad the mosquitoes have been around here. Not just in our yard: on a recent walk through the town park, I saw at least a dozen dragonflies and damselflies swooping over the grass.

The most exciting find, however, was something totally new. Yesterday, the contractor who’s repairing our rear wall alerted me to the presence of a male Polyphemus Moth outside on his scaffolding. While I’ve heard all about these giant moths that don’t eat and die shortly after breeding — the Luna Moth being the most celebrated — I’d never seen one before. I can see why people get so excited about them: they are so cool! Besides being as big as my hand, the predator wing-snap reflex is something else. One small twitch of a neighboring leaf as I tried to get a better photo, and BANG out come the wings with the little cat eyes staring right at me.

This is the second insect I’ve seen this year that prefers sassafras for food. We have a small sassafras tree on the south side of our house, and two saplings springing up next to it. Sadly, the sassafras is in the area that might have to go the way of a dead tree if we decide to do exterior waterproofing work around our house. For now, though, it’s apparently providing habitat for not just an enormous moth but the Spicebush Swallowtail, several of which I’ve seen in our yard this year. The moth apparently also enjoys quince leaves, so it’s possible it was hanging out in the small grove of those this summer.

Besides these exciting newcomers, we have a gazillion crickets in the lawn, which means I am constantly startling little flocks of sparrows up out of the grass when I go outside. The odd Jiminy-type cricket makes its way into the basement — by which I mean LARGE — and when that happens we rescue it from the risk of the glue-traps (set out for the completely squicky camel crickets to meet their slow dooms) and toss it back into the lawn for the birds. Speaking of birds, having sprayed for the Eastern Tent Caterpillars this year, the cherry trees were healthy enough to actually set fruit, and we have loads of birds munching away in the heights. All of which assures me that I am providing plentiful food sources even with the discontinuation of my bird feeders following our various rat and cat problems.

garden log : insects

garden log : rain rain rain

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The front daylily bed, exploding with growth.


Aster at the end of the front bed, looking like it might actually get bushy this year.

It’s been raining! This is a good thing, both for the new shrubs and the region as a whole. Coming from farmland, I’m always appreciative of the rain, but this year more than ever after last year’s drought. The rain and other commitments have kept me from charging full speed ahead on the yard. I’ve mown the lawn, but it’s mostly been a sit-back-and-watch-things-grow sort of week. I’m glad to see the aster coming up so lushly, as it’s been quite scruffy for the past two years. It’s susceptible to pests, but it’s been hard to tell how what was a pest and what was simple lack of water; my philosophy on yard plantings has been ‘survive or die with the water that falls from the sky’ which meant that last year was hard on a lot of things. This year, though, they all seem to be recovering pretty well, so we’ll see how it goes.


The pink azalea at the side of the house coming into bloom.

Azaleas are extremely popular in this area, for reasons which no one has quite been able to explain to my satisfaction. I understand that there are native varieties, but it’s not clear to me which those are. At any rate, our yard included fewer azaleas than most when we acquired it—only two—and I’ve been trying to keep them alive. Knowing absolutely nothing about azaleas, this has been a bit of a challenge. As with everything else in the yard, they were quite scraggly when we moved in. Following the advice of one of my many ‘help me, I know nothing about flowers!’ books, I pruned them back relatively hard last year before they bloomed. They both did bloom, the white one in the front foundation bed and the pink one around the corner of the house. With last year’s drought and the warm winter that caused them to put out buds in February, which all promptly died in March’s freezing weather, they didn’t exactly fill in as much as I’d hoped. I’ve been on the verge of fertilizing the front one for weeks, as it was yellowed and half-dead looking, but the rain seems to have revived it. It’s not likely to bloom this year, but it’s putting out fresh green leaves and perking up quite a bit, so I’ll hold off on the fertilizer for now. I have no objections to fertilizer, I just haven’t cleared and mulched that bed yet, so I wasn’t relishing clearing away the leaf muck to properly apply the HollyTone. If we have a similar winter next year, I’ll get organized to treat it a bit next spring. I promise.


The self-seeding poppy bed just starting to come into bloom.

One of the areas of the yard that’s thriving from neglect is the poppy patch adjacent to our back walk. Each year I’ve let it go to seed and avoided mowing the sprouts as they come up in the spring, and each year I’ve been rewarded with a nice bright patch of poppies. I see no reason to keep them from doing their thing when there is so much else to be done in the yard. At some future point I figure that I’ll just pull them out before they set seeds if I don’t want them. In the meantime, they’re cheery and not hurting anything so there they stay. It appears likely that the bluebells, which are also in full bloom, will remain where they are at least until the autumn (note to self: mark their location with a little flag thingy so that you can dig up the bulbs and move them).


The crocus bed: humus-enriched, mulched, and edged.

In terms of my own labor in the yard this week, I did very little. I mowed the (front) lawn. I hired the tree people to spray bacteria on the Eastern tent caterpillar nest, which seems to have been successful as we’ve seen little caterpillar corpses on the back walk (not that I’ve been looking too closely). I pulled up dandelions by the dozens—some before they went to seed, even!—although still not nearly enough to keep them from cropping up again, especially given their prevalence through the whole block. And, I edged the new bulb bed with bricks to keep everything from running away down the sidewalk, added an inch or so of (store-bought) humus, and covered the whole thing with pine bark chips (my mulch of choice). I hold out absolutely no hope of getting any blooms in there this year, but instead am eagerly waiting to see what survives until next spring and what kind of flowers I might get then. To that end I’m just letting the scruffy greens do their photosynthesizing energy-storing thing.

My goals for May remain the same: weed, mulch, and remember that it doesn’t all have to get done right now.

garden log : rain rain rain

garden log : new composter & blooms a’bloomin

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Bloomin’ quince.

With the official coming of spring, plants are bursting into bloom all over the yard. The flowering quince has been in full bloom all week, joined yesterday by the forsythia and the opening of the daffodils. The flowers were a nice reward for the work I’d put into clearing the beds, and I was pleased to see that a liberal sprinkling of cayenne pepper was successful in blocking the attempts of the squirrels to dig to China and treat the crocus bed as a lunch buffet.

The outdoor work of this past week was decidedly less appealing than the flower rescue of the week before. We pruned the Eastern tent caterpillar egg sacs out of the small cherry tree, only just ahead of the appearance of the caterpillars themselves. I am loathe to have the trees sprayed, but the caterpillars really creep me out. If there are nearly as many as there were last year I may go that route. We also discovered that at least one of the cherry trees is diseased; I’m going to have our arborist advise us on whether it will recover or if we should think about just having it removed.

Our other main project was cutting deadwood out of the large quinces and cherry trees that form the north property border. While we were there we—and by ‘we’ I mean my partner—wrestled a six-foot high ‘stump’ covered in ivy out of the back corner of our neighbor’s yard. When we moved in the upper half of the ivy-covered trunk of this dearly departed tree had fallen and landed on our garage, held in the air by the vines. Having cut it free and wrestled it to the ground the first year we were here, we had some idea of what removing the stump would entail. Thankfully, the public works employees in our town are wonderful, and they took the whole thing away without us having to saw it into smaller bits. Earlier in the week I’d cut down three saplings that were crowding the larger trees, and they also took those trunks without a problem.


Our new double-barreled tumbling composter.

The other big development in the garden this week was the arrival and assembly of our new tumbling composter. I’ve always wanted to compost, having become fascinated with the process as a young child, and I persuaded my partner that it would be both possible and financially advantageous to do so in our small suburban yard. In selecting a composter, I was concerned with minimizing animal access and being able to do the manual work of turning the compost myself; he was concerned with odors and having an overly visible contraption that made us the laughingstock of the block. The selection that best met most of our needs was the Mantis ComposTwin, a high-tech tumbler that cost the most upfront but seemed most likely to be workable for us in the long-term. To address the visibility and mocking concerns, we chose to place it under a tree and behind the neighbor’s bush, on the south side of the yard. Because it’s contained and aided by ‘composting agents,’ I’m hoping that the relative lack of sun won’t impede the composting process; it will be a few weeks before we are able to fill the drum and find out if it will actually make compost.

At any rate, it arrived on Monday, in three large and heavy boxes, and a friend came over that evening to help us put it together. Yes, that means we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by assembling a contraption into which one places food scraps to rot. Now you understand my life. The assembly process took us about three hours, with a break in the middle for dinner. We quickly lost the light, so after assembling the frame outdoors we moved to the foyer and front porch to assemble the drum. There was quite a bit of pushing and pulling and cursing, so I highly recommend having at least two people to assemble this beast. Once together, we placed it on its frame and threw in an inaugural mix of leaves and kitchen scraps, in the backyard in the dark. And then we had some beers.

Next up: pruning the deadwood out of the neighbor’s dogwood and weeping cherry that border the north side of our yard. I also plan to cut down another sapling that’s grown up right next to the maple’s trunk. And, of course, there’s always more lirope to kill.

garden log : new composter & blooms a’bloomin

new life birds & hatchling turtles at the pond

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Today was another beautiful day at the pond. I went around midday this time, and saw three more life birds! This is the first time I’ve actively tried to catch species on their spring migration, and so far I have to say it’s been well worth the effort.

Before I reached the pond, I saw a Baltimore Oriole, in the neighborhood about two blocks from the park. This time there was no mistaking its bright orange plumage, especially after seeing the more rust-colored Orchard Oriole the other day.

Once I arrived at the pond, I found the Yellow-billed Cuckoo still hanging around in the trees that were dripping Eastern Tent Caterpillars. This time I got a good look at its distinctive tail (not that there was any confusion, with its equally distinctive beak). I also saw a couple of Cliff Swallows dashing around, which I’ve only seen once before, at a barn in Dexter, MI. They’re relatively distinctive, though, with their dark square tails and light bellies.

About halfway around the pond I accidentally flushed an American Bittern. At least, I think it was a bittern; I peered at it from the other side of the pond, but it was pretty well into the reeds. Its head looked like a bittern, but the coloring could have also made it an immature Green Heron. I’ll look for it again and hopefully get a firmer ID one way or the other.

Back at the pond entrance, I spotted a couple of swallows on the electrical wires, which turned out to be Rough-winged Swallows. At first I thought they were just the Cliff Swallows at rest, and nearly didn’t look at them through the binoculars. I’m glad I did, though, as they had the distinctive dusty color and forked tail.

Besides the birds, I saw a decent selection of the turtles that appear at the pond. Just after discovering the wader, I spotted a hatchling turtle swimming around near the bank. I couldn’t resist plucking it out and taking some photos of it. It was a Red-eared Slider, a lovely little pastel green color. After photographing it and showing it to the two other people who passed by, I plopped it back into the water, where it promptly swam away into the mud.

I also saw at least one adult Eastern Redbelly Turtle, along with several Painted Turtles and Red-eared Sliders. As an aside, I hadn’t realized that Mud Turtles were so small; the ones I thought were Mud Turtles last fall were likely actually Eastern Redbelly Turtles, and the ones I thought were juveniles were likely actually the Mud Turtles.

new life birds & hatchling turtles at the pond

killing caterpillars, and other less than pleasant garden duties

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In general, I try to take the ‘live and let live’ approach to insects outside (mosquitoes being the obvious exception). Eastern tent caterpillars really creep me out, though. I don’t like the way they fall from the trees; even if they don’t fall on me, they make a disturbing plopping sound when they hit the ground plants. I especially don’t like the way that, no matter what I do, I invariably end up stepping on them (which is gross) because they are around in such abundance. Unfortunately for me, we have in our yard several cherry trees of the variety they love to eat. Which means, nests busting out all over the place.

This year, I decided to just bite the bullet, alienate my insect-protecting friends, and kill as many of them as I can before they mature. It seems less cruel to smash a nest full of itty bitty little caterpillars than run around stepping on them when they’re full grown. But that’s really just a post-hoc justification: I want as few of them around as possible, and killing them in the nests is the most effective way to make that happen (given that I neglected to try to seek out and remove the eggs during the winter; I’ll try that next year). I hope that if I remove the tents I can reach, my feathered friends will help by eating as many as they possibly can as they mature.

At any rate, we started that last night, pulling down (and in some cases pruning out) the limbs with tents we could reach with a ladder. Although it’s not the recommended approach, we burned the webbing and then pulled the mass out of the trees. I’m torn on whether to just cut back the limbs that are infested; one of the trees (the smallest and youngest) is close to the garage, and there’s a goodly chance it will need to be taken out when we repair the foundation. It’s tempting to just take it out now and be done with the caterpillar issue there, but it’s a nice little tree and I’m fond of it. Besides the creeping me out factor, I hate to see the caterpillars decimate the trees (even though I know intellectually that it doesn’t create long-term harm, as the trees generally refoliate without issue).

The caterpillar killing came at the end of a day of digging up onion grass (another exception to my general ‘live and let live’ approach, as it stings my eyes when I mow the lawn) and pruning deadwood out of the dogwood (I’m a bit concerned that the dogwood might be struggling with a fungus; a smaller one in our yard died off completely last year and will be the next thing we work on taking out). This year’s garden work seems to be clustering up around the theme of ‘remove all the stuff that’s died off or invaded due to years of neglect by the previous owners,’ with a sprinkling of ‘move plants that are in the completely wrong environment to a different part of the yard where they will get the sun (or lack thereof) that they need’ thrown in to keep things interesting.

Which is all to say, check back in a few years for photos of things actually growing: we’re not quite there yet.

killing caterpillars, and other less than pleasant garden duties