The Wicked White-faced Hornets

White faced hornets build the most amazing homes for themselves! Last year I discovered one in the apple tree by the pond. It was just beautiful, but as I watched the dozens of hornets that were flying in and out of this huge paper nest, I decided to stay clear of it until frost had killed its inhabitants. When at last there appeared to be only a few left buzzing lazily around the entrance I doused the nest with insecticide, cut down the branch it was attached to and carried it up to the guest house.


The walls of the guest house are decorated with lots of odd items - kids’ drawings, ancient tennis racquets, a collection of funny  hats, a polo mallet, old trophies, but nothing as unusual as this architectural marvel with its sculpted paper walls, so I hung its branch from a beam.

Had I known about the life cycle of these insects, I would have sprayed their nest with insecticide when I first found it.   No, if you're thinking the guest house later became infested with hornets, you're wrong.  Fortunately that did not happen. When I began reading about the royal queen and her workers however,  I realized my mistake. Each autumn up to twenty new queens are hatched  and by the following spring every one of them starts to build a new nest. So thanks to those industrious queens, there were three big fat nests in the yard this summer.

You’d think being a queen would result in a life of luxury, but that is not the case if you’re a hornet queen. When these ladies come out of hybernation in the spring they immediately starts building those amazing nests, and there’s no one around to help them. Each queen first makes a thick stalk that will hold the nest to a limb, then she creates what looks like a honeycomb about the size of an egg. She encloses it with two or three layers of paper which she makes by mixing chewed wood fibers with her saliva. Then she lays her first eggs in the cells of this little bedroom. They will hatch in approximately a week.


But there's no rest for the weary. The queen must feed these newborns,  not an easy job as they need a mash made up of finely chewed insects. Fortunately in less than two weeks the larvae are ready to pupate, and they spin their own cocoons. When they emerge, the queen finally has some help, for these hatched hornets are her workers, ready to enlarge the nest and provide her with a bigger bedroom full of cells so she can lay many more eggs, increasing the colony.

Toward the end of summer the workers instinctively know it’s time to build a few bigger better cells. How the workers know that these cells will be filled with future queens is Mother Nature’s secret, but the workers treat the larvae in them with extra care.  They supply them with large quantities of food so they'll grow strong, for they will be the only hornets to survive through the coming winter. By the time of the first frost, the old queen and all her workers are dead and their amazing home has disintegrated.



Unfortunately I didn't learn about all those healthy new queens until I started my research for this column. If I'd known I would have picked a dark summer night, donned some seriously protective clothing, and armed with insecticide, headed out to the three hornet nests. But it was too late.  The nests were gone and the new queens were safely hybernating underground.

Having read on the Internet that the stings of white-faced hornets can be deadly and one should hire a professional to exterminate them, I guess I'm glad I didn't try to tackle the job myself.  So next spring probably   half the trees on the property will be sporting new hornet nests. Oh, well, at least I got a column out of it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in the 1800s

                                               

                I hope you're all looking forward to a delicious Thanksgiving. Lots of turkey? Pumpkin pie? The Thanksgiving menu has been a tradition for so many years that I was really surprised to learn what was on the table at the first Thanksgiving. Reading in my tattered copy of Facts for Farmers, "A compost of rich materials for all Land-owners" published in 1866, I found that the Pilgrims did indeed have turkey, but I doubt it resembled the plump tender bird we enjoy. Most likely it was all dark meat and as tough as the acorns it had eaten.

The Pilgrims often cooked this less than scrumptious fowl in a "coffin." The term refers to neither a casket nor an oven, but a pie shell, sometimes edible, sometimes not. The bird was boned and stuck with cloves, well-larded, then sealed in the coffin with the breast downward. Although the word "vegetable" was not yet in use, there were edible plants on the table. They were called sallets or potherbs, and most were so unpopular they were rarely mentioned.

Turnips were boiled and then added to the stewed broth of the turkey along with chopped herbs - parsley, thyme, chervil and a bay leaf. Onions were often creamed as they are today, but the sauce was thickened with an egg yolk rather than flour, and seasoned with raisins, coursely ground pepper, sugar and salt. The corn grown by the Pilgrims and local indians was a flint variety - nothing like the sweet corn of today. Celery was unknown and only botanists knew about potatoes.

We like to think there would have been cider at that first Thanksgiving feast, but the newly planted apple trees were not yet bearing. Cranberries might have been used in "puddings in the belly" what we call stuffing, but sugar was too scarce to make jelly or preserves. There was no Indian pudding because, although there were plenty of Indians, there was no molasses.

There was probably pumpkin pie, but more likely it was made with squash. The most popular squash in Colonial times was an egg-shaped variety called Boston Marrow, which had a thin, salmon-colored rind and fine-grained orange flesh. I'm afraid my squash and pumpkin pie fillings come from a can nowadays and contain plenty of sugar.

In a different section of Facts for Farmers called "How eating affects the Health" I read the following - "To meet at table, father, mother, children, all well, ought to be a happiness to any heart. Let joy pervade your meals. Let this excellent advice be followed universally, and we shall hear less about dyspepsia."

What makes Thanksgiving delicious is not the food but the gathering of family and friends. Enjoy your turkey and be thankful the menu doesn't include much of the above. 

The Lowly Lichens

                                                            Clover                         Gottoo

Ah, we just got another Indian summer day. There’s no way I can stay in the house when November’s temperatures get into the 60s, so Clover and Gottoo, who are always begging to take a walk, and I, took a long beautiful walk up to the cow pasture and beyond. The pasture was at its most appealing, close-cropped and smooth except for rocks and a scattering of barberry bushes to add a touch of red here and there. The pussytoes lay perfectly flat against the ground, their leaves silver rosettes. The mosses were greener than the grass, showing off their myriad shapes and textures with no need to compete with taller vegetation.

The most prominent plants at this time of year, however, are the lichens. These unusual plants form a symbiotic partnership between a fungus and an alga. It's a very happy marriage as the fungus shares his house with the alga, who provides the food for the two of them. Neither partner has roots, stems, leaves or flowers, but a fungus doesn't even have chlorophyll, so he's delighted to give shelter to the algae who do.

The gray-green lace doilies growing on our pasture rocks are lichens. Reindeer moss, the wiry clumps of pastel green growing in open spaces in the woods, is another. The algae who live in these houses are often single-celled like the green scum found in stagnant ponds. Old man's beard (not to be confused with Spanish moss which is a flowering plant of the pineapple family) drips down in long flowing streams from the branches of trees in damp forests.Some of the most appealing lichens, British soldiers, also known as red cap moss, and fairy cups, are species of Claydonia.

                                              British Soldiers                           Fairy Cups

Lichens, though low on the totem pole of plants, have a pretty important job. They're the pioneers who build soil. Because they need no soil themselves, they can exist in inhospitable places, in arctic wastes and dry deserts and on bare cliffs. Their powerful acids eventually etch tiny cracks in a rock, loosening particles to let in the frost which disintegrates the rock further. In death the lichens' decayed bodies contribute additional material for higher level plants, mosses and ferns, to grow in.

Because most lichens contain strong acids, they're extremely bitter, but there are a few species that can be eaten. Even though reindeer moss isn't very tasty, moose and reindeer often make a meal of it. The "manna" eaten by the Israelites in ancient times was most likely one of the lichens.

I brought home several  lichen varieties from our walk to see if I could identify them. I got out The Lichen Book by G.G. Nearing, a book I'd never looked at since the day I received it as a birthday gift 39 years ago.  No wonder. The most necessary tool of a lichen lover is a microscope. I had no luck identifying my specimens, but I did have fun studying all the picturesque names - Pink Earth lichen, funnel lichen, mealy goblet, stringy name, rabbit, lemon, bristly, dark blister.

I then spent several hours playing around with my photo software making a picture to go with the following poem, one I wrote back in the days when I talked and sang about plants to school children.






Do you believe in fairies, who dwell within the wood?

They're very real, I promise you, and if you don't you should.

They have their parties with the moon when people are abed

They laugh and sing and drink the dew, the mushrooms are their bread.

But when the round and honest sun peeks o'er the hills at dawn

He find a field of sleepy cows, for all the elves have gone.

But once he caught them unaware - they'd had a rowdy night.

Their tiny gray-green drinking cups were scattered left and right.

And some had left their red wool caps behind among the moss.

When they got back to fairyland I'm sure the queen was cross.

So do believe in fairytales and never doubt yourselves,

Though all you'll find will be the signs, and not the elves themselves.

Tribute to the Sun

         

Oh, dear, the end of Daylight Saving always makes me feel as gloomy as a kid sent to bed without dessert. How bleak and colorless my perennial border looks as we say farewell to summer. I think I'm one of those people who go into a decline when deprived of sunlight. I've never been diagnosed with the syndrome known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (its wonderfully appropriate acronym is SAD) but supposedly it can be cured by sitting in front of fluorescent light tubes which emit the full spectrum of light found in sunshine.

I'm too cheap to buy one of these sun boxes, but by December 26th, the day with the year's least sunlight, I always wish I had. In January the sun's rays offer us nothing but bleak cheerless light as cold as moonlight, and by February that golden globe in the sky isn't much better, too weak to defrost an icicle. Finally things begin to look up in March. Even with temperatures hovering in the teens, the sun takes on the characteristics of a good kindergarten teacher, preparing the ground for spring growth, waking up the pussy willows, luring snowdrops into bloom and convincing masses of scilla to paint the landscape in a sea of blue.



                                   


Mother Nature and her sun perform all these miracles. Even those drab little gray birds that argue with each other at the thistle feeder all winter are magically turning back into goldfinches. I don't see how they manage that, do you? Are their feathers getting a sort of sunburn as spring returns, the way we humans get a tan as we work outside?

By summer the sun is not so benign. It can blister and shrivel anything it sets its eye on. Unprotected plants wither as it sucks moisture from their leaves and dries out the soil around their roots. In autumn the sun loses its power quickly, but because the earth has absorbed its heat for many months, it takes a suprising amount of time to lose it.

The sun is as vital an ingredient in making a garden as thread is in sewing a slipcover. Whether you're growing perennials, annuals, vegetables, shade-loving wildflowers or heat-loving cacti, you need sunlight. When you start planning next year's gardens, think about how and where and when the sun's rays will fall. Trees and shrubs that are too close on either the east or west side of a garden will create much longer shadows than those on the north or south.

The closer land is to the equator, the more vertical will be the light falling on the land. In the tropics where the sun shines down from directly overhead and vanishes in seconds at the end of the day, its light offers a dazzling brightness. It is often so brilliant that it destroys colors, turning the sky white and plants into mere black silhouettes. Such vertical sunlight creates small dark pools of shade beneath trees and shrubs, and highlights all perpendicular surfaces, sparkles the waves on water and accents the shadowed crevices in stone walls.

Our summer sunlight in New England comes from closer to the horizon, offering a more angled light. Even on June 21st, when the sun reaches its highest point in crossing the sky, its angle over New England is nowhere near 90 degrees. It's only about 45. As the sun reaches the equinox, its angle is even more acute, and by the winter solstice, a mere sliver. The shadows of our locust trees stretch all the way across the sheep pasture as we head into winter.

Before planting a landscape, it makes sense to think about the affects of sunlight and shadow on the area. When the air is moist, the sun gives a soft, filtering light which picks out the details and colors of plants. It creates patterns of foliage and slowly lengthening shadows as evening falls, and offers backlighting as it moves across the sky.

Sunlight can make an area warm and cheerful or dry and withering. It will turn the water in a birdbath silver or black, put diamond sparkles into the ripples of moving water. Lack of sunshine can mean a cool retreat or a dark cold corner. Having a sheltered spot which stays shady through the hot summer is as important as having one that is protected from wind and receives sunlight all winter. I wish I had a warm protected spot like that to cheer up the months ahead. Alas, the winter wind usually blows wickedly on Locust Hill.



                                  


Dear me! I didn't mean to write such a cheerless column. I wouldn't dream of moving to a warmer climate. I love the changing seasons and the infinite variety of New England's weather. The January thaw is such a treat, and seeing the soft pink of quince, one of the first harbingers of April. I don’t mind the August heat when the sweat runs into my eyes as I work in the garden, and of course who couldn’t love the fantastic display of colors as Autumn turns the leaves and gives us that little reprieve of Indian Summer. I even like the purity of a blanket of snow covering the earth when I curl up with the latest seed catalogs.

Lots of good things happen in New England, don’t they?

Quack Grass - Not for Ducks

                                       

     Believe it or not, the photo above is what my asparagus bed looked like this spring - a nightmare of very healthy quack grass. It was so thick that I couldn't find any asparagus until the stalks became inedible ferny little trees. The two raspberry beds looked equally horrible, another sea of quack grass.
     We planted both the asparagus and the raspberries in 1982 and for almost 30 years we mulched them with hay bales each fall. In early spring when I harvested the asparagus, I would pull the few bits of quack grass which appeared. This year the sight of all that wretched grass filling the beds was as upsetting as discovering a dozen snakes in the compost pile. How was I going to get rid of that grass without killing my lovely asparagus and raspberry bushes?
     I like to think of myself as an organic gardener, and do not like using chemicals, but I"m no purist and am willing to make exceptions when there's no alternative. Nowadays there are dozens of chemical products on the market to help gardeners solve vegetation problems, many of them selective, which means they only kill specific types of vegetation.
     Since we have a major problem with multiflora roses in our pastures, we use Crossbow, which kills these thorny monsters without harming the grass beneath them. Grass-be-Gone is another selective chemical, which obviously kills grass, but does not harm broad-leaved vegetation. GroundClear is a chemical used on driveways or similar areas that kills everything in sight and out of sight, as it poisons the soil and all vegetation for up to a year. Round-up is a systemic that is applied to undersirable vegetation. It travels down from the sprayed plant and kills the root but does not poison the soil.
     Quack grass, like a dozen other types of vegetation, clearly adored the combination of warmth and rain that spurred their growth these last two years. Being totally ignorant of how to solve the problem, I took the photo of my aspargus bed and went to see Crop Production Services in Amenia, NY. , the outfit that sells us Crossbow. They were extremely helpful, giving me explicit directions on how to treat the asparagus bed.
     "In the fall when the aspargus has finished growing, mow down the bed. When the new quack grass appears, spray the entire bed with Round-up, the systemic poison that kills whatever vegetation it covers by traveling down to the roots, but does not harm the soil. Just make sure all the asparagus is gone."
     And the raspberry beds? I actually was so concerned about the asparagus, I forgot to ask, but as the summer progressed the quack grass in the raspberries began to look very thick and healthy, and the raspberries started looking sick.
     Raspberries are biennials. Their first year they just come up. The second year they bloom, have berries and die. These dead stalks should be removed and only two or three new young stalks should be left on each plant. Since I couldn't do anything about the asparagus until late Stepember at the earliest, I decided to tackle the first raspberry bed at the end of August. I uprooted huge hunks of quack grass and old hay and cut down the summer's dead raspberry canes, filling the pick-up truck to overflowering 3 times.
     It was an exhausting job and I wasn't done. Within a week green blades of quack grass began to appear. I sprayed them with Round-up, carefully protecting the raspberries. I did this once a week. Then my wonderful yard man, Steve, brought a truckload of wood chips from the town dump and spread them on the bed.

                                      

     By the time we were done I just couldn't face the second bed. Why did I need two beds anyway? Steve took the cycle bar mower and cut down all the raspberries in the second bed. Then I took a trowel and dug up all their roots. Then I weeded, raked, seeded the bed with nice grass seed, watered and took a picture! There's no sign of new grass yet, but I plan to save the rest of this story for sometime next spring, including the success or failure of the asparagus bed.