Today was the first day I saw any blooms on the Lady Margaret passionflower. They’re lovely!
They’re not as large as some of the varieties, but the color makes up for the size.
The different types ramble along one another… it can be difficult with some of them to tell where one vine ends and another begins. The grape purple one is Passiflora x “incense” – and that one vine that I planted this spring can have 20 flowers on a good day.
For Chris’s birthday, I took him down to central Texas for a skydiving class.
Chris, looking dashing in his jump suit. We tried really hard to get him into the neon-green-and-pink one, but he swore it wouldn’t fit.
Me, looking portly in my jumpsuit, and explaining something with lots of gestures. For some reason, Chris found the gestures hilarious.
… because he kept taking picture after picture. I don’t even remember what I was describing.
Heading to the plane. From left, it’s Matt who was just jumping for the fun of it, James the jumpmaster who was going to help make sure I didn’t die, me, and the pilot. The pilot was SMOKING hot, but I couldn’t find a casual shot of him without looking like a creepy old perv, and you don’t want to creep out the guy who’s going to be flying your plane.
Everything went to plan; I did the scheduled drills in free fall, pulled my pilot chute, the main chute opened, and I flew it down to the right field.
Where I landed, on my butt, quite firmly. I understand that the impact was audible across the field. I was uninjured.
Chris flew his with a little better control than I did; he landed upright, but rolled.
I was so focused on landing without breaking anything, that all my pictures came out with my stern, concentrated look… Chris had a little more fun with his ride.
Overall, it was quite a thrill, and I’d definitely do it again. The only real drawback was that there was a LOT of hurry-up-and-wait… we sat around for hours waiting to go up in the plane. The free-fall portion of the ride seemed amazingly brief, and it was hard to really get a sense of what was happening aside from all the air rushing at me. What I really enjoyed most was the slow descent under canopy, floating along peacefully where I could see all the countryside and feel the chute responding to the toggles as I pulled them.
I felt really bad. For the first time since the bees arrived in April, I walked toward the hive with treason in my heart. I was going to find, and kill, and replace the Queen. The decision had actually been made in June – the queen’s brood pattern was spotty, and the hive wasn’t happy with her.
Last time I opened the hive, there were scattered laying-worker eggs, no open brood, no capped brood… but I did find the queen. It seemed that the queen was experiencing a total failure. I firmed my resolve to re-queen, and ordered a queen from the folks at Bee Weaver. Laura was very helpful, and had lots of good suggestions. She recommended a push-in cage, which became a drama of its own later on.
Packages of bees arrive in a box the size of a shoe box…. queens arrive with half a dozen helpers in a big envelope. Much less threatening to the nice postman!
I had expected the new queen to be marked and clipped – but she was unmarked and entire. I just hope she’s properly mated!
Of course, once I got the hive open, there was brood EVERYWHERE. I think that the Queen had heard my plans for her demise, and was trying to rally the troops. However, there were also two new supersedure cups – the worker bees were still not happy with the queen’s performance. I took those out.
What followed, I didn’t get pictures of. I was working alone, and a lot of it was fiddly, so I couldn’t handle the camera while I was doing it. I sifted through the hive frame by frame, finally finding the dotted queen on the second pass. I removed her and placed her in a jar – just in case something went horribly wrong.
Then, I found a frame which contained some open brood, some capped brood, a few empty cells, and some honey. I brushed it clean of bees, and took it over to the garage to work away from the hive. I had the garage open, so that there was good light – but it was far enough away from thei hive that I didn’t have the attention of the guard bees. I had built the push-in cage from the window-screening that covered the package of bees when I got them this spring. I laid the frame on the trunk of my car, and figured the best location for the push-in queen cage. Now, I had to open the queen’s transfer cage, get the queen out and onto the frame, push the cage over her and down into the comb, and then put her into the hive and close up. I took my gloves and hood off, because it was delicate close work and I needed gentle fingers.
What happened instead, was that I opened the little container carefully… and all of the bees, including the queen, took off flying. See above about the un-clipped wings. After a moment of intense cussing, I calmed down and realized that there was a cloud of bees still hovering around – maybe the queen was still there? I got my little butterfly net. One after the other, I caught bees and put them in a glass jar. Finally, I caught the queen! They’re not all THAT different when they’re flying around, but you can tell once they are sitting down, how the body is longer. So I got the queen onto the frame, got the cage over her, and after much amusing catch-and-accidentally-release, I got one of her court bees in the cage with her. These bees know and follow her scent, and they’ll feed her if the other bees in the new hive don’t like her right away. I was going to try for three, but it just wasn’t going to happen. I went and reassembled the hive with the new queen in her cage, closed up, and mercifully dispatched the old queen.
After closing up, I caught a few more photos in the yard…
A really lovely lynx spider.
Gosh, she’s big.
A baby watermelon, hiding out in a tomato cage.
A tiny peek-a-boo lizard. He was on the other side of the fence, so I had to peep through leaves to see him. The camera didn’t like the focus.
Jeanette, who was advertised as a French Maran, but lays nearly white eggs.
Weezy, who is one of the two Ameraucanas from our original batch of peeps – she isn’t laying yet, but I look forward to eggs soon. They should be green or blue.
And Penny, who really IS a French Maran, has taken to crowing. It’s never a full crow, but it’s very different from her “henny” noises.
One of the reasons that I get really annoyed when people refer to outdoor sericulture as “wildcrafting,” is that I know from wildcrafting… we usually called it “picking blackberries” or “picking wild grapes” in my family, but we have a long history on both sides of going into the wild and coming back with jams and cobblers.
I posted last October about my favorite Passionfruit patch. It’s on a freeway verge, so it’s not really “wilderness,” but with the plants growing there naturally, this is definitely wildcrafting. This past weekend, I saw highway mowers scalping along some of the Dallas highways, and so I decided I needed to make another visit before it gets chopped off to the ground.
Unless you noticed the areas of darker green vines, or saw them when they were in flower, you’d never know they were there. The purple flowers in the foreground are some kind of nightshade relative.
Different view of the same strip. There are vines on both sides of the freeway, but the ones on the far side of the bridge had fewer fruit.
The vines that were in fairly low grass seemed to bear the best and most fruit.
The leaves and tendrils are distinctive.
These fruits are almost ready. If the fruit drops when the vine is lifted up, it’s ready. If it clings to the vine, it’s too green.
The two fruits on the lower right are ripe; the one holding on to the vine is for next week’s harvest.
There are a lot of green, lush vines that get partial shade from the freeway bridge. Unfortunately, they had almost no fruit.
The flower on the wild type vines is lovely, but not terribly showy. I notice them while driving down the freeway, but they’re certainly not eye-catching from a distance.
They’re quite pretty close-to!
Occasionally, lifting up a vine will yield a whole line of fruit ready to go. I love when this happens. It’s like an Easter egg hunt set to “easy.”
Almost two hours of picking yielded fifteen pounds of fruit, enough to fill three plastic grocery sacks.
I looked high and low to find a recipe for jelly, but everything I could find was for tropical passionfruit, Passiflora edulis, and I’m dealing with the American passionfruit, or maypop, Passiflora incarnata. It was really evident when I would find instructions like “slice passionfruit thinly”… anyone who thinks they can slice these things has better knife skills than I do. I finally realized that I needed to search on the colloquial names… “maypop jelly” found a likely-looking recipe pretty quickly.
The best method I found for separating the peels from the pulp and seeds, was to pop the top open…
and squeeze out the guts.
It leaves very little waste.
A kettle full of the pulp and seeds, before cooking.
After a little simmering, they start to lose their shape, and the juice starts to flow. Unfortunately, it’s still a SERIOUS pain in the butt to get the pulp clear from the seeds – it clogs the sieve, and there’s a lot of fussy work with the spoon. The food mill was not helpful, as it tends to crack the seeds and give the whole thing a much different flavor.
I’m withholding my opinion for the moment on the jelly recipe – I made two batches, and they cooked up beautifully, but neither has set. I have read that high-acid jellies and marmalades can take weeks to set, so I’m giving it a little time before I try re-cooking. I can tell you for sure, though, that the flavor is amazing.
This time of year, it’s not just the moths that are getting busy in the garden.
This lovely mantis is starting to show her egg belly – she’ll be laying hundreds of eggs in a tough, resiny casing soon. I have very much enjoyed all the mantises this year!
Charlottte is yolking up, too. She will hopefully lay at least one big case full of eggs; we had one on the back porch at the old house that made three full cases! I’ve been tossing her milkweed bugs, to ensure she has plenty to feed her growing eggs.
The day before yesterday, a lovely female polyphemus moth hatched out, from this June’s rearing. They had been taking so long that I was beginning to worry they would not hatch until spring, but I think they were just waiting for cooler temperatures. I put her in the little suet feeder cage and put her on top of a very tall pole, but she didn’t receive any gentleman callers. Because it was so hot, I put her back inside near a window, and tried again last night.
This is what I saw when I looked out of the garage this morning – success!
The male is hanging on to the outside of the cage, mating with her through the bars.
He’s a big, handsome thing – love the pink-to-purple shading on his wings. They should make pretty babies. When I took the cage down, he flew off to find a place to hide for the day and heal his broken heart before seeking a new romance this evening. I put her into a paper bag, where she will lay her eggs.
And, as I was looking at them, I saw a fluttering in the side yard – my brain said “Swallowtail butterfly,” but it was a late-flying Luna moth! He’s lost some scales, but no wing bits. I tried tossing him up in the air so that he could fly into the woods and avoid being a cat toy – he wasn’t very bright about it, but eventually got over the fence after several tries.
I’ve been getting mulch, bucket by bucket, from a wonderful tree company, Preservation Tree Service. I haven’t hauled any for a while, because it’s just been too hot, but when I was spreading out the sheet mulch early this spring, I was going multiple times per week, sometimes even multiple trips per day. I probably carried 180 or 200 of the little tubs. As we discovered, though, mulch compacts fairly quickly, and, through the wonder of decompostion, it becomes part of the soil. So it seems like we have half the mulch now that we did then.
I had talked to their supervisor, back in May, and he said that as long as I didn’t mind mulch with the occasional log in it, they might be able to dump some at my house, if they were doing a job in the area. I waited, and hoped, and hoped… and nothing happened. I figured they’d lost my number, no big deal, I’ll get more once it cools off. And then Supervisor G calls me this morning – they are clearing some land of cedar trees, it’s 100% cedar mulch, they will have 8 to 12 loads over the course of the next three days. He dumped one load, and said they wanted me to look at it and see if I wanted more. I checked it out at lunch, and found this:
Just at a glance, I think it’s probably about as much in this one pile, as what I carried in my little Saturn Ion this whole Spring.
And it’s GORGEOUS mulch. The whole yard smells like spicy Christmas.
I asked for one more. I’m going to see, tonight, how much of it I can get moved around the yard. If the yard eats it up the way I think it will, I’ll ask for one or two more loads tomorrow.
When we had to take back the three chickens who turned out to be roosters, we went up to Sanger and bought a couple of French Maran hens, one Black Copper and one Blue Copper. We got two eggs when we brought them home, but then the stress of the move affected their laying, and we hadn’t gotten any since. Today, there was a beautiful dark brown egg waiting in the hen house. Yaaay, cool eggs!
I looked at the spider web, and saw something weird hanging in the middle… I thought, “Aww, something killed Charlotte.” But, it turned out, it was something entirely more wonderful.
Charlotte was changing her skin.
The knees are always the hardest part…
And, she’s out.
She hung like this, soft-bodied and vulnerable, until it was too dark for the camera to get a good shot.
The skin is just a pale husk; all the color seems to be in the spider.
So I came back the next day, and got a good picture of her fresh outfit. She moved and built a new web, too, so everything is nice and fresh.
A lot of lovely purple is happening in the garden.
This passionflower, Passiflora x “Incense,” is really coming into its own – it puts out three to five of these spectacular blooms each day.
This is Purple Majesty millet; I was worried that the photo was out of focus, looking at it on the camera, but then I realized that the flower itself has jaggedy edges!
This is a standard Ruellia. It’s about waist-high now, and has usually a dozen or more blooms each day. They fall off by late afternoon, but always put up a fresh crop.
This is a Gulf Fritillary, Agraulis vanillae. I love to watch them – you can’t see it in a still photo, but the white areas on its wings are reflective, like metal.
She’s laying eggs on my passionflowers. Fortunately, the wasp patrol keeps them pretty thoroughly in check. I’m a little sad that I won’t be getting more baby butterflies, but glad there aren’t huge holes in my vine. The caterpillars are voracious, and can strip a vine to stems in just a few days if conditions are just right.
I got one additional chicken, this one a young laying hen; now, we have a total of six. She was advertised as a Black Copper Maran, but I am pretty sure that she’s a mixed breed; she hasn’t got the feathery feet and chocolate-brown eggs of a true Maran. She’s very sweet, though, and has given us a light-beige egg every single day. Meet Jeanette.
When we got the Ameraucana peeps, the guy who sold them to us examined them carefully and did his best to give us only hens, but it’s really hard to tell until you get to about three to four months. After a while, it becomes really, really obvious.
Left: Hen Butt. Right: Rooster Butt.
Taco is fascinated with the chickens.
This posture is the beginning of a crow. I tried to catch one of them doing it on video, but didn’t manage it… it was always a very quick “Cawwwwerrrk.” Almost more of a honk than a crow, or like you would imagine if a rooster cleared its throat.
But this is where it becomes really, really obvious. Like teenage boys, the young cockerels are flooded with aggressive, restless hormones, and they have to figure things out. I LOVE the little stare-off at the start!
