Eggs, fresh off the lawn

Continuing with the eat local theme, thought I'd share how the first eggs from our spring chickens were enjoyed.

This is the contents of only 6 eggs from our young hens.  Count the yolks.  I actually cracked 6 eggs and three of them were twins!  And none of these was a normal sized egg - young hens lay small eggs when they first start out.  Only fitting, they're not yet full size hens.  But to see so many twins?!

These eggs were scrambled, seasoned with cracked black pepper, salt, garlic, tarragon, and smoked spanish paprika.  I believe there may also have been some cheese involved, but I don't remember what cheese.  Likely something aged and slightly ripe.  They were then fried up in a generous amount of butter on an iron skillet, and served with carrots and kale from the garden, as well as a generous slab of heirloom tomato from the local market, all piled on a gluten free rice tortilla.

mmmm....  After taking the picture I decided it needed a little dijon mustard too.  I like the Annie's dijon - a little saucy, but not overly horseradish-y flavored.

Eat Local Challenge

No posts for months and two in one day?  Yeah, I know, sorry about that.
This one has a community type motive.  My friend JoannaSpring over at Knit Spin Farm is having her second-annual eat local "Eat-Along".  In this, viewers are challenged to eat something they grew or which was sourced from local farms.  Eating local is supporting your local farmer, a chance to know the source of your food and support small business, a chance to safeguard the foodshed and local knowledge about producing it.  It is many good things.

I'd suggest try to make at least some of every meal local foods.  You might find it is great fun to seek them out.  Find the local farmer's markets, farms which sell direct, pick-your-owns, co-ops and boutiques that sell local products.  Its not just fruits and veggies, either.  There are farms local to me which sell also fantastic honey, eggs from pasture-kept hens (and ducks!  OMG, duck eggs...), cow & goat & sheep dairy, meats of all sorts, herbs and flowers.

For my part, my half-assed garden will provide the bulk of the goods (by volume).  Fortunately for me, kale is easy to grow, and I always sow carrots even if I don't tend them.  I love root crops, harvesting them is like a treasure hunt.

This is a very easy eat-local / eat-from-the-garden.  We have here purple carrots in fresh kale from the garden, with some cheese and leftover sausage (from the grocery).  The dressing contains also fresh thyme and basil from the garden, with balsamic and coconut vinegar, aleppo pepper, black pepper, salt, garlic, ginger, olive oil.  Ta-da!

PS:  I highly recommend using raw kale in place of lettuce for all kinds of purposes.  It never gets gross and soggy, and is very filling.

Praying Mantis babies!

This post is overdue, I took the photos at the end of May.  They still may be educational.

Look closely!  What you are seeing is newly hatched praying mantises on strawberry plants.  They were about a centimeter long.  There are two in the one below, but the second is blurry.  Sorry about that.

I was able to tell they were newly hatched because there were so many among the plants.  Within a day or two after hatching they begin to disperse throughout the area in search of food.  They grow rapidly and reach adult size by the end of summer.  In this area, around September or so they lay their eggs, which are housed in a foamy-looking papery case, usually attached to a twig.  See below.

Be on the lookout for these in your garden while pruning.  If you find one, leave it in place and prune that section the following summer.  You want these guys in your garden.  Not only do they look awesome, but they are predatory insects, making meals of such undesirable things as grasshoppers and stink bugs when larger, as youngsters of course they must select bugs more appropriate to their size.

Predatory insects you should be kind to:

• Lady Bugs and several other tiny round beetle like critters that eat aphids, mealybugs, etc.  Familiarize yourself especially with what young ladybugs look like - nymphs are very different.
• Praying mantis
• Assassin Bugs or Cog Bugs - do look this one up, they are very creepy looking
• Centipedes and Millipedes - I generally want to mash centipedes, but I have personally witnessed them at the hunt, so I tolerate them.
• Spiders of all kinds!  Seriously, spiders are awesome, and contrary to paranoid beliefs of many they are not out to get you.  Do, however, feel free to mash black widow and brown recluse spiders, but familiarize yourself with how they look to prevent unnecessary deaths.

There are many others, of course, and likely you are aware of some or all of these.  But it bears repeating - these will be of assistance to you.  Encouraging them takes time, and pesticides can kill your friends as well as undesirables.  Also meadow and other 'wild' garden spaces provide the territory for them to establish and thrive.  A "well tended" lawn is essentially a desert.

A visitor

Unidentified Crab Spider

This little lady was found laying in wait on some mounted plants.  Due to her color, she is nearly invisible when she is curled up on the back of a piece of cork.  On the front, she is more visible.  I was unable to figure out what species she is, but due to body type and her habit of sitting down and folding her legs up so that she looks like a wee spot of mud on the cork tells me she is a crab spider.  These are hunting spiders, like jumpers, and don't weave webs.  Crab spiders are also often called flower spiders, as many species are colored to blend in well on flowers, and prefer to hide among petals to wait for a chance to catch bugs.

To see more cool bugs and learn about them, I recommend visiting What's That Bug?

I hope she eats stink bugs.

Happy Holidays

Aloe barbadensis (vera)

We like an alternative Christmas tree.  Every year, one or two unlucky plants get pulled for ornament duty.  :)

I believe this to be Aloe barbadensis, or some near similar hybrid.  It came to me without a tag.  Its a large, beastly plant, and I have divided out many pups from it over the years in a vain attempt to manage its size.  The normal blooming season for these would be around early Spring, attracting hummingbirds if it was outside.  However, frequently this guy blooms for me in the late fall, soon after it comes inside.  I assume the sudden change from exposure to temperatures of 45 or 50F (7-10C) overnight to constant 68 (20C) makes it think spring has come early.  That scape is nearly 5 feet high (150cm), but that includes the height of the pot. 

Paph concolor v chlorophyllum

Paph. concolor v. chlorophyllum 'Buttercup'

Responding to an OGD post regarding a request for Paph concolor photos, I dug up what I had to share.  This is a photo of a plant formerly in my collection.

Yes, sadly, formerly.  I lost it when I ended up with a resistant, rampant mealybug infestation in a stand of paphs.  I finally destroyed them rather than continuing to spray, as the best I was able to do was keep it in check.  It was a liability.  So after a couple years of fighting it and keeping the plants isolated, I decided that rather than risk sharing such pests with anyone who got plants from me, I should put everyone who was infected into a black plastic bag.  It still makes me ill to think about it.  I had several very nice things in there.

This, kids, is why some people quarantine newcomers.  I didn't, and I paid for it.

But back to the plant.  Paph concolor is a lovely species, with butter yellow flowers and lovely, thick, crystalline tessellated foliage.  It and things like it really love calcium, and I always thought my success with them was a result of having hard water.  (See?  There is an up-side to hard water.)

The irony of this situation is that this flower smells like pesticide.  Not everyone can pick it up, its faint, and also, easy to mistake for pesticide residue.  However, this plant bloomed *before* the major infestation began, and so nothing else was stinky at the time.

I maintain that a lot of plants have some fragrance and we never hear about it.  People are convinced "Paphiopedilums have no fragrance", so they never check.  But I have come across several that are.  So don't feel silly, sniff every flower to see if you can detect something that someone else missed.

In Bloom: Pumpkin Colors

Three lovely orange flowers, for your enjoyment.

Clivia cyrtanthiflora

Clivia cyrtanthiflora, a natural hybrid between miniata and nobilis.  I don't know if this particular plant is a natural hybrid or a man-made "remake," but the effect is largely the same.  A large, beastly plant, it already has 3 pups, one of which bloomed for the first time this year.  Division of this plant would likely require a hacksaw, the root mas is so solid.  Clivias tend to tell you they want a bigger pot by pushing themselves up out of their current pot an inch or so.

Lc. Jungle Eyes

Lc Jungle Eyes (Jungle Elf x aclandiae) is a compact cattleya bearing thick, spotted flowers heavily influenced by aclandiae, which makes up 75% of it's ancestry (example flower photo shows C. aclandiae). The rest of Jungle Eye's heritage comes from a miniature yellow laelia species, esalqueana. Both species are small, and Jungle Eyes matures at about 6 inches tall.  This is the first of a batch of seedlings to bloom.  Younger plants of the same cross are available here.

S. cernua

Sophronitis cernua is an awesome little miniature plant, popping buds out of a maturing growth as it finishes out its growth.  Its a creeping plant, easiest to manage on a mount due to its habit of hugging its substrate.  They grow perhaps a little brighter than a Phalaenopsis, otherwise similar requirements, but are highly tolerant of lazy watering habits.

Also, a couple orange bugs - some woolly bears I found hiding under an empty pot outside.  They were grouchy about being disturbed, and vacated shortly after this photo was taken.  These are ground-dwelling caterpillars that eat grasses and weeds, and hibernate during the winter, then spin their cocoons in the spring.  Good luck little fellas.