During the Lubbock years, mom grew a lot of dill. I don’t recall her ever using it, but I do remember her saying that she mainly grew it for the swallowtail butterflies, as they had a preference for it. I still remember those beautiful little creatures and their iconic striped larvae.
So I’m naturally pleased whenever I see them now. They had a fondness of my garden a few years back.
A female Palilio polyxenes
Recently, as I went to harvest some dill for my pickling endeavor, I noticed one of these little caterpillars, so permanently etched into memory.
But, despite me actively using the dill, he can stay.
A month ago, we had picked up some old wooden boxes for a strawberry garden. My own experience with strawberries generally went like this: I would plant some plants, watch hopefully as some berries grew, then collapsed in despair as the day they ripen an insect had beat me to them. But Liz was hopeful.
And her hopes were not dashed upon the rocks. This last weekend I was tending to my garden and saw these (tasty):
Aside from the Japanese beetles, the bugs have been rather merciful to our produce. In light of these successes, garden expansion plans are in discussion.
Time and chance have yielded again some pleasing aesthetic fragments:
I took a photo of this vista only to realize that the auto-focus had chosen the screen, but it had the interesting effect of making the photo to look like a paintingLiz snapped this photo of some firework fun–it made a nice silhouetteI don’t know why this one leaf was curled, but I examined it a rather long timeThis dalia, rejected and thrown into the reduced bin, then nipped by frost, has recovered quite nicelyAfter a storm, I found this nasturtium leaf with a single bead of water, catching the sun
This is the Year of the Cucumber. And because of this bonanza, I needed to do something with all the extras. One family can only eat so much cucumber salad, after all.
So I thought I’d try making pickles, as I so predicted I would. Know thyself, I guess. Anyway, off to the Internet! Unfortunately, unlike canning tomatoes, pickle-making has a far less unified following. The USDA, who’s sole mission it seems is to sterilize everything, was not helpful. If you sterilize a vegetable, as in–boil it for 45 minutes–it becomes mush. This is fine for tomatoes, but when I tried a similar approach to pickling peppers a few years back, I ended up with a jar of pepper goo. I therefore sought anecdotal information.
It boiled down (see what I did there?) to two main approaches: a high-temp and short duration treatment, or a lengthy but low-temp treatment. I opted for the first simply because it’d be a quicker process.
The brine consisted of equal parts cider vinegar and water, with salt, then boiled. I cut cucumbers into spears, packed two jars, then poured in the boiling brine, then flash-boiled the jars. I added additional seasoning of dill seed, dill fronds, and crushed red pepper.
Admittedly, I have no idea what I’m doing here, but presumably the brine preserves the cucumbers, which supersedes the need for an extended sterilization process. I suppose I’ll find out.
[Edit: 2 days later I found out. Curiosity won out and I opened a jar. I was very pleased with how they turned out, and the red pepper gives them a nice bite.]
To reiterate, mushrooms are creepy. And yes, that’s based on traumatic childhood events.
Liz was trimming back the mint, which as expected was overwhelming the herb garden, and uncovered this:
Crucibulum laeve?
At the time, she recoiled a little at the sight, and exclaimed that there was a bee nest in the mint. It did indeed look like a nest of some kind–sort of papery, like a wasp’s. I certainly don’t mind the majority of arthropods, but I don’t relish coming into contact with them either. If it was indeed a nest, and those were larvae within, then…gross.
But I’ve never encountered any sort of nest like that, nor did it seem like a good nesting spot, so I had my doubts. Anything this weird, if not an insectoid machination, must be fungi. I snapped this picture and decided I would look into it later.
Later came after attending a résumé-building session. I was asked to coach. Interesting, that sometimes people want to know what I have to say. I’m more accustomed to shouting into the void. But anyway, I needed a respite, so I pulled up my photos and saw this. The search began.
I did not find any insect nests that resembled this, so I pursued my second theory. It wasn’t long before I discovered Bird’s Nest Fungi. It was one of the easier fungus identifications, due to it’s unique appearance. There’s a variety of species of course, but the family is Nidulariaceae. It’s possibly Crucibulum laeve. Wikipedia says they are not edible, they grow in mulch (appropriate since they were growing in potting soil), and release spores when struck by raindrops.
