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There are caterpillars that will nibble on your tomato leaves.  Then there is the tomato hornworm, a big green middle finger for your garden that will eat every leaf down to the nub - then shove its face into the tomato fruit itself for a little added insult.

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A few photos from Nico's and Monica's trip to see Patti, Charles, Anya and Estelle in Japan:



UPDATE:  For Monica's full photologue click on the slideshow below:

Margined blister beetles

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Garden Blogging

The tortoise beetle larvae have been chewing on the potatoes, and I finally got around to going out with a cup of soapy water to drown a few score.  They are little green worms with a brown shield on their backs. They build the shield out of their own shit, but luckily I'm not interested in eating them - only killing them.)

Among the harvestmen, wasps and dragonflies that hunt the foliage, I found a few long, black beetles hanging out among the stalks.  None of them were actively chewing on anything, but they didn't look very predatory either, so I read up on them.  

Margined blister beetles (as they are called) do chew on the foliage, but in fair exchange, since their larvae prey heavily on the eggs of grasshoppers and crickets - and those critters are all a-swarm and eating the plants.

The ten life stages of the blister beetle

The beetles are laced with the poison cantharidin, the active ingredient in the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly (which was always made up of pulverized blister beetles, not flies at all!)  If you can get the toxicity just right you can irritate the kidneys and urinary system enough to get a raging erection.  Unless you die of the poisoning instead.

Nowadays it's mostly grazing animals that get poisoned, and horses, cattle and sheep can die from ingesting a few of these potent insects.

None of us are likely to eat one (or crush one, which gets you nasty blisters on any exposed skin), so I'll just leave them be and count on their panoply of larvae to make omelettes of the local hopper eggs.

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Thievery!

This edible fungus, Chicken-of-the-Woods,  in the forest behind our house was too tempting for my virtue.  Not content to harvest the fruit, I stole the mycelium, log and all.  


I shifted out a log in our woodlot and settled this one into its place.

We'll saute the flesh with the flounder that Monica bought down at Stonington harbor . . .  a little purslane and pickled radish on the side . . . 

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As space shuttle touched down on earth for the final time, the US Space Age came to a close.  And this country's last semblance of a forward-looking vision closed.  The robots will still go out, though for how long is anybody's guess.

It may be that the manned space flight, with it's implicit promises of exploration and colonization was never anything but a chimera and an impractical daydream.  But it may be that it wasn't -- could movement off planet could have been a reality?  I think we'll never know.  But now, is anyone imagining a future beyond iPhone 8 or Jersey Shore 2015 in hologram?  Or the latest, faddish post-apocalypta?

Meanwhile, the percentage of the population looking for jobs and not finding them ticked upward again toward 10% - though the actual number of people idle in the current economy is closer to 20%, or one fifth of the population.


The oddness of this is maddening.  Extinction-quality challenges are coming down the pipeline toward us.  The destabilization of the climate; the destruction and acidification of the oceans; the impending decline of cheap energy; the dangerous challenge of providing material for 9 billion human souls - all leading to an erosion of too many global life support systems.


But not only are we not mobilizing for any of these challenges, we are idling people - a vast reservoir of human capacity that is being given no resources, no task, no vision beyond someday getting themselves back into the suicide pact of consumption-work.


Is the humanity-beast just averting its eyes from a future it doesn't want to face?  

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Chloe says, it's too damn hot.

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Dad was clearing out the shed of old bottles - the remnants of his collections of milk bottles, and old soda bottles, century-old medicine bottles that we used to dig up in ancient Pennsylvania dumps, overgrown with forest.  I took the best ones, figuring I could get them stowed away before Monica returns from Japan.  And Dad says they're probably done with canning, so I took four boxes of jars, quarts and pints, some salvaged in turn from the end of my grandmother's canning career nearly 30 years ago.  I'll return some in the autumn filled with applesauce or sauerkraut.

I left him and his indebted grandson to deal with the rest.

I dug up some of his bergamot and took some of the potted milkweeds he's grown from seed.  And a poorly placed black walnut sapling that started dying as soon as I dug it out, bare-rooted.  Still, I'll put it in the Rhode Island ground and see.

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The others went shopping for telephones, drawn by the closing days of Verizon's "unlimited data plans".  Like a flock of magpies lured by the sparkly smart phones.  And Porter entered into an indentured servitude with his grandparents for an iPhone.  40 or 50 hours of paid labor should pay for the phone and most of a year's worth of payments.  Oddly, this piece of technology is going to get Porter out of the house and into the fields where Dad is planting his meadows and prairies.  (A new school is going up in Palmyra and they are letting him plant part of the grounds in his native grasses and wildflowers - so Porter's up at 6 a.m. caddying tools for his grandfather.)

I drove in to Lancaster to drink beer with Kirk and eat his Tunisian meatballs - an Independence Day nod to the Arab Spring.  Neal and Loretta came over with 2 of their 3 boys, and another friend who recalls me from years ago.  Sveta came home from work and sat with us, murmuring quietly in her Dagestani accent.  The kids splashed themselves into the inflatable pool and I played a marathon match of "darn you" with Neal's oldest boy, who gave himself a bad conscience by cheating on a close call.  But rematches are better when there's controversy for some trash talking.  When the kids had gone inside to watch TV, we sat in the dusk soaking our feet in the pool, and talking, talking, talking -- my pocket occasionally buzzed with a message reaching out to me from Porter's new phone.

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Porter was viciously assaulted by sunbeams and birdsong at 6:30.  From a nearby early-opening cafe I brought him back pastries and coffee for myself.  We returned the keys to red-haired Helen at the corner shop, and drove to Park Slope to pick up my cousin Fred.  Taking his New York non-driver's bad advice, I crossed the Manhattan Bridge and spent an hour  crossing Chinatown on a gridlocked Canal Street.  I didn't care, since this borrowed van has a working air-conditioner, and I could watch the promenade in peace.

We made it to my parents' house in the afternoon.  We don't usually gather at this time of year, but Cathie came with 10-month old Leo, and Chris would arrive the next day.  So we opened the watermelon I'd brought.

Lititz Springs Park held it's first Independence Day celebration in 1811, and boasts one of the longest continuous traditions of July 4th celebration (196 years and counting).  As we arrived, around 8:30, the Queen of Candles pageant was announcing the winner, a local high school senior selected by her peers.  And then the candles were lit.  Thousands of them suspended above the stream that rushes from the springs and hisses the length of the park in it's stone-walled channel.  They made a great flickering slash through the dimness.

We spread old blankets on the ground for us to lay on - and for Leo to crawl around on.  Porter climbed the tree above us.  Over the years I've grown more indifferent to fireworks, but this show, accompanied by music from Clair Brothers Audio, was spectacular - possibly the best I've ever seen.  Leo would pause in his explorations sometimes to watch the colorful explosions.  Eventually, Porter came down out of the tree to sit with us.

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We all packed up for our journeys.  A couple of small suitcases for Monica and Nico, and a larger one they'd be bringing to our friends in Tokyo.  Porter loaded into the van his own little suitcase plus his bike and skateboard, and a little pile of electronica - for a stay with his grandparents in Pennsylvania.

For days Nico had been anticipating jet lag by staying up and sleeping to noon, but we rousted him out.

And we left at noon for a 7:20 flight out of JFK, but the holiday weekend traffic we'd counted on was all going the other direction and we got to the airport at 3 o'clock.  Amidst the triple-parked chaos of the loading zone I gave them both hugs and counseled patience with one another.  And then Porter and I launched ourselves out toward Brooklyn along the Belt Parkway.  The city shone on this sunny day as though it was in one of those optimistic NYC-arrival scenes that movie-makers love to ladle in.

In Brooklyn's Cobble Hill we got the keys to Denver's place, and climbed to their apartment on the fourth floor.  The humans were out on a Long Island beach somewhere, but we made friends with Lester, the shaggy, unpredictable, saucer-eyed cat.  From their roof we could see the city spread out all around us.

Porter likes cities even less than I do, but Brooklyn is not the anthill that Manhattan is.  Though the air was hot it was clear, and he was content to stroll around with me.  And so we walked among the alien Brooklynites and ate their food and shared their well-lit night.

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Resting in the scintillations of fireflies,

Cooling skin 'gainst purpling night,

Each hair, sentinel 

to breathy kiss of mosquito wing.

This one, 

settles on for blood-theft,

and with slow and practiced skill, 

I murder her and future millions.

I kill a dozen ardent mothers,

and drop gray bodies 

for morning's ants to take away.

Then no more come,

or I fail to notice.

And darkling night 

is flecked and flashed with greenish gold

by beetle assignations.

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Yesterday was rainy and today is cool and damp again.  The garden plants seem to like the wet and I think if we get some sun things will pretty much explode.

I checked on the bees this morning and there was only a trickle of traffic at 10, but by noon when I checked again there was a steady flow of bees in and out.  If it's sunny this weekend I'll take another peek at the frames to see their progress.

The potatoes continue to grow, and I hope all the herbage actually translates into tubers, because they're striving to 4 feet high.  I think I read somewhere that too much nitrogen can result in big plants and small potatoes.  But I didn't fertilize unless letting the vetch get out of control counts as fertilizing.


I waded through the potatoes looking for any pests, but mostly I found predators that seem to have made the place their own jungle haunt -- harvestmen, lightning bugs, wasps.  I tipped a few tortoise beetles, and a little slug into my little freezing jar, but the plants looked pretty well patrolled.  Still feeling benevolent, I didn't molest the pair of pretty katydids that were munching one of the plants.


When you see a patch like, with all your busy predator-allies you really have to wonder why people are so quick to coat everything with pesticides.

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Georgia's illegal immigrant law fiasco exposes some cracks in the Republican coalition of working class and wealthy. 


Somehow, when it comes to illegal immigration, employers and political leaders suddenly pretend that they don't understand what a labor market is.  When it suits employers to give people crap wages, then it's all about the natural discipline of markets, like it or lump it.  If you don't take the wage, then somebody else will.  But when companies can't get people to work for crap wages, then they forget about how markets work and all of a sudden Americans are too lazy and greedy to work for a "reasonable wage".


The labor market idea is pretty straightforward.  You raise the amount offered until there are people willing to take the job at that wage.  It might mean that a pint of blueberries costs $3.75 rather than $3.00, but hey, markets.  We don't just make up a price like we were the Soviet Union.


For years, our savvy capitalists have gotten around that pesky downside to markets by encouraging labor from Mexico and Central America, first because these people were poor and ambitious, and second because they arrived conveniently as second class citizens (undocumented immigrants) who couldn't insist on niceties like wage and labor conditions.  If they did get demanding it was easy enough to have them deported.  (Then employers had the gall to say that they had to bring in Mexicans, since Americans wouldn't take these jobs.)


Of course, this was enraging to many existing US citizens, in part since they rightly saw this whole game driving down their wages and "taking jobs".  There was a potential conflict in the Republican Party between popular anger in "the base" about this illegal importation of cheap labor, versus employer enthusiasm for the same.  This conflict could be successfully defused as long as the popular rage could be directed at the illegals themselves, rather than the employers and politicians benefiting from the situation; and as long as political leaders could pretend to care about it, without actually threatening the status quo.


Under popular pressure, however, Arizona and Georgia have broken that compact and passed anti-immigrant legislation that actually does threaten the status quo.  Apparently, Georgia has successfully scared off undocumented workers and outraged employers are claiming they are face a labor shortage, and will have crops rotting in the fields.  Although, the governor hopes that another convenient set of disenfranchised, second class citizens, (e.g. former prisoners and probationers) can fill the gap, there is panic that employers might find themselves exposed to the legal labor market.


It's unfortunate that it took xenophobia and racism to break the logjam that the Republican Party had engineered to prevent immigration and labor reform.  And it is unfortunate that some farmers are going to let their crops rot in the field because $3.75 berries picked by Georgia high school students can't compete with $3.00 berries picked by illegal laborers in North Carolina.  But it may be this implosion of Republican hypocrisy that finally makes room for some version of reform.  It's up to us to make sure those reforms don't just require businesses to stop gaming the labor market, but also bring some justice to working people, whatever the state of their documents.

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The honeybees are busy drawing comb on the foundations.

I'm still not sure where they're flying off to for their nectar and their pollen

The queen came out onto the tops of the frames,

mobbed by her attendants.

I hope she's doing well.

A click beetle with eyespots

landed on my white shirt.

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I found some retsina, 

so Monica

found some ground lamb

 and garlic

 and pine nuts 

and I gathered sorrel from the woods.

And with some olive oil that a Greek lady

who's smitten with Monica 

gave to her from Greece,

 she made Kebabs 
and tzatziki

for the warm bread

and olives, black and green.

And there was a 

happiness of food.

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I got my bees last night from the beekeeper, and this morning, when they were stilly dozy from the cool night, I moved them to the hive.


Within a couple of hours foragers were already returning with golden pollen, and they stayed busy with it all day.


I tried to see where they were going, but they would spiral up into the sky until I was too blinded to follow them.


I'll give them a few days to settle in before I open it again to meet the queen.

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I've sometimes wondered: Do we love flowers because they are beautiful and colorful, with perfumes and sweet nectar?  Or do we just happen to love color and nectar and floral perfume because they are the signals that plants have used for a hundred million years to advertise their proffered concentrations of food and nutrients - and so we have been hardwired to quiver in delight at these signals.  

(And honey, as literally the distillation of this entire seduction, is the ultimate in nature's foods.)

I've wondered:  If a hundred million years ago plants had chosen the carrion flies, rather than the sugar sippers, to be their pollinators, would the world be full of plants reeking of rotting flesh?  And would we be happy connoisseurs of decay and the smell of fly-beloved shit, and would we surround ourselves with gardens decorated with "flowers" comprised of fleshy petals of meat and offal?

I've always liked that idea of the path not taken - of a humanity where grandmothers send each other cards not of saccharine violet bouquets, but decorated with careful, lovely illustrations of rotting flesh-roses.  

The colony of octopus stinkhorn growing on a pile of discarded charcoal reminded of those wonderings. Here's a creature that took that path.  It puts out its fleshy tentacles and attracts the flies with a heady odor of dogshit.  And the flies do come.

And I'm sure the flies find the orange and stinking fungi beautiful and even quiver in delight.

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Milkweed in June

The birds have been fledging.  The chipping sparrows and carolina wrens have pushy, noisy youngsters in tow.  It's hard to tell how many phoebes there are in the yard, but it's more than the two.  And yesterday afternoon in the overgrown yard there was a turkey hen with 4 tawny poults scampering around her.  The catbird looks harried and distracted, but I haven't noticed nest nor nestling.  The 4 eggs in the robin's nest are gone - raccoons maybe?  do we have snakes that will climb into a low-lying pine?


I will set the computer aside and see what else is happening outside.

The Potato Patch

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One of those weeks gone in a blur.  Last week of school for the boys, so that rattled the schedule.  Beach day (each class goes off to a different beach), field day, "lower school rising" (when the students cross a little bridge to their next year's classes).  Monica writing up her teacher's comments and putting together DVD's of the kids singing and showcasing their Spanish language skills.  And she's starting to get sucked into the Nature Center's world for the camp season - meetings, forms, CPR training.  At work I was bouncing between rebuilding the website, editing video that we shot in Ohio on privatization, and helping finish the draft of the report due out today.  

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Mrs. C said she wanted a picture of all the 4th grade girls, 

and they all clamored that Nico needed to be in the picture, too.

So they ran to find him.

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