Eastern Tent Caterpillars: Living With Them

Last year, for the first time, we had a harvest from our apple trees. Partly that occurred after I sprayed them with sulfur following bloom. Partly because I paid attention to a leaf-eating native insect, the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. They love to form nests in the crotches of trees.

One of our biggest trees got completely defoliated in just a few days last year; it did leaf out again but no apples came from it. I consider it my control, since the trees that I did manage yielded a good harvest.  So this year, I used a long stick, or a telescoping pole with a brush on the end to remove the webbed nests.  Advice from professions such as Penn State's Extension service recommend dropping the nests in soapy water. I did that last year but this year I just put them on the ground and stomped on them.

Penn State gives advice for pesticides, but I don't see the need for such a small and non-fatal infestation; I think that I have removed a dozen nests from three trees.  Our cherry tree escaped this  year, the the caterpillars show no interest in our figs.  I hope that we will again have homemade apple sauce in the larder for 2024. I put put about a dozen jars last year.

In the woods, wild cherry trees are full of the nests. I leave them be, so birds will have plenty of moths in their diet.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

When Retirement Nears, Making Plans

Back in 2017, I attended a workshop at a national conference in Portland, Oregon. We were there at the national meeting to discuss writing pedagogy, but I figured I was within 10 years of retirement. I then went to a session on how we find meaning when our day jobs end.

The other day, 3 years ahead of schedule, I notified my employer that I'd be ending full-time work for the university at the end of the year. I'd just harrowed the hillside below the spot shown above; we'd buried our first livestock guardian dog, our beloved Vela, at the top of the hill. Life is short. In 2017, Vela had been with us 2 years and was in her vigorous middle years. Now, she's resting.

Big decisions when to retire are naturally fraught with emotion, but honestly, it was the happiest decision I've made in a long time. I don't hate my job or colleagues, but unlike many of them, I have a Plan B waiting. It differs from many retirement plans I hear such as "I'll travel more" (great!) or "I'll be more active in my church or community" (fine!).

I'm neither religious nor able to travel as much as other academics do. Luckily, I find my joy in work with words, machinery, and plants. For so many years, I realized that I love the solitude and hands-on experience of writing, gardening, forestry, and tending to land. I'm happiest on a tractor for many hours on end, coming in the house to share lunch with my wife and discuss what we've been doing that morning. My favorite pastime involves fixing and maintaining machinery and equipment; I find it much more rewarding than dealing with the messy intricacies of classroom or office. I'm getting more social, because it's healthy, but generally, others wear me out. 

As my late father-in-law put it, when done with a task "I like something I can put my hands on."

In Portland we discussed how a mere hobby would not be enough to fill the hours that require intellectual company. My farm-work is not a hobby in the same way as, say building models or restoring an old car, but I got the message. I took it so to heart that after the conference, I began a book project that saw publication in 2019. Nowadays, my plans are less grandiose, but I plan on more fishing and hunting. Those hobbies are great fun but don't quite fill the bill for a healthy retirement.

Having given lots of thought to this transition since 2017,  I'd advise any of you thinking of joining me in the long twilight of a working life to take stock of what brings you joy physically, emotionally, and intellectually, especially as your physical abilities will begin to taper off. A guy named Mr. John Deere helps with that, to a degree, as I find it hard to hire day labor, even for $20/hour in cash plus gas money and lunch. But no pay will buy me intellectual debate over a lunch table.

For that reason, I plan to teach part-time in retirement in my university's Master's Program for continuing students. Most of the work will be full-remote for small classes, allowing more time to help my students develop intellectually. Given my research and writing interests, I plan to be on campus weekly and that will include lunch with old colleagues, attending arts events and seminars, even going to a professional conference every few years in areas where I'm still writing professionally.

All that without the messy things: committee assignments, office hours for undergrads, lots and lots of grading.  That means more solitary time on the tractor or behind a chainsaw or at a work bench. I've lots of ideas about managing invasive species, cultivating land for pollinators and native wildlife, and more.

You'll read about them here.

The Forgotten(?) Art of Pollarding Trees

Topping trees to encourage growth has a bad name among tree fanciers like me. The conventional wisdom that it shortens the life of a shade tree has a lot of merit, but then again, don't we prune trees constantly?

As I do most of my heavy pruning in winter, especially late winter, I wanted to talk about a time-honored way of harvesting firewood without cutting down an entire tree. I've begun to practice it in my own woodlot. 

The photo above, from the Wikipedia entry on pollarding, shows a beech in Epping Forest, England. In the old world, where ancient forests long vanished, second-growth trees needed careful management to avoid vanishing. Legal rights to pollard a certain amount of wood were granted to locals.

Pollarding provides a safe and sustainable method, and carefully pollarded trees can live a very long time. The beech above has not been cut in a many decades, whereas a regularly pollarded tree will not produce the huge side branches shown.  For those working with willow for crafts, pollarding leads to a nigh-endless supply of material.

I use pollarding on our fence-lines, where gums, poplars, and other shade trees occur. Some I cut down to a stub 3  or 4 feet in height. The trunks get cut into small rounds for the woodstove, after seasoning a  year. The branches and twig I drag away to make brush-piles at the edge of the woods, to shelter wildlife. Sometimes I pollard very long stems to make beanpoles.

Pines, of course, cannot be pollarded, and once cut, do not return. I knew that but didn't know it as an ancient threat by Croesus from the Persian/Greek wars. Thanks, Herodotus.

If you burn wood in  your fire-pit, fireplace, or wood stove but live where you don't have a ready supply of large logs, you may want to begin pollarding trees. You might find it most handy for trees under power-lines as well. Keeping them short avoids the sort of awful slash/pruning power-companies often do to protect infrastructure. Pollarding provides a way to keep a tree like that gracefully shaped.

 

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Slow and Fiddly Hobbies, 2024

Back in 2017, I reported on my passion for "fiddly" and slow hobbies: mostly the solitary pursuits of building models, fishing, gardening, reloading my own ammo. It was a time of political disaster then, with a megalomaniac careening us unchecked toward a dark future, packing the courts so things he ruined could not easily be undone. It could happen again. I could have fled the country or gone mad, but instead I continued to find solace in slow hobbies and not living by the dopamine fixes and doom-scrolling provided by addictive smart phones. I grew up regarding golf as a hobby for old white rich people, but really, it would be a fine sport for me if it were more sustainable, environmentally.

Not long before that dark time of American dysfunction, a tremendously interesting series ran three seasons (in British parlance three series) on BBC Four, Detectorists. We don't watch TV beyond an hour weekly, but this one was so great that after streaming the first episode, we decided to buy the DVD. It's good enough to own, and hard enough to find to never, ever lend to others who might not return it.

We joke with others that we love "cottage porn," British TV that commemorates a simple rural life free of the hateful political stickers on clownishly lifted pickup-trucks now haunting America's countryside. Think of how twee All Creatures Great and Small is, as comforting as a mince pie. Detectorists, on the other hand, not only rejects escapism but moves its story to the present while adopting a wistful, resigned tone. The duo behind the detectors, Andy and Lance, are looking not just for metallic treasures under farmers' fields but for meaning. The show has a surprisingly existential bent, though not a lugubrious one. By adding gentle moments of humo(u)r, creator Mackenzie Crook manages the nigh-impossible; the characters' failures and modest successes remind me of the balance struck in the two excellent original Charlie Brown animated specials. Consider Linus' angst in the pumpkin patch, when the Great Pumpkin never arrives, or Charlie's moment of doubt and pain over an already-dead cut tree when he cries out, "I killed it."

Like the Peanuts characters, those in Detectorists do find solace, unlike Beckett characters or most of the Beat writers. Yet their regrets remain. That makes the show's comedy unique. One message? Bear adversity with a wry, even sardonic, sense of humor. Aside from a running gag about Simon and Garfunkel, the humor is sidelong. One sees the "Finds Table" with a carefully lettered but amateur sign at a meeting of the comically under-attended Danebury Metal Detecting Club, it's such an instance: pull tabs from beer cans, pence coins, old buttons and shell casings. Yet, sometimes, gold. It's still out there.

Rural life for more than 11 (!) years has taught me that thus philosophy works. I employ it when others tell me of their favorite "must see TV." Usually it's too silly for our cultural moment or so violent that it provides not even a slight respite from the news. Yet the philosophy of Detectorists, ultimately aligned with classical Stoicism, might work broadly beyond rural America, as we lose and find things in years ahead.

It's fine if you watch an episode and find it too slow, as some reviewers did when it ran. Slow is my favorite speed now.

I have yet to buy a metal detector, though we have talked about getting a pair of entry-level models to look for things on our property in Buckingham County. 

At least I will buy the DMMC T-shirt.

January is My Favorite Month

A recent op-ed in the New York Times, from a fellow lover of winter, got me to consider why January, called fondly "dim and a bit lonesome," and February are my favorite months. I've written about the second month here, before. That post is full of advice from writers I admire. I'll repeat "Time itself is nothing; the experiencing of it is everything" by Dutch novelist and travel-writer, Cees Nooteboom.

Now let's give January its due. It's 1/12 of your year, after all.

It's no secret that I am not a people-person. I try to cultivate Stoic Marcus Aurelius's equanimity toward others while admitting their their trauma lies beyond my control. He found that one must "end your journey content." I find too many humans "energy vampires" and lost souls glued to screens full of fluff and worse, poison. As I glide toward retirement in 2025, I am letting go of some of their borrowed anxiety about their needs, or even mine. I just can say "I hear you. We'll work on that" and enjoy the passing show.

It's different at what I consider to be my "real" job, working on the farm with our animals, equipment and land. In that case, while the demands are constant, the best season for doing certain things, in our changing Mid-Atlantic climate at least, falls during winter. The days are shorter, the ground often sodden, yet the sky! At the zenith in late afternoon, the sky is almost an ultramarine Klein Blue some days. The temperatures can be in the 50s, perfect for outdoor work without freezing or dehydrating. I can put in fence-posts, chop firewood, till the soil if it gets dry, do work on buildings that does not involve painting.

Walks in the quiet woods here invigorate me, with their vistas and their revelations of what lies at ground level. After late spring, all those details of old cemeteries, tumbled walls and fences, and building foundations vanish in the undergrowth. Speaking of that, there's no better time to take chainsaw and loppers to trim or remove saplings, fell larger crooked trees, or do pathwork.

Why don't more of us love the first month? If you don't enjoy chores but can travel now, do it. You'll find prices to non-skiing destinations at their lowest, with restaurants and lodging eager for your custom.

I cannot do that, yet, so I'll get outside instead. The temperature will plummet this weekend, not rising above freezing, so it's just the time to bush-hog half of the six-acre field we will are using to cultivate habitat for ground-nesting birds. 

I'll wrap up and have a blast.