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

Fall and All That

Around this time of year little weekly and freebie papers (as in newspapers, remember them?) that usually focus on phone-sex ads and supermarket coupons give their beleaguered staffs a little freedom. These writers then run sentimental pieces about the season.

Let me essay that with my quivering quill, "The russet leaves of the towering oaks, 'neath which the scampering squirrels nimbly put away their toothsome treasures against the bitter blasts to come. Oh, as I once told Linda, my lost love, summer hath all too short a lease..."

Alliteration. Adjective strings. Really bad infusions of pseudo-Elizabethan English.

Out, damned feel-wistful columns and a pox upon thee! I have other sentiments to express about  Autumn. Namely, that it sucks to lose two old colleagues in two days. And all your squash.

First, the humans lost. Both were here at the university when I arrived in 1991; one had been here when my late brother enrolled in '66, only to be booted two years later right into the US Army and, but for the deescalating grace of Richard Nixon, all the way to Danang. Nearly fifty years have flown since then.

Our campus flag flies at half-staff one day for each of my old academic commiserators. A day later, the little slip of paper with information on their lives and accomplishments, put in an acetate holder on the flagpole, goes right to the recycling bin.  Game over.

With all that in mind, 'neath the towering oaks around Westhampton Lake, I took a pleasant stroll today to think about what is really important not on a college campus, but beyond its boundaries. For me, it was I learned in a difficult summer about working the land.

The clouds did indeed look like October, and the lake has grown more woodsy since I began walking around it, 'neath various moons, with girlfriends back in the 1970s.  Days like this, with a good northwestern breeze, invite reflection. The light is slanted so the blue deepens in the sky.

To a Deist like me, it becomes consolation enough. There was a time thirty years ago, however when I stopped believing in a Providential God and nearly went full-on Paul Bowles into existentialist atheism. You know, The Sheltering Sky. That sky is there, Bowles claims, only to keep us from recognizing the horror beyond it. That type of nihilism is terribly easy.

Today I am less Bowlesian, but I still repeat, in my first-year seminar on The Space Race, the bald fact that we each are specks, in a crowd of other specks, who live on a speck circling a hotter speck, itself on the outskirts of a speck in a cloud of hundreds of billions of specks. Each sentient speck must think that at some point it is the center of creation. Then it is gone, as surely as my wiping out the compost bin under the sink and its clusters of fruit-fly eggs. Poof.

In 30-plus years, my particular speck will be as gone as my departed colleagues. What will I leave as a legacy? Some furrows where I grew hot peppers fairly well for a local restaurant? A restored tractor that someone will buy at an estate sale?

Or maybe these blog posts, gathering pixeldust in Google's bowels, until some purge or merger leads Blogger, Blogspot, and associated content to vanish?

Say, maybe I'll put them together, with transitions and new content, into a popular book that I'll sign at events like the recent Heritage Harvest Festival! Then tour the entire country, giving talks about buying the right tractor or the right farm pickup! That's it, Immortalitatem Ex Libris!


Or the book will be remaindered for $5 on a side table at Barnes & Noble and I'll report my travel expenses to the IRS and go back to growing peppers.

Thus, the turn to the squash. That, friends, I can not only control under the sheltering sky but even enjoy.

We planted 100 row-feet of Kabocha Squash this  year for a customer who wants a few bushels a year for a restaurant special. I was wary of squash bugs, so half my plants began under row cover. These were new beds never used for fruiting plants before. I planted late in the summer to try to avoid the bugs' most prolific weeks. They multiply not arithmetically, but exponentially.

And so they did. Some wilting in the uncovered rows warned me of catastrophe at hand. I opened the covered rows and it rivaled a zombie's feast out of a Roger Corman film: the dead vines, with thousands of squash bugs and nymphs. No application of diatomaceous earth could save the remaining plants. One day I came out to find all the rest withered. So what did I learn? Stop using organic practices and hit the aisle-o-death at Home Depot?

No. A friend brought me a perfect Kabocha she'd grown. I stuffed it with a Middle-Eastern tomato sauce, lamb, and rice, and baked it. And I am drying and saving all the seeds. She used one part Dr. Bronner's Eucalyptus Soap to 9 parts water, spraying weekly.

Bowles, in a haunting and disturbing (like all his work) piece called "Next to Nothing," says "no one can know where he is, until he knows where he has been."

So the desire just to keep going on, mindful of where he has been, can be enough. Try again with different variables: late planting, Dr. Bronner's, crop rotation. Read the paper on the flagpole and remember Irby's hilarious imitations of James Dean, "the worst actor ever to be famous," or Harry, who wrote dozens of well regarded books but never learned to drive until he was in his 40s. His belches in the Dining Hall were Rabelaisian.

These are the lessons of Fall, on campus or on the farm. Remember. Despair is easy in a bitter season, when anger and stupidity contend to see which force is mightier.

Endurance is a harder lesson still. Learn it.

Heritage Harvest Festival, 2016: Good Lessons for a Tractorpunk

Two years ago, I  waxed poetic about this annual event at Monticello. This marked the 10th anniversary, and I think we have only missed it one time.  I have to credit the speakers I have met there with so much of what we put into practice here at Beepasture Farms.

The weather was hot, unseasonably so as much of 2016 has been, and attendance seemed a little low as compared to last year. There was a bit of room left in most of the classes I attended. Here's what was on offer, to tempt you to join us next year.

Going on Friday before the main day of the event, or Sunday after, offers a more laid-back experience. One can park at the Monticello Visitor's Center instead of riding a bus from Piedmont Community College. While there are no vendors, there are few competitors for the speakers' attention after a talk. This year, on Friday I drove up to attend an excellent workshop on raising onions and garlic (alliums to us plant geeks), offered by Ira Wallace, a writer and gardener with Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. She convinced me that by accident I'd done some things right with our garlic (such as not over fertilizing the soil) and provided valuable advice for preparing a bed, advice that I plan to use for onions next year.

Our onion crop was a flop but I'll try again with a different perennial variety. From Ira I learned to harvest a little earlier than I have done for garlic, when one or two of the plants' green leaves are turning brown. Digging then insures that the bulbs will have sufficient skins over the cloves and not fall apart. I will also cut and eat the scapes from our hardneck garlic, then be ready to harvest a few weeks later. This was all news to me.

We began to prepare the bed for our alliums this weekend, in order to plant in mid-to-late October. I plan to keep rotating so my garlic never repeats in the same beds for four years, five if possible.

My 2016 changes involve smothering all weeds in the allium bed under thick weedblock fabric for a month, then taking it up when I plant garlic and onions as I did last year, under 4-6 inches of straw. This technique works well for Ira. Already, with my haphazard approach in a raised bed, we harvested about 40 bulbs of garlic, almost enough for a year (we eat a LOT of garlic).

Ira's workshop, pictured here, followed with one by Cindy Connor of Homeplace Earth. She gave an inspiring talk on cover crops and green manures. As with my alliums, I have been uneven since 2012 about putting nutrients back into the soil of our raised beds, beyond adding compost, ashes, and rock dust. Luckily, success involves little more than a few pounds of seed and some rain (or for us in drought currently, saved rainwater).

Next year I plan to follow our winter cover crop of hairy vetch, winter rye, and crimson clover (seeds went in this week and are sprouting) with Buckwheat going in for the Spring. Before our summer vacation, the wheat will be ready to scythe by hand and thresh. Connor's thresher is a grandchild with a plastic baseball bat and a sheet of plywood. She uses a fan to winnow the wheat, as she pours it from one bucket to another. Finally, the remainder of the harvest makes excellent locally sourced straw.

Given how much straw we use for our chickens' coops, I had better buy a plastic bat and hire a local kid to thresh.

For the second day of the festival I went to a really powerful talk about sustainable pest-remedies by Tanya L.K. Denckla, author of The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food, as well as other books and articles. Tanya and I then exchanged ideas about the vagaries of soil and weather in Central VA; she lives just up the road "a piece," meaning 40 miles, from us.  I plan to test some of her pest remedies on our squash bugs when I next grow squash (2018 season). This year we lost every single squash, despite our use of diatomaceous earth and other natural techniques such as floating row-covers and delayed planting!

Much of her advice would be a delight for the home gardener. Some simply will not work for our market-gardening operation, at least until I begin to remove weeds by some of the planting techniques and cover-crop ideas Connor advocates. I did notice this year that my Thai peppers had to fight much harder against weeds when I planted with recommended spacing. Next year, I'll go back to my 2015 method of closer planting and plant through heavy weed-block fabric. Last year I experienced some mortality because of reduced air circulation, but no plants toppled in storms and best of all, the deep shade under the the pepper plants stymied the growth of weeds.

Patience pays off. This weekend I saw two large worms covered with the larvae of parasitic wasps. We planted to attract beneficial insects this year, and it payed off. The picture below is nearly identical to one Denckla showed us, but it comes from my pepper patch.

The same day I also visited vendors and listened to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms have an imagined dialog with Thomas Jefferson about being a productive and sustainable farmer. Even on a mountaintop, a place that Salatin said only a dreamer would try to run a farm business!

Except in spirit, I did not see Thomas Jefferson this year, but we had Naturalist William Bartram courtesy of someone's time machine. Bartram strode manfully past me as I waited, in vain, to hear a talk by food journalist Corby Kummer. Kummer, of The Atlantic and my favorite writer about food, was unable to be present for his talk. It was my only disappointment of the the 2016 Festival.

I should have chased down Bartram. Even in facsimile, I would like to pay homage to a writer we environmentalist should know better. He had a real sense of both the wonder and fragility of the New World's ecosystem.  We need a bit more of what Bartram began and that continues every year at Monticello.

First Lessons in Commerce

Despite the happy looks on the farmhands' faces, it was a tough harvest at the start. With no pumpkins, we got no income from one customer.

Squash-bugs were a horror this year, and from 18 vines we harvested exactly 2 pumpkins. Only one went into the root shelter, while another one had a bad spot. I cut up the rest of it and froze it for our pumpkin soup or pies.

Lesson learned: to continue an organic regimen for squash and pumpkins in the garden, I'm going to have to start with insect netting over them and have diatomaceous earth down as soon as I put in seedlings.

Luckily, our little venture as an LLC has sold some cucumbers, lettuce, and now hot peppers. That said, even with these cash crops we'll not realize a profit this year. I must next year or will revert to "Hobby" status for IRS purposes. Thus I won't hire farmhands next year, my major expense, and do the picking myself.  My main helper does other work, anyway, on buildings here and helping to split wood, so he can be paid by me and not the LLC.

Next year will be interesting, however, as a new customer is about to open a produce stand just down the road. He's an Iranian with family who help him, and they'll sell produce from local farmers. He wants whatever we can provide.

It will be called "Garden of Eden," and I've high hopes for him and whatever I can contribute. The other lesson learned, then, is to have a couple of high-volume customers and diverse offerings. If the peppers had not come in so well, we'd hardly have any income for 2015.

Luckily, I still have a day job. For now.

Old School Tools: Apinol

Since 1903, "America's Oldest Green Product" has soothed and cleansed those who work or play outdoors. Until I met my wife in 1989, I had never heard of this strange product from Alabama.

When Nancy began to talk about "Alpine Oil," which is how she and her family pronounce it, I thought it was something from a pine tree. Sure enough, Apinol is made from pine oil, and when you put it on a mosquito or tick bite, sore toe, or big scrape the sting is brief and the relief is long-lasting. You do, however, smell like pine-scented cleaning products.

We say around here that "it will help anything but a broken heart," and I'm not sure it would not  help in those cases, too. I have made a poultice from it, using cotton balls and medical tape, and let it sit on a blister or wound overnight. It relieves swelling and quickens healing.

Apinol can be hard to find. Locally, an Westbury Pharmacy carries it, and I have seen it listed on Amazon. I suspect this product, which has only changed from a glass to a plastic spray bottle in my many years using it, will be with us until 2103 and beyond.  Unlike many legacy brands, Apinol knows how to build a customer base and has a decent Web presence.

Tell your friends this summer, when the critters bite and scratch. I have not tried it as an insect repellant, but it's a soothing friend to have in a miserable time of year down South.

Suburban Visitors Meet A Man From Mars

"There might be ticks," she said, stepping out of the car.

He replied, "I told you not to wear flip flops."

For the record, I don't own flip-flops or any open-toed sandals. Out here, they are not practical outdoors.

She doused her legs with bug spray. So did he, and he was wearing jeans and real shoes, good boots even.  I figured it would not be useful to tell them that I eat lots of garlic to keep the mosquitoes off, and sometimes I dust my boots with sulfur to repel ticks: not a great remedy if one wears that urban ubiquity, the flip-flop.

I also did not mention the tick jar I keep my pulled ticks in, until my bite looks okay, or the gizmo I use to remove several ticks a week from me.

That would lead to some sort of discussion about chemicals, and I'd get angry.

She got about 20 feet down our farm road and turned back. "I'll stay in the car." He said again, "I told you not to wear flip flops!"

I said something about street rods and the shell of a '55 Chevy I'm going to save, just to change the subject.

"So why are you selling these other old cars?" He asked. I have a few junkers on our property, none of them worth much, so I just gave him the real reason. "The wrecks are in the way when I'm mowing, and I've got two old cars already I fiddle with. We're going to cultivate the area to plant cover crops to feed our bees."

"Your bees," he said, as we trudged into the woods, me alert for snakes.

"You know, honey bees."

He nodded and was polite, but I was clearly the Man from Mars.

I didn't tell him, as I looked for snakes, that I'd said "hello, get a mouse!" to a big one that morning, on the steps by my garage. The serpent--a Black Racer--looked at me, stuck out his tongue, and slipped into a crack in the cinder block. My visitor would then probably recommend clearing all the undergrowth by the road, getting rid of brush piles, and so on.

Satisfied with the two pickup trucks he'd be saving from a rusty apocalypse, he and his wife went back to town. I'm sure they showered and deloused themselves. Nice folks, however, they are not my sort.

Later, another visitor came by, a talented painter and car-restorer who is going to do some body work on a car of mine. He and I walked to the garage to chat about the project, and he pointed to a patch of weeds.

"You know what THAT is?" He asked.

I looked, and looked back at him. "Poison Ivy."

He tilted his head but before he could offer advice, I said "We keep bees. I just string trim it, and we use no chemicals on our land, except some Roundup I paint with a brush on 'Tree of Heaven' after I cut them down."

Again, the Man-from-Mars look greeted me. But he too was polite and, again, not my sort.

I have seen the yards from the places where such folk come. Monocultures of grass not suited for our climate, foundation plantings just as water-intensive as the grass. Non-native trees far from the house, if there are trees. A sign on the lawn every so often, from a company with an innocuous name that cloaks its evil--GreenWays! EverGrow! BugBlaster!--that sprays poisons to kill bugs, all the bugs, or that puts toxins down so the lawn will continue its junkie life of constant chemical fixes. Meanwhile the owners of these properties breathe in chemicals daily, so trace amounts stay in their fatty tissue, accruing a little at a time...

I'd rather be a Man from Mars.

Here's a good test of a person I'd want to spend time with: they think the tick-jar is cool and talking to a snake is not odd.

I just pulled a tick off me, after my second paragraph of this post. I'll spare the readers a picture of him in the jar, crawling around.