I'm Late

        “I'm late, I'm late for a very important date. No time to say hello, good-bye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late. I'm late and when I wave, I lose the time I save. My fuzzy ears and whiskers took me too much time to shave. I run and then I hop, hop, hop, I wish that I could fly. There's danger if I dare to stop and here's the reason why: I'm over-due, I'm really in a stew. No time to say good-bye — hello, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.”

          A quote from Alice in Wonderland. I was only going to use the first two lines and tell you I’m really running late this week but when I read the rest of it, I thought it too cute not to use.

          I’m late. By this time on a Saturday afternoon I normally have six or ten pages knocked out.

          “Why are you running late this week?” you ask.

          I’m late because I had more than the normal amount of photographs to sort through. Mike found a big tractor with a backhoe for a good price and wanted to go look at it.

“Peg, didn’t Mike just sell his big tractor?” you wanna know.

Yep. He did. Big tractors are useful in their own right. You can move big rocks with a big tractor. You can pull big stumps with a big tractor. You can move big scoops of dirt and gravel with a big tractor. And you can leave big ruts in the yard with a big tractor. That’s what Mike hated most about his big tractor.

“I don’t anticipate needing to move the rocks again,” Mike justified. “We’ve pulled all the stumps we need to pull. And I’ll just make more trips if I have to move dirt or gravel. So, let’s sell the big tractor and get a smaller one.”

We’ve been talking about a backhoe too for a couple of years now. Every time Mike finds one it’s always a lot of money. “We could hire the job out cheaper than that and not have a backhoe sitting around.”

“What job?” you say.

Our pond for one. Mike’s thinking if we dredge up the sides of the pond that it’ll seal some if not all the leaks. There’s a culvert on the easement to the hunter’s cabin that needs replaced and our ditch that handles the runoff from the upper part of the property needs some work. Oh. Speaking of that, Mike tried to use his big tractor to skim out some dirt so it’d flow right and ended up with a low spot.

“That holds water better than our pond,” I told him. “Maybe we could make a little pond here.”

“A mosquito breeding ground you mean.”

“Nope. That’s what frogs eat and there’re frogs in there already.”

So, there are jobs around here that are better suited for a big tractor and jobs that are better suited for a small tractor. But who can afford to have two tractors sitting around?

Surprise! A tractor with a backhoe popped up on Facebook Marketplace and at a good price. Mike messaged Shawn and made arrangements for us to look at it.

A trip of a hundred miles on new roads? You can bet this snap-happy chick took lots of pictures!

“You drove a hundred miles to look at a tractor?” you ask.

No. Fifty miles up, fifty miles back.

“Peg, you can’t count that as a hundred!”

I totally can! Things often look different coming from the other direction so I’m counting it as a hundred.

“How many pictures did you take?” you wanna know.

Ballpark? 874.

“Yeah, but your camera takes like three pictures of the same thing,” you say.

My Canon would. It has a fast clicker in the stop action mode. The Nikon isn’t that way at all. It’ll snap off three in the action mode too but it has to be more intentional. I have to really hold the button to get it to take three. Therefore, I didn’t get three of the same pictures this time.

I’ve waded through all the pictures from the week and sorted out about 200 that are strictly road pictures. I need to weed that out and make the number more manageable. I’m thinking that no matter how much you love me, you ain’t got time for all that. Plus, I have six pictures from last time that I didn’t have room for and somewhere around 70 new ones for the week.

Shall we get to it?

First up, Tiger.

I was worried Mr. Mister might hurt him. When we got him six weeks ago, I took him out and ‘introduced’ him to Mr. They kissed noses, then Mr. Mister gave him a ‘kiss’ — he licked his mouth and nose. Maybe he knows Tiger’s just a baby. As encouraging as that encounter was along with the next two or three, I didn’t let him out on the patio when Mr. Mister was out there.

I stopped worrying when I looked out and saw them laying together on top of the feral cat house. Mr. Mister had come in when Tiger was out and I didn’t see him.

I was out taking care of my caterpillars when the sound of rocks clacking catches my attention. This little guy, who needs no fancy-schmancy toys, was picking up rocks, biting them...

 ...tossing them, and batting them around.

Smudge has warmed up to Tiger and plays with him. It only looks like he’s trying to kill his annoying little brother.

And Tiger likes steamed yellow squash! Who’d’ve thunk it! He ate two pieces.

Speaking of healthy foods, A recipe came up on Facebook for a healthy snack. Roasted chickpeas. I like chickpeas. Some people call them garbanzo beans.

Ya know what else I like? I like jelly beans. No, I LOVE jelly beans. Which is kinda funny considering I hated jelly beans when I was a kid. If we had candy at Easter and I was given a share of jelly beans, I’d give them to my siblings. If I’d’ve been smart I’d’ve traded for a candy I did like. I’m not that smart. Besides, to me jelly beans were worthless.

Used to be I could only get jelly beans at Easter — unless I wanted to pay premium price for Jelly Belly jelly beans. I didn’t. Now Walmart sells them year-round at a candy kiosk near the checkouts. I don’t buy them every time we go in — much as I’d like to, but I buy them once in a while.

So, there I was, munching jelly beans when this recipe for roasted chickpeas comes up. Since most of my snacking is mindless, I think, that would be better for me. I made a batch of roasted chickpeas flavored with rosemary.

“Were they better than jelly beans?” you ask.

Umm, no.

 

Pokeberries. The berries are especially poisonous. Young leaves and stems can be eaten if properly cooked. Birds spread this weed like wildfire. Anyplace they drop a berry you can bet a plant will pop up next year. Today, pokeberry is being tested as a possible treatment for cancer.

As a kid, my siblings and I used ripe pokeberries to decorate the sheds. We’d take a bunch of ripe, plump berries and throw them as hard as we could against the sides. As you can imagine it left big purple splotches. I don’t think I did it more than once or twice. It didn’t hold as much appeal to me as it did for my brothers.

This is the tiny flower of Wild Lettuce, a relative to our garden lettuce. Like many plants, it has uses in holistic medicine. It’s a good pain reliever and sleep aid. Savvy housewives once knew to allow their lettuce to bolt and would then harvest a mild pain reliever after enjoying all the salads the plant provided.

“What’s bolt?” you ask.

I know, right! I had to look it up. When a plant bolts it means it flowers.

If you Google Wild Lettuce, the WebMd site lists a whole bunch of stuff it’s used for. One of those things made me scratch my head. Excessive sex drive in women, it says. Why women and not men too? I wonder.

 

I thought you might enjoy this view of a skipper. People generally classify a skipper as a butterfly but they’re somewhere between a butterfly and a moth.

The moth, typically dressing in plain colors and patterns and laboring at the night shift, represents the working class of the taxonomic order. The butterfly, adorned in flashy colors and patterns and abroad in the daylight, represents the hoity-toity. The skipper, with characteristics of both the moth and the butterfly, falls into an intermediate stage. Combined, the moths, butterflies and skippers comprise more than two hundred thousand species throughout the world and more than 10,000 in Canada, the United States and northern Mexico. Moth species outnumber the butterfly and skipper species combined by about eight or ten to one. — Desert USA

Honeysuckle dressed in the morning dew.

This beautiful lady stopped for a quick visit after church last week. “I’ve never seen a Queen Ann’s Lace with a purple center,” she told me. So, we went walking until we found one.

A deer family.

 

Leaf-footed Bug.

    

    A Crane Fly. They look like huge mosquitoes and are sometimes called Mosquito Hawks or Skeeter Eaters. At this stage in their life they only reproduce then die. They have no mouth parts and are incapable of eating anything at all, let alone a mosquito. Nonetheless they are an important link in ecology. They are food for spiders, birds, and smaller mammals.

So the next time one gets in your house, gently cup him in your hands and put him outside.

 

A happy little frog on a milkweed leaf.

    Now here’s a shot my Canon absolutely would not take no matter how still I held it — not even if I used a tripod!

The bridge on the Wyalusing New Albany road is almost done!

 

 Old cars in an old garage. I took this on a shopping trip to Sayre.

             A tiny little Eastern Tailed Blue. They usually share space with the Spring Azure butterfly. They look very similar but the Tailed Blues have a ‘tail’ on the hind wing and the Azures don’t. Both butterflies are tiny; about the size of your thumbnail. 

I don’t know this guy’s name. His shape suggests he’s a damselfly but damselflies usually fold their wings back along their body when at rest, not out like a dragonfly.

Blue Dasher.

Autumn Meadowhawk.

I like this shot of a wasp on hardhack.

Red-spotted Purple. You can tell because he doesn’t have ‘tails’ like the swallowtails do.

Close-up of a fly. I believe this is a Flesh Fly. Most of these guys breed in carrion, dung, and other decaying material. A few lay their eggs in open wounds of mammals and that’s how they get their common name.

“What’s on his feet?” you wonder.

I think he’s been on a flower and now has shoes of pollen.

But don’t hold me to my ID here. There are about 120,000 species of flies; 16,000 in North America alone.

Virgin’s Bower is blooming. It’s also called Devil's Darning Needles, Love Vine, Wild Hops, and Woodbine. It’s an aggressively growing vine which can climb to heights of ten to twelve feet.

Even though the Indians used this plant, all parts of it are poisonous.

This guy is a faker. He wants other critters to think he’s a wasp but he’s not. He’s a Locust Borer. They lay their eggs in the wounds of a Black Locust Tree. They most commonly feed on goldenrods but I found this one on my milkweed.

This is Wood Sorrel or Sourgrass. All parts are eatable and have a lemony taste. It also makes a nice yellow dye.

Wild Mint. The leaves are edible raw or cooked. Having a strong minty flavor with a slight bitterness, they’re used as a flavoring in salads or cooked foods. An herb tea can be made from fresh or dried leaves.

My Gladiolus are blooming!

Since I don’t seem to have a lot of luck gardening, I get excited when anything I plant grows! I’m super excited to have Glads again next year. At least I was until Miss Rosie clued me in on something I didn’t know.

“What’s that?” you ask.

You have to dig up the bulbs in the fall if you want them again next year. Gladiolus bulbs won’t live through the winter here.

I also have a red one that bloomed too but some little yellow stinker tried to climb it and broke it.

Sigh.

Stinging Nettle. I know! I had a brush with it. It’s something you don’t soon forget. Stinging nettle has a long medicinal history. In medieval Europe, it was used as a diuretic (to rid the body of excess water) and to treat joint pain.

Stinging nettle has fine hairs on the leaves and stems that contain irritating chemicals which are released when the plant comes in contact with the skin. The hairs, or spines, of the stinging nettle are normally very painful to the touch. When they come into contact with a painful area of the body, however, they can actually decrease the original pain. Scientists think nettle does this by reducing levels of inflammatory chemicals in the body, and by interfering with the way the body transmits pain signals.

A finch.

I don’t know who or what this guy is. A fly? Maybe a treehopper?

Check this out. I first saw all of these orange stringy vines crawling through my milkweed patch a couple of weeks ago. Now I see its got flowers!

“What is it?” I know you wanna know — and so did I!

Meet Dodder, the creepy, orange-tentacled, plant-hunting vegetable vampire. This is a parasitic plant also called Devil’s Shoelaces, Wizard’s Net, Strangleweed, Witch’s Hair, and Hellbine.

Research has shown it’s able to recognize which plants are around it by a sense of smell. Every plant gives off a unique blend of compounds making it easy to tell cilantro from tomatoes by just a sniff. Not only can Dodder distinguish one plant from another, it can sense which is more nutritious and will move toward that one with great precision and attack it.

Dodder lacks chlorophyll and needs to vampirize other plants in order to live and reproduce. With the exception of grasses, it can parasitize nearly any plant. Once it reaches its intended victim, Dodder inserts root-like filaments called haustoria into the tissue of its prey and begins sucking out nutrient-rich sap.

Dodder can be hard to kill and produces a tremendous number of seeds very quickly and its seeds can remain viable in the soil for as long as 60 years!

Katydid.

A sundog.

Indian Strawberry or Mock Strawberry. You can eat the leaves and berry but don’t expect it to taste like a strawberry. Indian Strawberries don’t have any flavor.

A stink bug.

This is the largest patch of Bittersweet Nightshade I’ve ever seen!

Although not as poisonous as Deadly Nightshade or Belladonna, this one can still make you sick.

I’ve shown you lots of pictures of flowers and critters that I’ve seen this week and not given you much in the line of stories. So, here’s one for you.

I had two Monarchs born this week. First this female.

Then this male. See his hind wing spots?

I was out taking care of my Monarchs, cleaning out yesterday’s leaves and poop, when I found this poor guy dead in a pile of black goop.

What is it? I wondered. I know they can get diseases and even though I didn’t know what happened to this guy, I decided I’d burn it just in case. I took every leaf that had even a speck of black goop on it and set it on the stump. When I finished cleaning the butterfly house, I’d get the burnables from the house, toss the leaves on top, and burn it.

The very last leaf I took over to my pile on the stump — the very last one! — I was coming back and got stung on my forearm. I never heard the bee. I never saw the bee. But I sure do know what a bee sting feels like! I started swatting and brushing my arm as fast as I could. Like I said, I never saw him. I don’t know if it was a bee, wasp, or hornet. But that sting hurt worse than any other sting I’ve ever had. I put a poultice of baking soda on it and that did help, for a little while. Then I tried lavender oil, which didn’t help at all, so I made another batch of baking soda. It hurt all day! That night, in the middle of the night, it woke me up itching like crazy. The site of the sting stayed swollen and itchy for two more days. Today the swelling is down and there’s only a small knot there and thankfully the itching has eased up too.

In the meantime, I Googled Monarchs. One thing I learned is you shouldn’t let them hatch overtop of feeding caterpillars. There is a small amount of ‘birthing’ liquid that drops out.

“Mike, would you build me a new birthing house for my Monarchs?” I asked.

Mike’s a good husband. He built me two new Monarch houses. That way I didn’t have to worry about having a large number of cats (short for caterpillars) in such a small area. You can see my original Monarch house sitting on top of my feeding house.

Besides losing the cat in the pile of goo, I’ve lost two more. One has died in his chrysalis. The other climbed to the top, hung himself in the traditional j then died. I don’t know why.

          “Peg, what did you use for the sides of your houses?” you ask.

          Oh. Yeah. We used tulle. We stapled one on and hot glued the other. I like the stapled one better. It was faster and easier and looks nicer.

          Now, having said all of that, I have a confession to make. I was cleaning out the butterfly house one day and had all the cats on the leaf they were eating, on a plate where I put them so I could dump out the poo. When I came back and picked the plate up, one of the little cats was between my finger and the plate. I set it back down as fast as I could but it’s entirely possible that the one that died was the one injured during the plate-lifting incident. I don’t have any way of knowing for sure.

 

          “Peggy, Peggy, Peggy!”

          You sound exasperated.

          “You tease us with hundreds of road pictures and Mike looking at a new tractor, then don’t tell us anything more!”

          I know, right. I’m so bad. But since we’re winding down the week, I won’t make you wait any longer.

The tractor is a Fordson Major. They were made in Britain. In the early 60’s they were exported to the U.S. and the name was shortened to Ford. So is this a Ford? I don’t know. Shawn, the owner, called it a Fordson.

We drove up to Owego, New York to look at it. Shawn and his wife Tammy have pigs as pets.

“People say they’re as smart as dogs, but I don’t know,” Shawn said.

Tilly followed him around like a little puppy dog.

“Did you make this for her to wallow in?” I asked.

“Nope. Tilly made that all on her own. My wife puts water in it for her.” Shawn laughed. “Here I am, trying to keep the water away from the house and she’s dumping water next to the house!”

“Do you let her in the house when she’s all wet?”

“She’ll stay on the porch until she’s dry,” Shawn said.

Besides Tilly they have several other pigs. They’re planning on breeding and selling these guys.

And they have cats. And they have a dog. Hercules. He’s a Bull Mastiff.  While Mike and Shawn talked, Tilly and Hercules laid down to nap.

 Then Tilly got up and started pestering Hercules. She was biting his ear. Hercules didn’t like that at all and let out a deep guttural growl and barked a bark that shook the timbers — and scared me to death! 

“He won’t hurt her. He just warns her away,” Shawn said. But did Tilly quit? No! She did not! She came back and started nibbling again and Hercules had to give her another warning shot.

Mike was impressed with the size of the tractor and the reach of the backhoe and the price was right. He gave Shawn a deposit and we went home.

It took us a couple of days to arrange transportation then we made a second trip to Owego.

“Come over here and look under the porch,” Shawn said as soon as we pulled in his driveway. “We had nine babies born yesterday afternoon.”

“Who had babies?” I asked as I got down to look under.

“Pearl. She’s one you didn’t meet when you were here last time.”

Imagine my surprise when I look and see pigs!

The trucking company we hired to haul the tractor showed up just when they said they would. Tilly helped supervise the loading.

          Colin, the driver, unloaded the tractor for Mike when he arrived at our place.

          And the first thing Mike did was give it a bath.

            I find myself at the bottom of page sixteen and I hesitate to start another page. Look for an extra edition this week. It’ll contain the road pictures from our two trips to Owego. Next week I’ll tell you more about Mike’s new tractor.

                      Let’s call this one done!