Ichney Nursery

           When I play ball with Raini, the ball sometimes gets stuck in the valley between the roof and the old chip chute of the mill. I keep a ladder back there for easy access when I’ve gotta get up there and use my long stick, also strategically placed, to knock the ball down.

          It’s not even my fault! The ball has hard rubber knobs on it that makes its bounce unpredictable. Sometimes it’ll hit just right — or wrong — and the ball goes off the end of the big roof down onto a smaller roof. I’ll listen for it to hit the ground. Raini has already run to the other side, out of my sight, in anticipation of the ball coming off the roof. When it doesn’t, she comes back, stands under the chute, and listens as it rocks back and forth in the valley.

           Then she looks at me. 

          “Uh-oh,” I say. “Let’s get the ladder.

          Both dogs run ahead and wait at the ladder for me.

          I might go for a long time and not get the ball stuck, or I might get it stuck twice in one day. That’s when I quit playing. But at least I haven’t broken any more windows!

          Last week it got caught in the valley. Crossing the small section of yard between the chute and where the ladder is stored, I saw round holes in the ground.

          Must’ve hatched out some cicadas, I thought.

          This week I found out different.

          This week I see a large orange wasp and I’m excited!

          These things are so interesting! I’m sure I’ve talked about them before.

          This is a Sphex Ichneumoneus. Since that’s too hard to say, we’ll call her by her common name, the Great Golden Digger Wasp.

          That’s when I knew that the round holes in the ground were not exits for the cicada, but rather a nursery.

          This large wasp, about an inch and a half, may be scary, but they’re really harmless. They’re not aggressive and even though females have stingers, they only use them on their prey. Don’t test them, though. Being pinched or stepped on may cause them to sting. Male wasps may act aggressive, but they have no stingers and can’t hurt you.

          The female digs a main tunnel four to six inches deep, then secondary tunnels at right angles that lead to the nesting chambers. Then she’s off to hunt. They prefer katydids but will take grasshoppers and crickets, too.

          I was lucky enough to catch this female coming back with a katydid.

          It took her a long time to find the tunnel she wanted. I wonder if me having just mown the grass maybe erased her scent markers? I don’t even know if they do that but she was all over, up, and down the blades of grass, dragging her katydid with her.

   

           Bondi came to see what I was doing. She saw the wasp.

          “Leave it alone,” I told her. She wandered off to the shade and waited for me.

The Golden Digger finally found the hole she was looking for. She left the katydid and went down to inspect her tunnel. They have to make sure there aren’t any other enemy wasps in her tunnel. For another thing, she needs to check that she can get turned around and get back out before she drags the katydid in behind her.

          I watched as she backed out of the tunnel and dropped a rock. I’m gonna guess I knocked a bunch of stuff in the hole when I mowed because she took a long time cleaning house. She came backing out, kicking dirt behind her a bunch of times. You can see where she’s kicked it onto the katydid’s head.

          Finally she was satisfied, grabbed the katydid, and pulled it in the tunnel.    

    

          She’ll put Katy in a chamber, lay an egg on it, and seal the chamber. Her youngin’ll hatch in two or three days and devour its still-paralyzed host alive. I can understand this part even if I don’t like it. If she kills the katydid then her baby’ll have two- or three-day dead food. That’s no good. Babies need good, fresh food.

Over the fall and winter, the wasp larva will undergo a complete metamorphosis. In June, it will emerge as an adult and begin the process all over again.

The wasp females prefer sandy soil with a food source close by and often nest in the same area. I’ve seen at least three out here at my nursery and there are a dozen or more nesting tunnels.

Just to the right of the nursery is a patch of huge pokeweed. This may be part of the reason they chose to nest here.

“Peg, is that by your electric meter?” you ask. “What if they need to get in there?”

It is! But how often does the electric company come out to the meters? Since it’s read by satellites — never!

Until, that is, your meter starts sending power outage messages to the electric company when your power’s not out and after the third time they come out to change your meter!

And that’s exactly what happened this week.

“I let the pokeweed grow because it’s food for the birds,” I told the nice young man. Then I grabbed the clippers from the golf cart as we headed to the back. “If we need to cut it, we will.”

You could barely see the meter.

“Want me to cut them?” I asked when I showed him where it was.

“Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen pokeweed that tall before,” he said. “I think I can change it just fine without having to cut it.”

Knocking the pokeweed to one side, he was able to change the meter. It wasn’t until the next day, when I went to take this picture, that I see we broke the stems on a couple and they’re laying down. They’ll probably die now. I hope my Ichneys can still find enough food.

My week started on a sad note.

“What’s going on?” you wanna know.

I woke up to find Meep had died. I’d only had him about five days and Pet Smart has a two-week guarantee.

I packed Meep up and we headed back down to Dickson City to get Meep point two.

Crossing the bridge of our little creek, I’ve noticed there were birds sitting on the dead log that extends out over the water. This time I was ready with my long lens and got a picture. It’s a Kingfisher!

The railyard.

Repainting the totem pole. Next time I go past, I’ll try to get a picture of it done.

Remember from our last trip down the tree with the fresh scar?

“It looks like they got the tree down,” I said to Mike. I couldn’t see any scar now.

Going past, we could see they were rebuilding the roof. 

I love this outbuilding with its soft blue color and adorning gladiolus. 

We didn’t do anything else on this trip except stop for gas. It was straight down and straight back.

When we got home, I took the box with Meep.2 and the cage with Meepette into the small bathroom and closed the door. The last time I transferred the finches from the box to the cage I didn’t have any trouble. This time I did. Meep.2, henceforth called Meep, escaped. I set the box down, not thinking to close the cage door and Meepette joined Meep on the light fixture. It took me a little while to catch them. I caught one in midflight — gently, and the other one landed on my head. I was able to cup him in my hand. He was exhausted after being chased around the bathroom.

Mike thought our cage was too small for the finches and went online and ordered a larger cage. It was one-third the price as the same one at Pet Smart.

          It comes in a flat box. You have to open the pieces up and put them together. True to our name, the Do-it-again Lubys, we had it partially put together and had to take it all apart and start again.

          Meet the new Mr. and Mrs. Meeps. Yep. That’s right. Meep and Meepette Meeps.

          She really loves this new guy and grooms him — a lot. Or maybe she’s trying to peck his brains out, I don’t know. After awhile he has enough and flies away from her. 

          My oldest and much-adored sister Patti is right. Birds are dirty. They scatter seeds all over the place; sometimes I think it’s on purpose, although I haven’t caught them at it yet. I usually just hear the seeds hitting the floor or my desk.

          And if they’re on a perch with their butts close to the wire cage... they don’t care. They just let it go and mom can clean it off the wire.

          Be that as it may, and nonetheless, this pair is way more talkative than the last pair were and I like to listen to their chatter.

          The new cage has four covered feeding cups. I’ve gotten to where I put the food and water back in different spots. Make them look for it. In one of the cups I’ll put a little treat. They didn’t touch the broccoli (who can blame them for that!) but Meepette picked on today’s banana. Tomorrow? Maybe apple or carrot.

Mike needed some info from the township so we took a road trip out to the township building. We haven’t been out those back dirt roads in a long time and were surprised to see that they’re not dirt roads anymore. They were all chip and sealed.

“I wish they’d do ours,” Mike lamented.

Mike got the info he needed and the gal there said everyone wants their road done but they’ve done all the roads they’re going to this year.

“Maybe next year,” she said.

We can always hope. Everyone drives these roads so fast! The dust makes it miserable, otherwise I’d be okay with dirt road.

I did take pictures.

Putting in an electric fence.

The streak on the left is a reflection on the window I was shooting through.

The reflections totally ruined this next picture. If it hadn’t’ve, I would’ve cut me out of it.

This picture reminds of me a guy we knew. His kid was in an accident and the car looked like this. The guy put it in the yard along with a sign saying something like his kid walked away unhurt from this car and he gave thanks to God.

A grasshopper inside my Glad. 

          A little flower spider on Queen Ann’s Lace. 

“Are there any uses for Queen Ann's Lace?” you ask.

As with most wildflowers, there are uses for it.

The flowers of Queen Ann’s Lace will produce a yellow dye.

You can eat it, too. It has a carrot-like taproot and in fact the carrots we eat were developed from this wild carrot.

Using first year Queen Anne’s Lace plants is recommended. The roots are long, pale, woody, and finger-thin. You can use it in soups, stews, and making tea. First year leaves can be chopped and tossed into a salad. Flower clusters can be ‘french-fried’ or fresh flowers can be tossed into a salad. The aromatic seed is used as a flavoring in stews and soups.

In folk medicine, Queen Anne’s Lace seeds were used to prevent pregnancies. There’s research today that suggests there may have been some merit to this so if you’re pregnant or hoping to conceive you should avoid both the flower heads and the seeds.

It also been used as an antiseptic, to soothe the digestive tract, and as a diuretic. The root was grated and mixed with oil to calm topical burns.

A half-grown taddy and an adult frog in my small pond. 

I liked how the sun was shining through the leaves onto the water, but of course the picture doesn’t capture its beauty and mystery. 

Mike worked on his sculpture a little this past week.

“It doesn’t look like I want it to,” he said.

“Keep working on it,” is my advice. “You’ll know when it’s done.”

I love seeing this creative side of my handsome mountain man.

And speaking of knowing when something’s done...

I finished the double-sided porch sign I was working on.

I was working from a picture and didn’t know how I was going to paint the weave of the basket. “It might end up being a clay pot like the one on the other side,” I told the handsome guy who commissioned this.

“That would be alright, too,” Lamar Kipp said.

“You Tube it,” my peeps said.

I hadn’t thought of that. I was going to do what I did with the flowers, which is block in colors, then add darks and lights. You Tube sounded like a great idea. You can find a video on just about anything there! My cute little redhaired sister fixed her car’s AC by watching a You Tube video. I put the key words in the search box, hit enter, and a bunch of videos came up. I watched a few and learned several things.

There are as many ways to paint a basket as there are artists painting it. Some paint light first. Others paint dark first. Some paint the background first. Others paint the foreground first. There were different size weaves. Different colors. They used different brushes. But there was one thing they all had in common.

“What’s that?” you wanna know.

They all started.

I started and there came a point where things were looking good.

“It looks good like that,” Mike said. “I’d leave it alone.”

Did I leave it alone?

NO! I did not!

I kept trying to add more detail and it wasn’t looking better. In fact, it was looking worse. I ended up repainting part of the basket and putting the barest hints of basket weave in and calling it done.

One thing I always guarantee. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy it.

Lamar did like it. “Just what I was looking for,” he said. And he paid me, even giving me a little more than I asked for.

 Speaking of the Kipps...

Lamar and Rosie came back from visiting their daughters in the southern part of the state. They brought back peaches and was kind enough to share them with us. First, in the form of a slice of blueberry peach pie (which was yummy!) and second, a half dozen peaches. I gave them a hot bath, slipped the skins, chunked ‘em, added a little sugar, and let them sit for a few hours. When I dished ‘em up, I added some chilled canned milk. Peaches and cream, just like my beautiful Momma used to make for us kids.

I saw one other bug this week. This is a Tiger Bee Fly. These guys are almost an inch long, not counting their wings. There are about 800 species of bee flies in North America. It parasitizes the larvae of carpenter bees. The female lays her eggs in places where the carpenter bees have laid theirs and the Tiger Bee Fly larvae eat the bee larvae.

Bee flies are true flies and not bees at all. They don’t sting or bite but because they look like they could, it helps them evade predators.

This old woman has now taken 64 turns around the sun, aka, I had a birthday. I’m no longer 63 years old.

Mike took me to the Wyalusing Hotel for a prime rib dinner. Well, I had prime rib, he had ribeye.

When we got out of the car and I looked at this handsome building with all its gingerbreading, I noticed, for the first time, the stars.

They’ve always been there but the Hotel was recently repainted and they painted some of the stars blue, which makes them stand out.

I was going to have the waitress take our photo but instead of bothering her, I decided to do a selfie with my phone camera.

          I really made out this year.

          Mike took me to dinner and got me the Meeps and a large cage for them to live in.

          I love Meep and Meepette Meeps, even if they do make meep messes for me to clean up.

          “You know that means we can never go on vacation again,” Mike said.

          Raini already made that hard. We’d have to board her since she doesn’t travel well.

          “We could get one of the young gals from church to come in and pet sit for us,” I suggested. Mike wasn’t crazy about that idea but now, since we have the Meeps, maybe he’ll change his mind — if we decide to go away.

My Miss Rosie gave me a gift, too. She painted an old washboard for my laundry room. My heart melts every time I look at it. I can’t tell you how much I love this. She captured me with my short hair, favorite purple shirt, she gave me a slim waist and an all too accurate bigger backside, if you know what I mean.

“Do you see anything in there that you don’t have?” Miss Rosie asked.

“I don’t know what that means,” I told her.

“In the picture. Do you see anything you don’t have?”

Such a simple question with an oh so obvious answer in hindsight. But I still wasn’t getting what she was asking. “There’s Raini and Bondi (she did a fabulous job capturing their likeness, too!) and the pond,” I said. I moved to the other side. “A tree with a wind spinner in it...”

Miss Rosie held up her index finger and then I understood.

“I don’t have a wind spinner.”

Miss Rosie disappeared into the house and came back out on the porch where we were visiting and handed me a second gift. I opened it and knew what it was.

          “A balloon like yours!” I was pleased as punch.

          “Only yours is purple with hummingbirds,” she said.

That was something I couldn’t see until I popped it open. I took it home and hung it on my kitchen patio where I can watch it spinning lazy circles from my chair at the table.

          I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such kind, thoughtful, generous, and loving friends in my life. I am truly blessed. 

          With that, let’s call this one done.