Go Native...

One sunny day when the canes were in full bloom, I wandered out to my black raspberry patch and was gratified to find eight different species of pollinators hard at work among the blossoms. I counted at least two species of bumble bees, two or three honeybees, a pair of solitary native bees, both different species, a wasp, and a California hairstreak butterfly.

Pollinators, their plight and diminishing numbers are much in the news these days, and while the honeybee and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) claim much of the spotlight, one should note that 80 per cent of pollinated crops in this country is effected by native bees and other pollinators. According to my hymenopterist friend Don Rolfs there are some 600 species of native bees in Washington State alone and at least 4,000 nationwide. When you think about those numbers, consider the vast potential for pollination the nation's horticulturists and agriculturists have in their (and our) favor. Recognizing the pending agricultural crisis, the Federal Government last year initiated the National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honeybees and Other Pollinators, earmarking 82 million dollars for the program.The Strategy addresses three issues:

• Cut the number of losses of overwintered honeybee colonies to 15 per cent (Note: many beekeepers lose all or a majority of their hives over winter...in my case five or six hives.)
• Increase the population of the monarch butterfly to 225 million butterflies occupying approximately 15 acres in the overwintering grounds in Mexico.
• Pollinator habitat Acreage: restore 7 million acres of land for pollinators over the next five years.

I am of a mind that one can't have too many bees on one's property, especially if he or she gardens or has fruit trees. My honeybees have set the apple crop on our one slim acre to the heaviest in memory. But one doesn't have to tend honeybees to encourage and sustain populations of bees and other pollinators on his property. Perhaps the best examples are tube bees, communal bees (bees that nest in the same vicinity but carry out solitary reproductive cycles) that lay eggs and raise young in tubes.

The orchard mason bee is the most popular and well-known tube bee pollinator. To sustain working adult populations, mason bee cocoons can be harvested in fall, and reintroduced the following spring.

A few years back my brother Kevin gifted me with a creative and practical gift any bee lover would welcome: a nest box packed with six inch bamboo tubes of various diameters fashioned from bamboo canes he cut from his bamboo "forest" at Chipping Twig Farms in Orting.

Mason bees don't do well on our property. Masons only have a range of a hundred yards and nest close to food sources. Bee forage, I suspect, is slim here in early spring when the masons begin their cycle. (The urban bee lover should be gratified to know masons flourish in city neighborhoods because of the diversity of pollen and nectar sources in the urban landscape.) In July, however, native bees throng to the bamboo tube box. At midday half a dozen or more busy insects flit about the box, working the tubes.

Miner bees also flourish on our property. I first noticed little mounds of soil in the garden and alongside the driveway. At first glance I thought them to be worm castings, the byproduct of night crawlers. Closer observation proved the hillocks to be access tunnels dug by miner bees, mining subterranean homes for themselves. One species of miners is a dazzling iridescent green, a striking little beauty less than half an inch long.

  

Even if you are a rural resident with a mere postage stamp lawn, you can do much to encourage and sustain a pollinator population in your backyard. For one, make your property a bee-friendly habitat: choose and apply organic pest and weed controls where and whenever possible.

And don't forget the bumblebee, that hearty foul weather flier you will find buzzing about the spring blackberry and blueberry blossoms. They will brave light rain and drizzle when honeybees and small natives stay indoors warm and dry. This spring bumbles established a colony in one of our bird nesting boxes. (The Man Who Poked the Bumblebee Nest, 5/4/2016)

Houses for tube bees take up little room. Hang them on your fence, above an exterior entryway, from a backyard tree. Bee houses, tubes included, are readily available at garden shops (nice for gifts, too, especially if you have your own bamboo grove).

A container garden--vegetable and floral--creates a symbiosis between the gardener and his apis-type friends. Alliums, zinnias, certain varieties of dahlia are pollen and nectar rich (alliums are bee magnets). The Butterfly bush or buddleia is a pollinator's delicatessen. Vegetables: cucumbers, zucchini, squash and pumpkins are pollen producers and proliferaters.

As the squash blossoms unfold in the morning sun, honeybees furred and laden with pollen particles valiantly seek the necessary lift for the flight back to the hive. Native bees, I've discovered, are partial to tomatillos and on a late summer day nearly every blossom  in the garden has a striped native bee foraging on it. In today's pollinator-conscious world a brief search is certain to turn up lists of plantings bee lovers might select to create pollinator and butterfly gardens in their backyard and property.

So make your backyard bee-friendly. It's a good way to study bee behavior, a great opportunity to teach the younger generation about bees, allow them to observe nature's "busy bees" up close and personal, help children understand bees are the gardener's friends, not something just to swat at. And bee watching allows the gardener to take a welcome break once in awhile from those seemingly endless gardening chores.

At Sixes and Sevens...

An interesting phrase, this one. I first ran across the saying in the script of Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth. I was a high school drama director at the time, and as it was my directing debut, I had something to prove. First time directors, I'd heard, often chose Wilder's Our Town because the staging required a simple set, a bare stage with chairs representing cemetery plots. The Skin of Our Teeth, on the other hand, called for elaborate sets and numerous set changes which the set crew rehearsed countless times so that each took less than three minutes.

The context of the phrase: the Antrobus household is in a topsy turvey state because father George has failed to return from work at his customary six o'clock time. Lily Sabrina, the household maid, sums up the turmoil by saying: "It's the coldest day of the year. The dogs are sticking to the sidewalks. The world is at sixes and sevens." In other words, things are in a state of chaos, disorder, disarray.

I've been thinking about that phrase a lot these days. Geopolitical turmoil, terrorism rampant ("The Middle-East is everywhere," someone recently said), mass shootings here at home. I can't remember the last time I've seen the flag flying high at its masthead. The current political scene: someone who's never had a job suddenly wants one; the other, who has had several, given a tainted resume, will have a hard time finding an employer. The oceans are warming, melting the heat reflecting icecaps. Our refrigerator ice maker is on the fritz....

And I'm expecting a phone call at any moment. The news will not be good.

The world is at sixes and sevens.

A Foolish Consistency: a Literary Digression...

Strange where one's head goes when pricked by certain stimuli. Take this morning, for instance, when Gladys and I rolled out into the mist for our constitutional in the Valley. Propped up at the entrance to Jim Cabe's driveway was a garish orange warning sign. I knew it was the weekend before the anniversary of our Grand Old Republic but thought it highly unlikely Jim would be hosting a celebratory Hell's Angels motorcycle rally: as if the Cabe residence is the Sturgis of Tualco Valley. Besides, if a biker can't navigate 200 yards of roadway without tipping his bike, he shouldn't be straddling one...unless, perhaps, it's a trike.

The County has been prepping the Upper Loop Road for resurfacing all spring. I first noticed the white graffiti highlighting pavement cracks. Then the serpentine black sealer cover up, (one looked suspiciously like a '60's peace symbol; County guys having a little fun?). Yellow plastic tabs next and the gravel overlay for the asphalt to follow. Thus the warnings for bikers rumbling (screaming?) devil-may-care through the Valley.

But propping a warning sign at the head of a long driveway seemed a bit superfluous and brought to mind a string of literary allusions, the first of which was Emerson's famous quote from his essay "Self-Reliance": "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds/Adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines."Another on the topic of consistency stated by Kenneth Roberts in the forward to his novel Lydia Bailey:

"...; narrow men who consistently upheld the beliefs and acts of one political party and saw no good in any other; shortsighted men who consistently refused to see that the welfare of their own nation was dependent on the welfare of every other nation; ignorant men who consistently thought that the policies of their government should be supported and followed, whether these policies were right or wrong...;"

And then there's the poem "Mending Wall" by New England's poet laureate Robert Frost in which his subject is a stubborn neighbor whose "foolish consistency" binds him to the old saying "Good fences make good neighbors." As he complies with the neighbor's stubborn demand they annually repair the stone wall dividing their properties, Frost maintains their labors are just "another kind of outdoor game...there where it is we do not need the wall:/ He is all pine and I am apple orchard./ My apple trees will never get across/ And eat the cones under his pine trees, I tell him." But the neighbor "...will not go behind his father's saying,/ And he likes having thought of it so well/ He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'"

Our County servants, in their defense, constipated by regs, codes, and guidelines would be the first to justify--consistently, of course-- the misuse of common sense and resources as "We're just doing our job." After all, Jim Cabe's driveway is a designated "County Road" (Christenson Rd.), thus must be posted with the cautionary warning. However should Gladys and I decide to visit the Cabes, we'll heed the advice and pedal carefully because Gladys is like William Faulkner's mule, "[She] will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once."

Just one more allusion for you. No need for thanks. Call it literary lagniappe.

The Humble Pie: Gooseberry...

I readily admit the worst pie I ever made had a gooseberry filling. Unpalatable it was, to say the least. Just one bite and into the garbage with it...a total waste of my time and one perfectly good man crust. But you capitalize on past mistakes, right? Thus my next gooseberry pie, if not the best pastry I ever made, was certainly the most exotic, a gustatory treat down to the very last mouthful. Here's how the tale of the two pies unfolded.

When you have an horticultural bent and one slim acre with which to play, you may be inclined to try a little of this, some of that. I like to think of our place as "the Valley Sampler," and in keeping with that moniker I've added gooseberries to the backyard garden.

Just how the cultivar came to be called the "gooseberry" I have yet to discover. In fact, one plus of the gooseberry is, unlike our other berry crops, birds avoid it; the bushes require no protective netting. When I tell them I grow the fruit, most people ask for an explanation; not only have they never seen a gooseberry but mere mention of the plant is usually a first for them.

The gooseberry is native to Europe (Ribes uva-crispa) and put to a variety of uses there, primarily in preserves, jams, jellies, and conserves. I cultivate two bushes: the Old World variety and the North American strain Ribes hirtellium. The former fruits a green berry that ripens to a yellowish color; the latter, a larger fruit, purple when ripe.

I was excited for my first crop, anxious to make a batch of jelly. Although the fruit is uncommon here in the U.S., I had no trouble finding a jelly recipe. In fact I found recipes for jam, preserves, conserves, and something the English call a "gooseberry fool," a dessert concoction of stewed gooseberries in sweet custard. All recipes gave precise proportions of sugar and juice, cooking times, processing and storage guidelines, which was all well and good...but not a one told you WHEN THE GOOSEBERRIES WERE RIPE. I picked the berries at the "pucker" stage of ripeness, the point at which my grandson, whose four-year old palate craves sour things, screwed his face into a Shar Pei's likeness when he crunched down on the green orb.

The jelly turned out so-so...certainly sweet enough (after all, jams and jellies are nothing more than fruit flavored sugar) but had very little flavor.

Then came the pie fiasco. And you know how that turned out. More research needed: how to tell when a gooseberry is ripe. This is what I learned--post pie disaster unfortunately. First, there's the "squeeze" test. Take a berry between the thumb and index finger and squeeze, If the result is like pinching a marble, save the berry for my grandson; however, if the fruit "gives," is sponge-like, it's pie-ready. The pie maker can double check by the "taste" test. The berry should have a sweet-sour quality: the flesh sweet; the skin tart.

After climbing to those heights on the gooseberry learning curve, I attempted pie number two, a recipe I found for "Old-Fashioned Gooseberry Pie," the ingredients of which complement the unique flavor of the fruit. The ingredients follow:

5 cups gooseberries, blossom ends and stems removed
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp grated fresh ginger
Juice and zest of one orange
1/3 cup instant tapioca
4 Tbsp butter (set aside for later)

Combine all ingredients except butter in a large sauce pan and place over medium heat. Cover until gooseberries start to soften and burst (about 5 minutes). Then uncover and keep barely simmering on medium-low heat for about ten minutes. Remove from heat and cool.

The crust: one Man Crust (top and bottom). Form bottom crust in a nine inch pie plate, fluting the rim of crust. Weight with pie weights and bake at 375 degrees for ten minutes or until golden brown. Ladle in filling, spread butter in dollops evenly throughout the filling.

Top crust: using the rim of a small glass or cookie cutter, fashion circles from the pastry and layer them in a concentric circle pattern, leaving a hole in the middle and an inch to an inch and a half space between rim and outer ring of pastry. Whisk together one egg and a Tbsp of milk and brush the pastry circles with the egg wash.

Bake at 375 degrees for 35-50 minutes until vigorously bubbling. (Suggestion: set pie on a metal sheet or pizza pan; filling will bubble over.)

Approximate time to prepare: 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Note: Much longer if you have to pick the gooseberries. Longer yet if you have to grow them. Good luck.

Attribution: beekman1802.com/recipes/old-fashioned-gooseberry-pie

A Bother of Wasps...

KATHERINE: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

PETRUCHIO: My remedy then is to pull it out.

KATHERINE: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.

PETRUCHIO: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting.
                        In his tail.

        Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew

The collective noun for wasps is "pladge" as in a "pladge" of wasps. That may be but considering the waspish invasion that's descended upon our property, I much prefer the collective a "bother"of wasps. On any given warm spring day they are everywhere, drifting along on the breeze, legs dangling like tails of a kite. A fog of them cascades from the shake roof. I find their nests in the strangest places: an empty flower pot, inside my little greenhouse cloche, under a piece of scrap lumber. Just the other day I removed three small nests from inside the chicken coop. Nests hang from the soffits, the carport, the eaves of the shed.

The woodshed is a favorite nesting place for them. Before I remove a stick of firewood from the stack, I inspect the underside of the roof for their telltale gray cones. Many's the time I've gingerly removed a stick from beneath a nest bristling with the bothersome things, each posturing for assault. Their numbers seem to grow each year, their nests more plentiful, the airspace filled with more and more. Our swallow nest box has remained vacant for two or three years because, I'm fairly certain, they tired of the wasps' incessant pestering to gain access. For years a pair of violet-green swallows nested in our roof gable, but the hordes of wasps living under the cedar shakes proved too much competition for them. If the day's a warm one and I leave the truck windows down for ventilation, I'm certain to have a couple of wasps riding shotgun with me when I run my next errand.

In the two story ranch house, my home as a boy, every fall wasps would build nests in the attic above the knotty pine plank that covered the ceiling pitch of my bedroom. In the warm autumn afternoons they would ooze from the hot attic and cluster around the light fixture in clumps of forty or fifty. I learned from experience that at anytime one was likely to drop on me or an unsuspecting visitor and sting upon impact. At bedtime you'd be well advised to inspect the bed clothes before you slipped under them.

It became my ritual those Indian Summer afternoons of clumping wasps to sanitize my sleeping space. Home from school I'd rush upstairs to assess the day's battleground and find a clump or two clinging from the ceiling. Next out came the folding card table which I'd set up to one side beneath the enemy. Laying a fly swatter close by, I'd prepare the necessary ordnance for the assault: projectiles fashioned from newspaper, each with a fold in the middle so I could get a firm purchase with thumb and forefinger. I knew an all out attack would be a mistake: swatting a clump of fifty or sixty wasps was likely to cause painful retribution. (Unlike honeybees that are armed only with a single shot because of their barbed sting, a wasp is--or can be, should it wish--a repeat offender and do a stinging dance up and down a bare arm. Snicker snak....) Strategy was to even the odds: take out a number of the enemy, trim their numbers, until one or two swats could dispatch the remainder.

I began the offensive by slipping a stout rubber band over my fore and middle fingers, hooking a paper missile between the strands, and taking careful aim at the nest, let fly, and dash under the card table when a direct hit would tumble six or eight to the floor where they lay momentarily stunned. I'd rush out and whale away with the swatter, make short work of them. The battle would continue until only a half dozen remained. First making sure my shirtsleeves were rolled to the wrist, the rest I'd take on mano e mano. The wasp wars lasted until the October frosts dispatched my ceiling foes.

These pesky fellows are paper or "umbrella" wasps, genus polistes, a commonplace North American wasp: "umbrella" because of their nests of open faced hexagonal cells (unlike the archetypal football-shaped nest of their hornet cousins), housing for developing larvae. Wasps attach the nests with a thread-like pillar or "petiole" around the base of which they secrete an ant repellent.

If you're a reader of The Ripple, you know I'm hypersensitive concerning the subject of bees and quickly come to their defense whenever someone confuses any bug that flies in his face or buzzes in his ear as a "bee." Most likely the culprit is a wasp or hornet--and of those two, I'm putting my money on the latter. Not only do wasps and hornets differ in appearance, so do their flight patterns.

Wasps are drifters in flight. Long legs trailing behind, they laze through the air seemingly without purpose. Hornets bullet along as if they were high on amphetamines, darting here and there like insect hummingbirds. If an obnoxious, supercharged bug tries to appropriate your piece of barbecued chicken at the picnic table,
you can bet the party crasher is not a bee but a hungry hornet.

Although bothersome, I admit, wasps serve the gardener by pollinating his crops, berries in particular. These little paper sculptors are seldom aggressive and if you're uncomfortable with their presence, instead of dosing their nests with a noxious chemical, encourage them elsewhere by removing their nests with a swift swish of a broom. A word to the wise: just don't surprise a nest of them as Kelly Bolles did the other day. I stopped to chat with Kelly and he showed me his swollen right hand, puffed up by protective wasps when he accidentally laid hands on their hidden nest while cleaning his gutters.

The Valley Loses Another Farmer. In Memoriam: Tim Frohning, March 31, 1956--May 8, 2016...

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

Psalm 1:3

Friend, neighbor, and farmer Tim Frohning left our Valley and this life May 8, 2016. I knew Tim had been in failing health the last few years. When I heard his passing was imminent, I realized I had some unsaid thank-yous I needed to share with him and to this purpose, I paid Tim a visit. As I drove the Lower Loop Road to the Frohning Family Farm, I mulled over what I wanted to say and how I should broach the subject without my visit appearing to be a last farewell, which, I'm sad to say, happened to be the case.

Tim had been under hospice care for some time, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I approached his bedroom. To my surprise Tim was alert, called me by name, and lifted a hand in greeting. His grip was strong, and as I held that meaty hand, I thought of all the work, all the farming that hand had done over the years. Two visitors were just leaving and for the next forty-five minutes it was just the two of us.

We talked about our history in the Valley, mine which began in 1975, his, of course, much earlier. I chose this tack as it steered me to the thank-you I had come to deliver. I reminded Tim of the pile of concrete slab, remnants of our backyard patio, that had to be removed to make way for the sun room we added to the house in 1981. The pile was an eyesore, full of weeds, a hindrance to the landscaping of our side yard. Sometime or other I must have mentioned that heap of concrete scrap to Tim. He offered the loan of his farm truck which had a dump bed. "Haul it out here," Tim said, "I've got just the place for it." And I did, two loads. Tim remembered that truck and the dumping site, as well. Thus my thank-you for his neighborly kindness. Then it was idle talk until I noticed Tim was tiring, drifting in and out of the conversation. "You must have had a lot of visitors, "I said, and asked if there were too many at times. "A lot of people," he replied, cue for me to take my leave. I gave that big hand a final shake, told him to take care, and left. That was the last time I saw Tim Frohning.

At Tim's memorial officiating pastor and close family friend shared with the large audience how that tough old farmer hoodwinked death time after time during his last six weeks. Death would hover around Tim's bedroom door, peek in, realize he was wasting his time, and take his mission elsewhere. That was their relationship those final days. Death would show up, Tim would send him packing...too much yet left to do....

It's impossible to know for certain a dying man's thoughts during his last weeks, days, hours, but that was not the case with Tim Frohning. Sometime during the final days of the "end game" Tim decided the Frohning Farm needed ten thousand strawberry plants. One evening--it had to be Tim's final week--I get a phone call. To my surprise, caller ID announced "Tim Frohning." I picked up the phone and there was Tim on the other end, voice strong and gruff as ever. He was concerned about his raspberries, wanted to know if I could bring down a hive of bees to set the season's crop, a last request I was only too happy to honor--one neighbor helping another as Tim had helped me. The day of Tim passing, the bees were hard at work in his raspberry patch. That was Tim Frohning, lifetime Valley farmer, thinking about his farm,  farmin' away until his very last breath.

The Man Who Poked the Bumblebees' Nest...

Last summer a pair of chickadees nested in one of our nest boxes. I left the abandoned nest, a soft mound of fluff constructed mostly of moss, in hopes they'd return this year.This spring I've seen a pair, perhaps last year's, checking out the nesting box. A half dozen times they've inspected the nest, popping in and out and then going on about their chickadee business.

It's nesting time for our local avian species and the chickadees have apparently decided to relocate. A couple of days ago I think I discovered the reason. I opened the nest box door and noticed the floor of the box was damp and nasty looking.

My thought: I'll clean it out, let the chickadees build a new nest...plenty of building material around, especially in our backyard. I pulled out the old nest and tossed it nearby, went to the outdoor faucet and rinsed out the inside of the box. When I returned to hang the box, I happened to glance down at the discarded nest and noticed a bumblebee hovering around it.

I bent down to investigate. Mid-nest I noticed a number of cocoons the size of hummingbird eggs. I poked around in the moss and to my surprise two or three little bumblebees, like fuzzy baby chicks, emerged: the chickadee nest had morphed into a bumblebee nest.

Doing my best to keep the nest intact, I carefully picked it up, reinstalled the clump in the nest box, and quickly closed the door. I checked the ground for any stragglers. Circling a fragment of fluff was a large bumblebee. The queen, I thought. Her majesty landed on the remnant, perplexed, I'm sure, as to the whereabouts of her brood. I captured her in my glove and after a shake or two dislodged her into the nest and closed her in, hoping she'd set things to right again.

Since the incident I've peeked in the box two or three times and each time saw a couple of baby bumblers prowling about the moss. Yesterday I looked in again. No activity. I poked the nest a time or two, eliciting an angry hummmm from within the moss. Today, hoping for a photo op, I opened the door again and six or eight of the babies came swarming out in full defensive mode. I took my photos and with a couple of  irate bumblers orbiting my head backed quickly away.

As a staunch advocate of all species of bees, I maintain the more plentiful they are, the better for us all. At this posting the outdoor temperature is fifty-seven degrees with a light rain falling. My honeybees, fair weather folks, are taking the day off, in out of the weather. Yet bumblebees are foraging in my black raspberries, setting this year's jam and jelly crop. A nest of them on the property is a blessing indeed.

But I'll miss the chickadees.