Garden Ninja

As much as I'd like to think I'm a 50-year old with the reflexes of a ninja, it's not me I'm talking about. It's this praying mantis. I've noticed a real explosion of mantids in my garden this August, and I've been enjoying watching them work. They are such a highly specialized insect. Many folks consider them beneficial, and I do too; they eat things like grasshoppers and crickets that can destroy your garden. However, they do not discriminate. They will eat any insect that comes near them, and this morning I watched one catch a honeybee in a very clever manner.

It waited patiently in the plum tree, hanging just above a sunflower, looking for all the world like a leaf. It noticed that bees were coming to the sunflower. So it waited. And waited. And waited.

Every so often she would do a little sideways rock. But mostly she stayed very still.

And then bam! Leap! Pounce! Forelegs sinking into the bee and holding it in such a way that it could not sting her.

First she ate a leg, and then she munched on a wing. Or maybe she just removed them and then moved to the meat of the bee. Mantids eat their prey alive. They do not sting it or poison it, just hold it skewered in their barbed forelegs and start to eat. 

Mantids have two compound eyes and three simple eyes between those. In the compound eyes, there is a concentrated area called a 'fovea' that allows them to focus and track. Apparently they can jump with extreme precision and even change direction or twist their bodies mid-air. They seem to attack anything that flies, and there are some mantids that eat hummingbirds or other small birds!

I came in to start this blog; fifteen minutes later I went out to see how the lunch was going, and the mantis was done! Licking her chops!

You can't even tell from her body that she ate a bee. She is still in the same place, so I'm assuming she's going to do some more hunting, although I don't think they need to eat all that often. This plum tree is in the middle of a pollinator garden and is full of flowers - mostly cosmos, at the moment, some verbascum, some tithonia that haven't yet bloomed, and the fading sunflowers. It's a good place to hunt, if you're a mantis.

In a month or so, I will check this area for egg sacs, which the mantis encases with a sort of brown hard material. I imagine they will be hard to see and perfectly adapted to the surroundings. 

Are you seeing a lot of mantids in your garden this August?

Romesco Sauce

We love making romesco sauce every summer and freezing some for winter. It uses up some of the harvest, and really tastes good with grilled steak. It's also good on fish, chicken, or pork. Or you could use it as a spread on a sandwich. Or with cheese and crackers. It's slightly spicy and full of flavor. 

I make a double batch; we have some with dinner and for lunch the next day, and the rest I put into mason jars. I cover the surface of the sauce with a film of olive oil (just like I would with pesto) to preserve the color, then I stash the labeled jars in the freezer. Taking this sauce out in dark, dreary January is a real treat. 

Here's the recipe:

“Romesco Sauce

This is the recipe for a single batch. If you want extra to freeze, it easily doubles. Every recipe I read calls for hazelnuts; I have trouble finding those, so I just double up the almonds and skip the hazelnuts.
Instead of thyme sprigs, sometimes I’ll use my own dried thyme and in that case, I never remove it from the tomato, just add it to the food processor.

1 tomato (about 6 oz), quartered
olive oil
fresh thyme sprigs
salt and pepper
1 slice (4x4 ish) of crusty white bread, cut into cubes (I use a good French loaf)
1 red bell pepper (or whatever kind of sweet pepper you have in the garden, just large)
1/2 cup almonds, toasted
1/2 cup hazelnuts, toasted and skins rubbed off
4 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar

Preheat oven to 400. Place tomato in small glass baking dish, drizzle with olive oil and scatter thyme over. Season with salt and pepper. Roast until tomato is soft, about 20-30 minutes. Scatter the bread cubes over the tomato and roast another 10 minutes. Let cool and discard thyme.

Meanwhile, char peppers directly over a gas flame or under broiler, until blackened all over. Transfer to a large bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let stand for 15 minutes. Then peel, stem, core, and chop.

Add almonds, garlic, vinegar, nuts (don’t forget to toast them!), pepper, and tomato mixture to the food processor. Blend until combined. Add olive oil in a drizzle as machine continues running. You may need as much as a cup, you may need far less (I usually use 1/2-2/3 cup). ”

— adapted from Bon Appetit

Enjoy!

Bat Talk and Walk

Last night, we had the most incredible experience: We traveled to a local wetland area to learn about bats and see their nightly exit from their 'cave.' The area where we went is part of the Yolo Basin Foundation, an organization based in the Yolo Bypass Area, which is very interesting in its own right. In between Davis and Sacramento, there is a long overpass built over a 17,000 acre wetland area. This area is designed to flood in the winter months when we get all of our rain. In the summer, it dries up, but there are pockets of wetness and bogs, and there are many farmers who grow rice in those places. There are also natural wetlands that attract many species of migrating and native birds. Any time you drive highway 80 from San Francisco to Sacramento, you go over this area. There are always interesting things to look at, from sunflower fields to rice fields, to herons and egrets. 

We've driven over this area hundreds of times but never driven off of it to explore the wilderness area, which is open dawn to dusk each day. We finally saw it last night when we went to the Foundation to learn about and view bats.

The bats we saw were mainly Mexican Free-tailed bats, though we also learned about Pallid bats and Big Brown bats, which also live under the overpass. Mexican Free-tailed bats are tiny, like 3-4 inches long in body, and eat lots of agricultural pests, which makes them quite a boon to the Central Valley. The farmer who grows rice in these fields, who allowed us to venture on to his property, reports that he uses zero insecticides on his crops, even though rice is a crop notoriously predated upon. The bats do all the work for him.

terrible picture, but she just wouldn't cooperate. 

The speaker, a naturalist who works with bats, had examples of each of these bats with her and showed them to us under a camera that projected the image onto a large screen. These bats were brought in for rehabilitation (for instance, the one above had her wing damaged by a cat) and are not able to be released into the wild. They don't permanently live in these display cases, this was just for our benefit. It was so interesting to see these bats up close and discover the beauty and delicacy of their wings, their downright adorable faces, and the large ears. Our naturalist had a special machine that could 'hear' the echolocation the bats were making, which is beyond the range of our own hearing. It was so cool to hear those clicks! We were all riveted. The naturalist explained what the bats eat, how they live, and why they live under this overpass, which is basically because it so perfectly mimics cave environments. Which, by the way, are in short supply - habitat is disappearing for many bats, because of human interference and loss of insect life. Pesticides affect the creatures that eat insects, of course, and that includes both birds and bats.

After our talk, we drove out to a super-secret place under the overpass, through the farmer's rice fields. He was growing domestic rice, which is short and chartreuse-y green, and also wild rice, which is tall and has a huge inflorescence tinged with red from the pollen. It's a gorgeous crop.

After driving about a half hour on the twisty-est roads imaginable around bogs and ponds and groupings of reeds and rice, we came to our spot.

There were about 30 of us in our group, and we went to this spot because for some reason, the bats have chosen that tree in the distance as their exit point. About 250, 000 bats live under this overpass, and there are three exits, but this one seems to be the one most of them choose and we were told to expect three 'ribbons' or waves of bats. The naturalist said they exit at a similar time each night but that it wasn't exact and so we would just wait until something happened, and it didn't take long before we noticed, all along the underside of the overpass, a great rushing of wings. The bats fly for awhile under the overpass until exiting at this tree. So suddenly you notice an enormous shadow of wings rushing down the channels of the overpass, like some great hoard of locusts, and then they burst out into the air.

And then they start to fly in this curve, going out over the fields, and eventually they rise up into the sky and disperse in groups.

The line of bats went on and on, and then there was a break, and a second ribbon appeared, and then a third. We saw hawks sitting in trees nearby, waiting to snatch a bird from the ground if it fell. We watched the clouds of bats grow higher and further away (they can hunt up to 50 miles away from their cave). Meanwhile huge dragonflies were hovering around our heads and formations of geese skimmed the overpass. Suddenly we noticed more 'rushing' and out came a fourth ribbon, very rare, and then later another ribbon, the 5th, which caused our naturalist to text her husband in disbelief.

We just stood and stared. It was like a miracle. I've seen bats on the wing at night in various places (and I hope desperately that we have them at home), but I've never seen something like this. It was incredible.

The way the bats flew made me think of sine curves, and it reminded me that sine curves happen all around in nature, in the ocean waves, in sounds that we hear, the sunrise/sunset pattern, our heartbeat. It made me think about the great Creator of our universe who makes even daily things look like poetry. Sometimes you just have to stop for minute and experience the Divine, which is so easily found in nature.

These talks and walks go on all summer, before migration in the autumn takes the bats to who-knows-where (none are tagged, so no one knows). They are sold out for the season except for Sept 21, and you can get your tickets HERE. If you can't go this year, put in on your calendar for next year; you don't want to miss this experience.

Honey Tasting

Each month, my beekeeping association has a general meeting with a guest speaker. Lately, the folks at UC Davis (our local land-grant university) have been coming to give the talks. We had a great one in July about the latest research in varroa mites (given by Dr. Elina Nino, Program Director for Apiculture), and last week, Amina Harris was our speaker. She is the director for the Honey and Pollination Center. UC Davis is really leading the way in a lot of interesting agricultural studies (have you seen the latest on nitrogen-fixing corn? very exciting) and their participation in apiculture is ground-breaking. Ms. Harris' program is the only one I know of for honey tasting, which is similar to wine, coffee, or beer tasting. But the reason for it is very different. UC Davis wants to help determine if the honey coming into the US is adulterated.

You may remember my post about this very issue. Imported, adulterated honey is a huge problem for our country, and the people manufacturing it keep getting around the chemical tests that have been developed to detect the fake stuff. So, Ms. Harris reasons, if we get humans on the case, with developed palates, we can begin to add another dimension to the testing of imported honey. 

So, she gave us a quick lesson in tasting, and it was fascinating. You can take an official course at UC Davis in this art, but it ain't cheap. So it was fun to have her explain some basics.

First off, she divided all honey into four categories: Fruity, Floral, Buttery, and Brown Sugar. Within those categories there are other sub-categories with about a million flavors for each. She gave us each three samples of honey to demonstrate the first three categories: Blackberry, Orange Blossom (citrus), and Eucalyptus. Let me just state right here that in order to know what the origin of your honey is, you have to have an awful lot of property with dedicated plants. Like three square miles of predominantly eucalyptus trees, because that's the foraging range of bees. I can never state what kind of honey mine is, because my bees forage on such different stuff in my neighborhood. I can guess what they are eating in different seasons, but it's just a guess. So I could never market my honey as one certain kind.

We were instructed on how to smell the honey, and what to think about and look for as we tasted it. I have to say, I'm not so good at this. I never have been. I think I have a good palate and a good sense of smell, but when it comes to describing the way things taste, I'm terrible. I'd be simply rubbish at taste-tests. All honey smells like honey and all honey tastes like honey. However I will say that when you taste test three different honeys side-by-side, you can easily tell the differences in them. But would I be able to say which flower made which honey? Doubtful.

Anyway, surprisingly, I enjoyed the eucalyptus honey the most, because it had the lightest flavor (and Ms. Harris would say 'light' is not a flavor). And yet it had the darkest color, so you would assume it would have a more robust flavor. This honey tasting stuff is pretty eye-opening. Also, you can taste the pollen in the honey (if it's real and not heated) - although less pollen gets into the honey than you would think. Also, that idea that local honey helps with allergies? I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Most allergens come from wind-pollinated trees, and that means that pollen won't be in honey. So really it won't help with your allergies. However honey has a LOT of other health benefits (if it's real, and if it's untreated or heated); it's anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, and it never goes bad. Did you hear about that honey they recently found in an Egyptian burial site? Still good.

And this is the perfect place to insert my mantra about buying honey: We should always buy local honey from a local beekeeper. It will not be cheap, in fact it will be much pricier than the stuff in the bear at your local Safeway. But this way you are sure to get the real stuff, unheated and untreated, simply filtered (to remove any wax or bee-parts) and bottled. Go to your farmers market or local health food store to purchase your honey. 

Today is beer-making day, pickle-relish-making day, and sriracha-making day. We ran out of sriracha a long time ago and miss it terribly. Homemade is so good! If you haven't made it, I highly suggest you do. I'm not a hot-sauce person, but I love a slug of sriracha in my Asian noodle dishes (and Adam will eat it on everything). You can find the recipe here. 

August Wreath

I finally got around to making the August wreath. I snipped some suckers off our California Pepper tree (Schinus molle) and also some of the seed pods from the Salvia Clevlandii. The pepper is blooming with tiny white flowers, and the sage is extremely fragrant. So altogether the two make a lovely looking and smelling wreath.

Salvia clevelandii is one of the stars of our garden. It takes very little water, the native bees love the purple blooms which are arranged on a sort of wheel, there are 2-3 wheels per stem, hummingbirds love them too, and then the birds love the seeds. The shape of the plant is very architectural and gets quite tall and makes a big statement. 

This photo is from Las Pilitas nursery in southern California and there is a nice description of the plant here. 

It's not a dense plant though, especially with dry soil, so it has an airy look to it which I like (movement in the breeze too which is my favorite) and it needs cutting back each autumn. The scent is very strong, and you'll either love it or hate it. I love it. It smells wild. It smells of chaparral. It smells of Mt. Diablo in summer.

Speaking of summer, we are overrun with cucumbers. Tom has made 16 jars of pickles, all kinds, and I have another large jar in the fridge with half-sours, my own personal favorite. We've eaten cucumbers in all ways and are still awash. Perhaps you would be surprised to find out (I certainly have been) how many people do not like cucumbers. I'm having trouble giving them away! Tomatoes and peppers are steady, so is basil, and green beans are an everyday event as well. Today I shall make salsa. 

I've ordered garlic, shallots, asparagus and seed potatoes for fall planting, as well as all brassicas, greens, and root veg seeds. I won't start winter seeds in the greenhouse until September first, with a plan for all the winter veg to go in the ground October first (though asparagus will go in in January). Which reminds me, I need to order fresh row cover, Agribond 19, which I get from Peaceful Valley. So here's your reminder - order those overwintering items now - garlic and shallots sell out quickly.