Gleanings of the Week Ending October 13, 2018

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Free Technology for Teachers: Frostbite Theater - 87 Science Experiment Video Lessons – Short videos…fun for more than just students!

Sunflower pollen has medicinal, protective effects on bees -- ScienceDaily – Sunflowers – a nice addition to pollinator gardens.

Research forecasts US among top nations to suffer economic damage from climate change -- ScienceDaily – The study found that the top 3 countries with the most to lose from climate change are the US, India and Saudi Arabia. China is in the top 5.

Do MoCA and Other Cognitive Screening Tests Work? | Berkeley Wellness – A short article that introduces some terminology….but not very satisfying. This is not an area where medical intervention has made great strides – unfortunately for an aging population.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week: Birds in Flight – National Geographic Blog – Birds in motion…a photographic challenge.

BBC - Future - Do we really live longer than our ancestors? – Life expectancy has increased because more of our species are making it to old age; life span has not changed much at all through history. The emperor Augustus lived to be 75 in the 1st century (his wife live to 86 or 87 years) and Japan’s Empress Suiko lived to be 74 in the 6th century. Cicero’s wife lived to be 103.

Prehistoric art hints at lost Indian civilisation - BBC News and An Unknown Ancient Civilization in India Carved This Rock Art | Smart News | Smithsonian – The same story from two sources. The first one is more detailed.

The Seven Cs of Education | What's Next: Top Trends – 2 items: the 7 Cs and the nature of creative thinking.

Secondary forests have short lifespans: Most don't last long enough to provide habitat for many forest species -- ScienceDaily – Making large scale commitment on reforestation requires long-term vision….and that appears to be lacking. The study was done in Costa Rica.

Infographic: Light Pollution Threatens Species | The Scientist Magazine® - It not just birds and bats….light pollution impacts a lot of organisms…including us (not the last item on the list ‘desynchronization’).

CSA Share

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The Gorman Farms CSA season is about done but I am enjoying everything in the shares we are getting. A recent share filled the ceramic top of my stove. There are carrots with more top that carrot – but I like the tops in salads and soups; as soon as I got them home I cut the tops off, cleaned them and put them in a plastic bin with the parsley. I’ll eat the carrot tops first since they won’t last as long as the parsley. The carrots themselves will be eaten with hummus for snacks. They were very muddy. Heavy rain and mud has made harvesting more challenging than usual in our area.

I haven’t tried the watermelon radishes yet but I have enjoyed them in seasons past. We’re still getting a couple of onions every week which fits well with the way I cook. I’m a little behind on the winter squash; at some point I’ll cook them all and freeze the pulp to use like pumpkin. There were three tiny versions of butternut squash in this share; supposedly they are even sweeter and cook faster because they are small. The purple cabbages are small – struggling in the soggy fields probably. The peppers are holding strong; there were bell, banana, and roasting peppers in the share. And then there are sweet potatoes…several pounds every week; I’m saving the ones that are cured to eat after the CSA is over for the year. There was quite a selection at the overage table and I picked the fennel; I’ve developed a taste of it…since joining the CSA several years ago; I’d never tried it before that.

Good eating in October!

Rain and the Middle Patuxent

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Last Friday, I had all my gear prepped and was almost walking out the door when I got the word that the field trip for high schoolers to assess stream health in the upper part of the Middle Patuxent River (in the Middle Patuxent Environmental Area) was cancelled. There was a line of heavy thunderstorms come through the night before and crossing the river on rocks was impossible. It’s been a rough fall for stream surveys with all the heavy rain we’ve gotten. I waited until mid-morning then headed out to see the high water myself – recruiting my husband to go along. It is about 15 minutes from our house.

Like a lot of forested areas in our county, there are scheduled deer management hunts posted on bright red signs. There is a similar one in our neighborhood for the forest behind many of our houses (and down to the Middle Patuxent River).

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The South Wind Trail started out as older asphalt then became grass with some muddy places.

I saw some Christmas ferns under a low growing tree just off the path.

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The closer we got to the river the muddier the trail got. The ground was clearly saturated. It would have become quite a quagmire with 60+ students, teachers, and volunteers hiking down to the river.

At the river the water was higher than I’d see it and foam was floating on the surface. The rocks we used to get across the river where we did most of the sampling were partially submerged…to dangerous to cross the river. The amount of sediment and rapid flow of the water would have made it had to find macroinvertebrates as well.

At first, I thought the gray areas of the rocks close to the river were lichen, but when I looked more closely, the areas looked more like they had been scoured and the lichen might be starting to grow again – very slowly.

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As we continued around the loop to get back to our car, a part of the trail looked like it was becoming a rivulet into the river. Since the water had not made a ditch yet, it might be something that has just happened this fall.

Mushrooms

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Mushrooms are coming up all over. The moisture we got in September evidently provided optimal conditions for the fungi to put up fruiting bodies.

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On the way home from Belmont last week, I stopped along the road to photograph an embankment with visible mushrooms.

As I got closer I discovered some that were not quite as visible. There were at least three different kinds. The largest ones, that were in all stages of development, were what I saw first. The started out as white then began to darken and crack like meringue. Finally, the cap splits. There were some that were still just pushing up – still almost concealed by pine needles.

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There was one that was almost the same color as pine needles.

And puffballs that were in all stages of development.

When I got home, I noticed a large one at the base of a neighbor’s tree. I put my macro lens beside it to show the size and then took a picture of the surface with the lens; it looked like a topography map with rifts between the brown patches!

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 6, 2018

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

BBC - Future - The recipes born from hardship – A little history…and food chemistry.

Fall Foliage: When, Why & How Vibrant Will Maple Leaves Be? – Cool Green Science – A little about the season. Unfortunately our September weather was just opposite of what it takes to get great leaf color from maples.

A mechanism of color pattern formation in ladybird beetles -- ScienceDaily – The Asian ladybird beetle… more that 200 color patterns…from a single gene.

Each Pigeon Painting by Adele Renault Shows the Bird's Overlooked Beauty – Some eye candy of a very common urban bird. Pigeons might be worth a closer look through a birding scope or camera with a big lens.

Praying Mantis Seen Hunting Fish for the First Time | Smart News | Smithsonian – In India…a large praying mantis ate a guppy.

A one-way street for salt -- ScienceDaily – How quinoa gets rid of the extra salt that it absorbs from saline soils.

My Penn’s Woods, Ever Changing – Cool Green Science – A little history about the forest in Pennsylvania (and Maryland too).

Life Thrives Within the Earth’s Crust – We know that there are a lot of living things in soils…but now we are discovering that deeper still – in rocks – there is life where previously we thought there was none. It’s a whole new area of biological research.

The surprising truth about loneliness – Some results from the BBC Loneliness Experiment.

The American Dream is Harder to Find in Some Neighborhoods – Look at the overall US map and read the article…then look at the Interactive: Explore the Opportunity Atlas to look at more detailed map locations.

Belmont BioBlitz Field Trip

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I went early to help set up for the first Belmont BioBlitz for 5th graders this fall at Howard County Conservancy’s Belmont location. I arranged the discovery tables with pelts, skulls, insects in jars/acrylic, and leaves/seeds of common trees neatly framed in cases backed with cotton. Another table held reference books. The volunteers arrived and we all went out to wait for the buses. The new item for this year is a rugged tablet! Otherwise we had the usual BioBlitz backpack: ruler, tape measure, magnifiers, clip boards, some id books…things we would need in the field.

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It’s good to feel that we are ready – and enjoy the morning calm as we wait for the buses.

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And then the buses arrive and it all begins.

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With my first group we stayed on pavement since we had one student with a cast and were using a wheel chair for her to help with the distance. We documented some trees along the entrance road and some insects on the trunks. Some geese flew to the pond as we watched, and I used the zoom on my camera to take some pictures to include with their documentation. It was the only time I got my camera out during the field trip. Otherwise the students did all the picture taking and documenting of what they found. The big find for the first group was a wolf spider.

The second group went in a different direction and said – at the beginning – that they wanted to look at plants and fungi. They documented an oak and the ivy growing on it. Then they found several kinds of mushroom type fungi. And there were some insects along the way…they were more interested than they thought they would be in insects. They were looking around for acorns and discovered a different kind of nut….and then the tree. A hickory. They got some good pictures of the nuts and leaves, and the way the leaves are on the branch…so they should be able to determine the type of hickory it is!

It was a good field trip. All the students had already done a BioBlitz on their schoolyard so were well versed with the mechanics of what to do. Belmont is a very different place than a schoolyard!

eBotanical Prints – September 2018

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It was a light month for botanical books because I was busy with some volumes of insect prints.

October is set up to be a big month for botanical print books because of the many volumes of Louis van Houtte words that are available on Internet Archive. I found the first volume toward the end of September and am savoring them all through October. There are at least 20 volumes!

Enjoy the September Botanical print slide carousel. Check out some of the eBooks using the links below the pictures.

Sturm's Figures of plants V2 * Sturm, Jakob and Johann * sample image * 1798

Sturm's Figures of plants V3 * Sturm, Jakob and Johann * sample image * 1798

Sturm's Figures of plants V4 * Sturm, Jakob and Johann * sample image * 1798

Sturm's Figures of plants V5 * Sturm, Jakob and Johann * sample image * 1798

Deutschlands flora in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen Abt. 1 Bd. 7-8 * Strum, Jakob * sample image * 1809

Australian Orchids V2 Pt 3 * Fitgerald, Robert David * sample image * 1882

Australian Orchids V2 Pt 4 * Fitgerald, Robert David * sample image * 1882

Australian Orchids V2 Pt 5 * Fitgerald, Robert David * sample image * 1882

Australian Orchids V2 Pt 7 * Fitgerald, Robert David * sample image * 1882

Cryptogames vasculaires V1 * Fee, Antoine Apollinaire * sample image * 1873

Cryptogames vasculaires V2 * Fee, Antoine Apollinaire * sample image * 1873

Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe V1 (1845) * van Houtte, Louis * sample image * 1845

 

Here is a list of all 1400+ books containing botanical books that I’ve found online – freely available. Enjoy!

Brookside Gardens at end of September – part I

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The growing season is waning, but there is still plenty to see at Brookside Gardens when we went last weekend. Some plants have already produced their seeds – the sumac and sunflowers and castor beans among them.

The magnolia pods are as colorful as the seeds. Some of the seeds have already been eaten by birds or squirrels.

But there are still flowers to see too. I spent time photographing asters with tiny water droplets still coating them from the morning dew.

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But there are other things still blooming as well.

There were some lights that were turned on covering the trunks and lower branches of trees around one of the court yards – evidence that the crew putting up lights for the holiday light show has already started.

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Cooler Days – Little Fall Color

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Here it is the end of September and most of the leaves are still on the trees and green. The ones that have fallen are brown.

Our oak is a good example of that. Looking at the ground it looks like half the leaves have fall but the tree still looks like it has plenty more. (The ruler in the picture is me learning to take better documentary pictures for trees.)

In the back of our house, the red maple has no red leaves. Usually it starts out with a few that show up surrounded by green. But right now it’s still a wall of green although there are leaves on the ground that are brown.

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The tulip poplar usually has some yellow leaves surrounded by green. Some of the leaves look like they might be turning but even the zoomed image looks like a wall of green.

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There are some green tulip poplar leaves that have fallen in recent heavy rains…but overall the tree still has a lot of green leaves attached.

The sycamore has been dropping brown leaves but still has a lot of green ones on the tree. It’s usual the first to drop leaves. This year some are staying on the tree but there are still more green than brown ones.

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We’ve gotten a lot more rain than usual in September (almost 11 inches rather than the historical average of 4.6 inches) and the trees may be impacted by that. There is a lot of mud even in the grassy areas of our yard.

The end of October is generally the time the leaves fly from the trees, so I am still anticipating fall color. It just seems that there are too many brown leaves on the ground already.

Gleanings of the Week Ending September 29, 2018

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The Amazing Ancient Fishes of Africa – Cool Green Science – Lungfish, butterfly fish, bichir, bonytongue…most of them are air breathers!

Thinking beyond yourself can make you more open to healthy lifestyle choices -- ScienceDaily – Maybe we need to psyche ourselves to make better choices!

Japan's Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Successfully Deploys Landers to Asteroid Ryugu's Surface and Bouncing robots land on asteroid 180m miles away amid mission to fetch sample for Earth • The Register  – Exciting stuff from a rover on an asteroid! And the return mission in 2020 will be exciting too.

Molecule with anti-aging effects on vascular system identified -- ScienceDaily – A ketone body was identified that is produced during fasting or calorie restriction. It appears to delay vascular aging.

Free Technology for Teachers: A Good Resource for Learning About the Science of Food – 14 short videos about food research.

Scientists investigate how DEET confuses countless critters -- ScienceDaily – Evidently DEET interferes with organisms’ response to odors thus confusing the organism rather than repelling it!

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week: Birds with Yellow Plumage – National Geographic Blog – I always enjoy the bird photographs

BBC - Future - How to use seawater to grow food – in the desert - An experiment in Jordan to farm with solar powered desalination of Red Sea water for greenhouses cooled as part of the desalination process. Jordan currently imports a high percentage of its food…if this type of farming can be cost effective the country might be able to feed itself and even export some foods.

How leaves talk to roots -- ScienceDaily – When I was in college taking biology courses in the 1970s – micro RNA was not in our vocabulary!

Well-Preserved Roman Road Uncovered in the Netherlands - Archaeology Magazine (more details at https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/09/roman-road-artifacts-found-during-digging-for-a-new-motorway/ ) – New finds like this are always a little surprising…things that were there for a very long time but covered over by a few feet of soil.

Fall Harvest

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My freezer and refrigerator are overflowing with foods from my CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). In the freezer I have a build up of items that I couldn’t eat quickly enough from the beginning of the season: zucchini and garlic scapes from the beginning, some kale that I chopped up in the food processor and then frozen in a sheet, tomatoes. Each week has brought more bounty, so I haven’t drawn down on much once it went to the freezer. Sometimes I manage to finish off everything from the share the week after I got it.

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Right now the refrigerator is very full. My strategy is to eat the parts that will spoil most quickly, wait a little for the winter squash…but not too long (I already have 2 in the refrigerator)….and try not to freeze anything else. That looks tough with two crispers, two plastic bins, and squashes overflowing into the other part of the refrigerator along with 2 pounds of freshly harvested sweet potatoes.

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What not to like about 3 kinds of peppers and scallions and tomatoes and tatsoi and Romaine lettuce and Napa cabbage and fennel and onions and collards and butternut squash and acorn squash….it’s just the volume that is the challenge.

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I made a yummy ‘pudding’ this morning in the food processor with half of a leftover (cooked) acorn squash: acorn squash, 1 tablespoon almond butter, ¼ cup soy milk, a little honey. I sprinkled cinnamon on it right before I ate it. Yummy!

3 Free eBooks – September 2018

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All three of the selections this month are multiple items. The first is a series of books from the late 1700s about insects; the second and third are magazines that are within the past few years.

Panzer, Georg Wolfgasng Franz; Sturm, Jakob. Favnae insectorvm Germanicae initia, oder, Deutschlands Insecten. Nürnberg:In den Felseckerschen Buchhandlung. 1796. A series of books available from Internet Archive here. They are in German but the plates (my Jakob Sturm) are the draw. Lots and lots of insects!

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Morfield, Angie Daly (editor). Missouri Conservationist. Missouri Department of Conservation.  Available from the department website here. The monthly magazine about conservation in the state. If you are a resident of Missouri a subscription to the printed magazine is free! I am looking at it online at this point…learning about the plants and animals of Missouri prior to my daughter moving there. Lots of great pictures of various parts of the state.

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Carey, Victoria (editor). Country Style: Australia Coast to Coast. Several issues of the magazine (2015 and 2016 vintage) are available from Internet Archive here. I liked the photographs of gardens and houses….and animals. They have a large ad for Fancy Feast cat food in every issue!

Ten Little Celebrations – September 2018

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Every month when I look at the notes I’ve made for each day of little celebrations – I enjoy them again. Many times, it’s hard to pick just 10 for this blog post. Here are the picks for September 2018:

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Volunteering on the last day of Brookside Gardens Wings of Fancy exhibit – It was good to be there for the good-bye day…and know that the next exhibit will open again in April. I enjoy being in the butterfly house and interacting with visitors…it’s a happy place.

Window cleaning – I am surprising myself at how satisfying cleaning the windows (taking the panes apart and cleaning all surfaces except the one on the outside) on a rainy day can be. Instead of spring cleaning – I’m doing fall cleaning! I celebrated the difference clean windows make.

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A monarch butterfly emerging – Caterpillars crawled up from our front flower bed to make chrysalises at the top of the window frames. I finally managed to notice one that was still emerged - hanging from the bit of chrysalis still attached – and then crawling up onto the lentil to finish drying. Celebration!

Yummy zucchini bread – I made a double batch of zucchini bread from squash frozen earlier in the summer. We enjoyed it for days. I celebrated the spicy flavor…helped me feel ready for fall.

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Howard County Conservancy volunteers and staff – With the training for fall field trips, we always have a pot luck lunch and this one – for me – was a celebration of those people (and that they are all such foodies)!

Elementary School Butterfly – What a celebration when the first Monarch butterfly emerged from a chrysalis I took to the elementary school! I wasn’t there for the excitement but got the description from the teacher. They even found another chrysalis on the fence around their school garden while they were releasing their butterfly.

Haircut - I told the stylist – with some trepidation - that I wanted it short….and celebrated the results.

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A birthday spent at Longwood - This is a great place to spend celebrating a family birthday…better than a too-sweet cake!

Yard work – Just as the window cleaning – I celebrated the results. It’s good to know that I’m ending the month in relatively good shape when it comes to the yard…before a lot of leaves have fallen.

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Lacewing larvae – Celebrating seeing (and recognizing) a new-to-me organism (looks like lichen since it covers itself with pieces of the stuff)!

Zooming – September 2018

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The zoom on my new camera (60 vs 40 optical zoom…and then comes the digital zoom too) makes it even easier to stand well out of the flowerbed, get a good angle, not scare the butterfly or bee. It’s easier to hold myself steady using the viewfinder rather than the screen like I had to previously. Sometimes I use the monopod…but other times I find that I can simple hold myself steady enough that the camera image stabilization does the rest.

The images I selected this month are from several places: Longwood Gardens, home, Brookside Gardens, and Howard Count Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant Farm. Some of my favorite places to be.

Enjoy my picks of zoomed images for September 2018!

Fall Yard Work – Part II

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The rain held off last week, so I got 2 rounds of yard work. I’ve already posted about the first one. The second round started with me taking the kitchen scraps and a torn-up pizza box back to the compost bin. I noticed an Eastern American Toad on the way back to the front of the house. I managed to get close enough to get a picture of it with my cell phone before it hoped away.

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I finished getting the day lily leaves cut from the front flower bed along with some weeds; that totaled about half a trash can full.

I decided to try the leaf blower to collect and slightly shred leaves. It worked great on the drive way and the gutter at the street but just OK on the front yard. Some of the oak leaves on the yard were too damp to be picked up easily. The leaves from the bag the filled up the rest of the trash can to go back to the compost bin. At the compost bin, I mixed everything up and made holes to connect the layers with the pitchfork…then watered the pile since I wasn’t sure how soon it would rain again. Cardboard and paper shreds soak up the water and help the compost ‘cook.’

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The next activity was picking up sticks from around the oak tree; it self-prunes so there are always sticks around it. I collected an armload of sticks and took them back to the brush pile. I don’t put them in the compost because it takes so long for them to decompose without somehow reducing them to small pieces. One stick had a flower like fungus growing on it.

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I took a closer look at the oak tree trunk again and discovered a largish ant. I think it is a False Honey Ant.

The highlight of the morning in terms of wildlife started out as a mystery. I was looking at the lichen on the oak tree and noticed a piece that moved! It wobbled a bit but stayed on the trunk. When I put a leaf in front of it, the movement stopped completely.

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I’ve marked the first picture. Can you see it in the others? It is a lacewing larva! I’ll be looking for these little critters from now on. They have great camouflage.

Cloudy Day at Brookside Gardens

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Last weekend we went to Brookside Gardens to photograph hummingbirds. The garden area they frequent still had lots of blooms.

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I photographed other parts of the area: some favorite sculptures,

Seed pods,

A rabbit eating breakfast,

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Mushrooms under the roses,

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And at artsy shot of an orange flower with a spiral shaped bud.

The best observations of the morning were bumblebees nectar robbing. The bee makes a hole in the base of the flower and then drinks the nectar. The shape of the flower would be a tight squeeze for these bees. Still – this is a case where the bees are not acting as pollinators since they bypass the flower structures entirely.

But hummingbird photography was disappointing. The lighting was not as good as the previous visits and there were not as many birds coming to the flowers. I only managed 3 pictures worth sharing.

So – the nectar robbing saved the day!

Gleanings of the Week Ending September 22, 2018

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Curiosity rover surveys a mystery under dusty Martian skies -- ScienceDaily – What makes Vera Rubin Ridge so hard?

The Environment's New Clothes: Biodegradable Textiles Grown from Live Organisms - Scientific American – ‘Growing clothes’ that are sustainable – very different form the current fashion industry.

Change your diet to save both water and your health -- ScienceDaily – Research that looked at the water footprint (the volume of freshwater to produce goods) relative to types of diets. It turns out that many of the foods that take a lot of water to produce also are overconsumed – in the EU where the study was done and maybe even mores o in the US.

How the People of Pompeii Really Died - The Atlantic – New technology looked at bones and teeth of the 19th century plaster casts from Pompeii. Two surprises: they had good teeth, and many died of head injures rather than suffocation.

A Great Brown Storm Is Raging on Jupiter – It’s not like the red spot. They come and go and Jupiter. This time NASA’s Juno spacecraft is there to monitor its progress and show more of its structure.

One big reason why women drop out of doctoral STEM programs: The fewer women in entering class, the less likely they'll stay -- ScienceDaily – This study ruled out grades and funding as the main reason….the academic climate for women is not only harder to measure, it’s also harder to change.

First evidence that soot from polluted air is reaching placenta -- ScienceDaily – There is a health cost for burning fossil fuels…and it begins to impact us before we are born. Previous research had linked air pollution with premature birth, low birth weight, infant mortality, and childhood respiratory problems. This research was focused on determining if the particles in the lung – breathed by the mother -  can circulate through the blood to the placenta.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week: Gamebirds – National Geographic – Peacocks are considered game birds!

Total of 21 new parasitoid wasps following the first ever revision of their genus -- ScienceDaily – The first revision since 1893…and using specimens from 20 natural history museums.

Something Blue | The Prairie Ecologist – Blue sage…insect magnet.

Our Oak Tree

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We have an oak tree in our front yard beside the mail box. It was a very young tree when we bought the house in October 1994.

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It’s grown a lot in 24 years.

We appreciate it’s shade on the front of the house in the morning. This year it has some Virginia creeper growing on the trunk. Maybe it’s just the wet year. I’m leaving the vine – since it’s a native plant – but may cut it next year. The tree looks very healthy but had no acorns this year; maybe the a cold snap last spring caught the tree at the wrong time.

The tree has more lichen and moss on it now. The extra moisture may contribute to the density but it’s typical of mature tree trunks in our area to have these companions. I like the contrasting greens of the moss (very bright) and the lichen (soft green).

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The county trimmed the lower branches from the street trees in our neighborhood and our oak was no exception. I took a picture of the scars where larger branches were cut. They show how the tree responds.

One that was particularly interesting had some curly fungus growing in it. The surface was not as vertical as most of the other cuts; perhaps more water is retained…and the fungus found a niche.

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Overall – the oak is one of my favorite trees. I wish they had planted it further back from the street and the drive way…and not elevated the mulch around it; it’s a lesson learned for future houses and trees. At this point, I just enjoy that this particular oak where and how it is.

Fall Yard Work – Part I

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Yesterday I got a head start on fall yard work. My first target was the front flowerbed with common milkweed (no caterpillars left) and lots of day lily leaves. I took a before and after picture. It’s not entirely cleared yet but the bird bath near the porch is more visible. I tried to leave the black eyed susans to finish seed production for next year. I pulled tulip poplar sprouts and a largish poke weed that has grown low enough that it wasn’t obvious how big it was until I started looking for its main stalk.

I took some rocks and shells out of the flower bed and put them on the corners of the porch to get cleaned by rains.

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My second target was the day lily foliage around the oak tree. I took a before and after picture again. That filled up the trash can with greens for the compost bin.

I stripped the larger stems of leaves since I’ve learned that the stems don’t decompose very rapidly…better for them to go in a brush pile than in the compost bin where the leaves were going.

I carried the arm load of stems (some of them milky with milkweed sap) to put just outside the the compost bin with the pitch fork in the other hand. The compost bin has been decomposing. I turned it – stirred it. Decided a lot had decomposed but I could still just add more on top since there is still plenty of room in the bin.

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I put the kitchen scraps on top and carried it around to the compost bin located the back of the back yard. It was a little heavier than I expected…but I managed.

I put the ‘greens’ in to the bin followed by some brown sycamore leaves cleaned from the stairs up to the deck (reducing the hazard on the stairs) and the paper shreds from house.

I didn’t water the compost pile yet since everything was so wet from recent big rains. The paper and leaves were dry, but I used the pitch fork to some holes through the layers and reduce the height of the additions to the pile. If it doesn’t rain again in the next few days I might check to make sure it is moist enough to ‘cook.’ There is still a lot of fall yard work to do…but I felt good about the progress I made in two hours.

Paper Wasp

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In one of my forays into my front flowerbed to check Monarch butterfly chrysalises, I noticed a wasp on a poke weed flower stalk. It was moving all over the stalk, investigating each open flower. I had my camera…and took a series of pictures. The pictures were easy enough to identify it as a Common Paper Wasp Polistes exclamans using the Maryland Biodiversity Project website. I learned from their database that it is a species of the southeastern US that appears to be expanding northward. I looked around for the nest but didn’t see one. We still have some time for the larvae to develop but as the nectar plants die back, only the young queens will remain – in a protected spot to over winter.

Enjoy the paper wasp acrobatics on the poke weed flowers slide show!