muskrat love

 We've had quite a few visitors lately.

Our apple tree is absolutely overloaded with apples...

...and is experiencing "June drop," where some of excess is discarded by the tree in order to focus energy elsewhere.  The little green apples are a perfect meal for a wandering deer.

At first horrified glance, I thought that this deer was covered in TICKS!!

Only by blowing up and sharpening the photo am I relatively sure that those are just flies.  Still...shudder.

Our goldfinches are back!  They are impatiently waiting for my flowers to go to seed.

Neither Todd nor I have had a single mosquito bite this year.  It's due in large part to the huge family of barn swallows nesting in the gutters of our barn.

A single barn swallow can eat almost 1000 mosquitoes per day!  They're busy swooping over the garden, and it's nice to know that they're taking care of our pest problem.

Well, some of it!

Hummingbirds are back in droves.  I love seeing them in the garden.

Hummingbirds are also great consumers of mosquitoes!

Other creatures who are beneficial to have around...we have muskrats in our front pond!  They are diligently working to take care of our overgrown cattail problem.  The former homeowner used chemicals to no avail, and we hired an excavator to scoop out as many as possible...but they still spread relentlessly.  Muskrats love to eat cattails and eat about 1/3 of their weight daily, so they're very welcome around here!

The 17-year cicadas are truly gone now.  Look anywhere around town and you'll see trees with dead patches.

This is done by the cicadas in a process called flagging, so called because the hanging dead leaf sections look a bit like limp flags.  The female cicada cut slits into all of these branches to deposit her eggs.  This kills the tips of the branches.  In a few weeks, the eggs will hatch, the nymphs will fall and burrow into the ground, not to emerge for another 17 years.  Here is a great video about the life cycle!

There's a new "life cycle" in the garden, too...PUMPKINS.  I'd collected  seeds for about 25 unusual varieties, but I just don't have the space for them.  I ended up planting a select few - too many, but I can't help myself.  Within a week, they'd outgrown their containers...

...and were up-potted into larger ones.

They are going to take the place of my sweet peas, which are rapidly going to seed.

So, too, are the poppies.  You have to let the seed heads dry completely, until the top starts to separate from the bottom.  Escape hatches curl open, and the wind helps the seed to fall easily to the ground.

I waited much too long to dug up my anemone and ranuculus corms.  Recall their earlier glory...

Like daffodils, you have to leave the foliage up to gather energy after the flowers fade away.  Mine multiplied like crazy - hooray!  I spread them out to dry this week.

After they're completely dry, I will store them away until next winter, when once again I'll wake them up around Valentine's Day to start the cycle all over again!  

Just like with the ranuculus, I waited too long with many of my dahlias and they developed dahlia smut, a fungal disease, certainly caused by endless weeks in a hot, humid barn.

Next year I'll have to be more diligent about getting them into the ground sooner.  Phew!  So much to learn.

Have a great week!