Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Dear Farmers,

Today I write my last Farmer Ladybug post for the school year.  What a wonderful and unexpected journey we have had together!  I know and trust that your home gardens are growing well, that you've learned a little from me about what plants like and what our animal allies are telling us about our gardens.  I know for sure that if you keep gardening and keep your hands in the Earth, that the plants and animals will continue to teach you many things, just as they have taught me.

At dinner one night, Mosquito read a card that asked, "What can you do to help the Earth?"  And while we came up lots of answers the one that felt the best to me was - to just be with her and play with her.  I think that is true.  Mother Earth wants most of all for us to be outside and play with her.  I hope you get to do lots of that this summer.

I planted the corn at the garden today with Mr. Stagnaro, Ms. Naccarato and Ms. Eichhorn.  It was nice to work with friends again in the garden.  I taught them our verse, "One for the gopher, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow." We used the beautiful red corn you all collected from our fall harvest. Our corn seed has been passed down like that from class to class every year.  Next year's class will harvest the seeds from the seeds you collected, and pass them down too.

I continued to work after everyone had left.  The baby jays came out to see what I'd dug from the compost.  A baby crow begged for food while I worked.  I've been working alongside their parents all Spring.  You can see the Scrub Jay parent in my latest garden video and, if you're listening well, you can also hear the crying crow in the background.

Garden class 23 video- The Last Gardening Class

The chickens and bunnies will go to their new forever homes this week and I too, will not be returning to Monterey Bay Charter School as a garden teacher.  Not to worry. Like you, I will still be gardening at home and also will continue to teach many classes and lead camps in the community.  It's not hard to find me- just see the Contacts page.

A goodbye gift to you

I would like to gift you on your way into the world with the corn and fava bean seeds collected from the plants you grew this year.  If you would like me to mail or deliver you seeds for your home garden from the plants you grew in the school garden, please email me using the link on the Contacts page.  Be sure to include your address in the email. I will also include a special note just for you.

Happy Gardening, dear Farmers!  May you sow seeds and plant gardens wherever life takes you!


With great love,

Farmer Ladybug 🐞

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

We worked in the school garden today.  Farmer Hummingbird came with us to weedeat down all the grass, so if you pass by on one of your walks, you'll see it looks very different now.  Without weekly mowing, the grass had grown very thick.  He also took down the barley field. Cob-weaver and Mosquito saved some plump barley heads, but overall it was a poor crop.  While Farmer Hummingbird worked a mama Scrub Jay and her two babies followed closely behind, picking off any little critters left stranded.  The mama sat on the sundial- the spot I've seen her at for many of my visits- and the babies whined and begged and to their credit tried to forage on their own. It was a delight to watch them.  Crow came also and two Western Bluebirds.  Their was quite a feast in all that tall grass.  When we stood in the newly mowed barley field, we could see tiny spiders- little cob and funnel-weavers running in every direction, ladybugs too.  It was a sad sight, really.  The birds were going after snails and bigger prey.

The two big storms that moved through only added up to 0.44 inches of rain by our rain gauge, so we watered.  The fava bean crop is almost done, at least the one by the garden classroom.  The other one, over by the water tanks was slower because it is shaded all winter by the redwood.  Next Tuesday is s fruit day, so we'll remove the fava beans by the classroom and plant it with corn, squash and beans.

Fava beans are a delicious winter crop and they make the most succulent meal imaginable.  But, they are very difficult to prepare.  I only make it once or twice a season and I need lots of helping hands.  Here is may all time favorite fava bean dish.

Fava Bean Ragout

from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Vegetables.

3-4 lbs fava beans
1 large clove garlic
1 sprig rosemary
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
½ lemon
Gnocchi, cooked to package directions

Shell fava beans.  Bring pot of water to boil and add favas, simmer for 1 minute.  Drain and cool immediately with cold water. Pierce outer skin with thumbnail and squeeze each bean out of its skin. Chop garlic fine and strip rosemary leaves and chop fine.  Put fava beans in a pan with ½ water and ½ olive oil, enough to barely cover. Add garlic and rosemary, season with salt and pepper as desired. Bring to simmer, cover and cook until beans are tender, about 5 mins. Finish with a squeeze of lemon juice. Serve with gnocchi.

Farmer Ladybug🐞

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

We visited the school garden today and harvested lots of fava beans.  The fava beans are covered with aphids.  They are also covered with ladybugs.  Ladybugs, ladybugs, everywhere ladybugs.  Ladybug eggs, ladybug nymphs, ladybug chrysalis, and loads and loads of adults.  Did you know that ladybugs have 4 life stages?  They are like butterflies that way. Many insects do this, but butterflies get all the credit.  Can you recognize the ladybug in all her forms?  Mosquito took these photos for you.

Adult ladybug and aphids

Ladybug eggs on fava bean leaf

Ladybug nymph

Busy ladybugs

Beautiful ladybug with heart spots

When we came home we found that Cob-weaver's Underwing moth had hatched from its chrysalis.  We had buried the chrysalis in soil in a jar.  We let it go at dusk.

Farmer Ladybug🐞

Thursday, May 7, 2020

When I water the flower bed this morning, I notice an underwing moth crawling away.  It is big.  It is bigger than a quarter and very helpless in the cool of the early morning. It must have just emerged from its underground cocoon.  It finds a safer spot in the grass to warm up.  Like all moths, it flies at night.  I wonder what it eats?  This is the second underwing in two days.  The first we rescued from Bisbis. We put it in our insect cage for the day and let it go at dusk.

As we sit on our front porch for our morning snack, the two crows come and sit right above us on the roof.  The peek at us over the roofline with their heads upside down.  It looks very silly and makes us laugh. They are hoping for their share, I think.

It's a flower day, so we decide to plant the sunflower bed and record a video for Garden class 22.  We learned on Cob-weaver's Daisy journey that sunflowers and geraniums clean the soil of lead (thanks to Girl Scout troop leader and mom of LUDA).  I think we will grow more than usual this year.  I've also started some under the grow lights for the school garden's sunflower patch.

In garden class at school, this is the time of year where the students tell the stories.  They stand at the chalkboard and tell everyone what they have learned about their garden animal.  They tell us their animal super powers and also, what the farmer learns from them. I have three stories from you to share on my video today.  Thank you to Millipede (NAES), Scrub Jay (LUDA), and Rollie Pollie (EPMA) for your stories from the Garden class 20 assignment.  What are those letter codes with the animal names you ask?  Check out the Garden Animal Partner Puzzle here to find out who is telling these stories of their garden animals.  I look forward to sharing more of your stories about garden animals.  If you'd like me to read your story in my video, simply turn it on on Google classroom and give me your OK to read it.

Farmer Ladybug 🐞

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

It has become a routine for us to have Sara out playing in the front yard while we enjoy the morning sun.  She stays very close by.  We never worry.  Even when I'm in the chicken yard, she is so constantly underfoot that I have to be careful not to step or trip over her.  If I am standing next to the hen house, she will get up higher so she can be at eye level with me.  It is both endearing and annoying.  What was funny today, was as we were basking about pulling weeds in the front yard, our neighbor who walks by daily with her old black lab, Samantha, was standing and staring.  It took me some time to notice.  She finally said, "Do you see something strange, Samantha?"  Samantha was staring intently at Sara, not blinking, with drool dripping out of her mouth.  She was as still as a statue.  It was then that it finally occurred to me how strange a sight it is to see a chicken freely walking around in a yard.  Samantha stayed staring and drooling for quite some time before her owner gently urged her on with her walk.

Crow has a partner.  There are now always two who come.

We finally got an egg from Popcorn today.  The first in two weeks.  I hope this means the comfrey is helping.

Farmer Ladybug 🐞

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Happy Cinco de Mayo!!

I have been really puzzled by the seedlings coming up in my big pot.  This is the pot I planted in the first video and showed again in the second.  It has yard soil in it. I suspected at first they were tomatillos.  But as they grew larger, I quickly realized I was wrong.  It is not like me to be so stumped by a seedling, especially one from my own yard.  What a mystery!  But this morning, my brain finally clicked. You know that feeling of a lightbulb going off?  That is what happened. And it is no wonder I didn't recognize this plant because I have not seen it as a seedling for 20 years!  It is cleome.  Lots and lots and lots of cleome seedlings are filling my pot and outcompeting everything else.  I still have my 2 wild lettuce and 2 chickweeds, but in this battle, its the cleome that is winning.  How did cleome get into this pot? 

Cleome is a beautiful ornamental, annual flower.  It has large, complex pink and white blossoms. In good conditions, with lots of rain, it can grow almost 10 feet tall.  It is not native to California and it does not grow here without lots of care and attention.  I don't really know how it is coming up in my pot.  I have a few hypotheses, but first need to tell you a bit of back story.

Cob-weaver is always collecting flower seeds. We carry around envelops in the car for this. When we go hiking in the fall, we come back with lots of seeds in our pockets. She collected cleome seeds almost 3 summers ago when we visited the grandparents in Maryland.  We tried to plant some last summer, but only a few came up under the grow light.  They were weak and spindly.  Most did not come up.  The ones that did flowered but they were tiny, under 6 inches tall. As is my usual practice, I dumped the old potting soil out from the seed pack and saved it for replanting something else. 

Hypotheses:

1. Could that soil have been dumped into the big pot and these are seeds sprouting from last year?
2. Did I dump out the rest of the cleome seeds from my stored envelope of seeds, thinking they were too old, into this pot, and forget about them? 
3. Did the cleome seeds mix with the marigold seeds that Cob-weaver collected at the same time, and when I dumped all the rest of the marigold seeds, I also unknowingly dumped in cleome seeds?  That would mean cleome seed is a lot hardier than marigold.
4. Do you have a hypothesis?

I love watching aphids almost as much as I love watching ants.  Ants are often with aphids and there is a good reason for this.  If you have aphids in your garden, I invite you to go and find out what the ants are doing with them.  You'll have to watch for a long time to figure out this puzzle.  I'll be writing about it soon here in my journal, but I wanted to give you a chance to discover it first on your own.  It's really cool, I promise.

Farmer Ladybug 🐞

Sunday, May 3, 2020

The corn and squash are up in the medicine wheel.  Today we planted the pole beans to climb the corn.  The poppies have germinated.  They are so tiny and delicate!  Their leaves are like fine hair.

Popcorn has been laying the bad eggs.  I thought it was Isabella, but for sure its Popcorn.  We have found broken yolk on her feet a few times.  Also, she is the only one who has white eggs.  White chickens lay white eggs.  We haven't had a white egg in a really long time.  When we do get a white egg, they are the biggest of all of the rest.  Popcorn is a Leghorn, I believe, which is the breed of chicken most used in egg laying operations.  They lay the most of any other breed.  Another thing about Popcorn... she is always STARVING in the morning.  She is the smallest, hungriest chicken of the flock.  She really is breaking a fast at breakfast, as if the long night sleep was a real hardship for her.  I think I was misled about the leathery eggs being hers because they are light brown instead of white.  I wonder if the hard white shell forms after the leathery one?

Because Ant wakes up first, he lets out the chickens.  I feed them after I get up. This morning before I gave them breakfast, I found all the chickens suspiciously gathered in a circle eating.   In my experience, that always means they are up to no good.  Our flock in Missouri did this once. I discovered that day that chickens are cannibals. They were all eating the rooster.  Yuck!   Luckily, no one was dead today- although that did cross my mind.  They were eating a leather egg laid on the ground.  Its not a good thing when chickens start eating eggs. The may turn around and eat them right after laying them, or you'll have a few bad apples in the flock that peck the eggs.  Once this bad habit is learned, its hard to break and can ruin a flock of good layers.  On a farm, the egg-peckers are the first to enter the soup pot.  But, this is not a farm and we are not dependent on the eggs to feed us. These are town chickens and pets.  We will have to outsmart them.  Even though chicken brains are notoriously tiny, outsmarting them is harder then you might think.

We have put Popcorn on a comfrey and eggshell diet.  The eggshells need to be ground fine so they don't look like eggs; otherwise, this just reinforces the egg pecking behavior.  We named Popcorn, "The Miracle" in the Cast of Characters.  Here is her story:

Popcorn's story

Popcorn was born 3 years ago in the Spring of 2017 in a class incubator.  What was so miraculous about Popcorn is that she came from store bought eggs.  Yes, that's right.  The 3rd grade teacher that year, Ms. G, walked into a grocery store and bought a dozen fertilized eggs.  She put them in an incubator and Popcorn, and only Popcorn hatched.  The other 11 eggs did not hatch.  That makes Popcorn a miracle to me.  It's also a miracle because she was supposed to be eaten and her life was spared. Yes, you can hatch fertilized grocery store bought eggs.  Make sure you read the date on the carton and get the freshest ones.  They will probably be Leghorns.  Because of Popcorn, I now love Leghorns.

Since Popcorn had no siblings, the teacher, Ms. G., went and bought another baby chick to be her sister.  That chick was Diamond, originally named Penny by the class.  So Popcorn and Diamond have been together since they were chicks.  They moved into the school chicken pen with Ol' Big Red and Speckles (both now deceased, RIP). They lived a pretty uneventful life- besides their wonderful luck of being school chickens.

Popcorn is tiny but mighty in the pecking order.  She is very bossy and picks on Sara relentlessly.  Although she is not the leader, she has also taken a pretty high position mixing into my flock.  She is not afraid of attacking anyone.   Only the home chickens Roxy and Penny are higher up in the pecking order than her.  She is also a very funny and has big, bulging eyes.  It makes you laugh to watch her and her floppy comb.  She loves cameras and is quite photogenic.  Maybe she has a future as movie star, who knows?

Farmer Ladybug 🐞