In praise of dandelions!

Why would I be praising dandelions?  Aren't they the bane of every homeowner with a lawn?  Yes, if you want to maintain a total monoculture in your yard.  But nature abhors monocultures, and will do everything she can to diversify them. Perhaps it is time for us to rethink the way we use the land around our homes.

Early-blooming flowers like dandelions are a major source of spring food for bees, butterflies, and other pollenators.  With the current bee shortage in many parts of the world, these insects need all the help they can get.  So I let the dandelions alone until they are done blooming, then mow them down. Sure, that spreads the seeds around -- but since I want dandelions, that's no problem for me.  After all, a "weed" is by definition simply a plant growing where you don't want it.

Our street number in spring

Granted, I live out in the country, where the philosophy pretty much is "if it's green, its a lawn."  In more controlled suburban neighborhoods you might have a hard time convincing your neighbors to let you have a lawn full of dandelions -- but then again, that's why I don't live there.  Nature is more important to me than social status.  If you visit me in the spring, you will likely be greeted with hundreds of these bright yellow flowers dotting the landscape.

Dandelions are also nutritious. In fact, they were brought to the USA as a vegetable by the French. ("Dandelion" comes from the French dent de leon, "Lion's Tooth," named or the jagged edges of the leaves.)  Old herbals prescribe them as a cure for scurvy, and recommend eating as many leaves as you can find in the spring.  Good advice at a time when people didn't understand about Vitamin C deficiency.  But they did know that the plants leafed out very early and the cure worked.

You need to pick dandelion greens before the plants flower, however.  Once the blooms appear, the whole plant gets very bitter -- so bitter, in fact, that I've known nature-oriented Jews to use them for the "bitter herbs" at the Passover Seder instead of the usual horseradish. (Which is perfectly kosher -- the Torah says "bitter herbs" but does not name a species.)

My chickens and geese also know the value of dandelions as food, and will choose them over other greens. Here you see two geese gobbling down fresh dandelion leaves, while ignoring the grain feed they've been eating all winter.  They know good nutrition when they see it!

Dandelions can also be used to make dandelion wine.  There are a lot of good recipes online, but one thing they may not tell you is to use the yellow petals only!!! The first time I tried it, I used whole dandelion heads and ended up with a bitter brew that only a masochist would care to drink.  That's because the green base of the flower (called the calyx) has the same bitter taste as the stems.  Having learned my lesson, I now use only petals.  The easiest way to prepare these is to hold the flower head in one hand and cut off the yellow ends of the petals with a scissors. A bit tedious, but you'll have a far better wine.

If nothing else, I find dandelions to be a welcome, happy greeting in spring after a long Minnesota winter.  Like little yellow smiley faces, telling me to come out of hibernation -- spring is here!

Got allergies? Don't blame the goldenrod!

It's mid-September and the goldenrod is now in full bloom -- right about the same time that the pollen count hits the roof.  Over and over, I hear people blaming their hay fever on goldenrod.   But they are wrong!  Read on...

A field of goldenrod on my land in Minnesota --
haven for many butterflies & other insects

 Everyone can see the bright yellow of a field of goldenrod plants in full bloom.  As they look at all those yellow flowers along the road, they visualize clouds of pollen choking the air.  Just the sight of it all is enough to make some people sneeze.

But the fact is, goldenrod pollen is not spread by the wind at all.  This is why weather reports that include a pollen count never even mention goldenrod as a source.

A Goldenrod flower

Don't believe me?  See for yourself: Touch a goldenrod flower and you will not have any pollen on your hands.  Shake one and you won't see any clouds of pollen hitting the air.  It just doesn't blow around.   It spreads by sticking to the bodies of insects.  Unless you are a bug with lots of tiny hairs on your body to pick up the pollen, it doesn't leave the plant very easily.  Ecologically speaking, Goldenrod is an important nectaring flower for wasps, bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects.  So please -- don't yank it out!

Ragweed plant in full bloom

The real culprit is ragweed, a coarse weedy green plant that blends into the background in fields and woodland edges.  Unlike the showy flowers of goldenrod, the rather nondescript flower stalks of ragweed are just loaded with pollen, and it does indeed spread on the wind.

Ragweed is not particular about habitat, and will grow just about anywhere.  The plant in this photo grew next to my compost pile, so it got to be over 6 feet tall from all that rich chicken manure.  Along the road you might see flowering ragweed only about a foot high, eking out an existence in the hard-packed gravel on the shoulder.  But once you learn to recognize it, you'll see it growing just about everywhere.

(Well, maybe not in the high desert -- but it crops up in irrigated areas like Las Vegas.  In fact, according to The 30 Worst Cities for Ragweed, Las Vegas ranks #2.  The top city on the list is Phoenix, Arizona.)

The stuff is very easy to pull up, so if you learn to to recognize it before it pollens out, you can at least eliminate it from your garden.  But with all the acres and acres of wild areas where it can flourish, you will probably have to wait until frost kills the plants before your "hay fever" finally goes away for the season.  Just don't blame your misery on the innocent goldenrod!

Typical distribution of ragweed pollen in
the USA in September

A beautiful pink and white spider!

"Even things you see as superfluous in this world -- like flies, fleas, and mosquitoes -- are part of the greater scheme of the creation of the world.  'And God saw all that God had created, and behold it was very good.'" (Midrash Exodus Rabbah 10:1)

For many people, including the words "beautiful" and "spider" together in the title of this blog post would be an oxymoron.  Spiders are often seen as ugly and even fearsome creatures.  But for those who can get beyond their arachnophobia, some spiders can indeed be attractive.  Consider this pretty spider I spotted on a milkweed plant in my garden. (Click photos to enlarge):

I had never seen a spider like this before, and was amazed at how the pink stripes on her (yes, it is a female) abdomen exactly match the color of the flowers.  I could not find this species in any of my nature books, so I googled "pink and white spider" and immediately found this page on a spider website that not only identified the species, it gave me a lot of other interesting info.  Turns out my pink and white spider is nothing rare.  The species is very widespread and often found on a variety of flowers. There were many, many more sites where people asked or wrote about this interesting spider.

The scientific name is Misumena vatia, and it a variety of crab spider, known as both a Milkweed Flower Crab Spider and a Yellow Goldenrod Crab Spider, among several other names.  This is one of the few North American spiders that can change its color to match its surroundings -- an arachnid chameleon!   After reading this, I remembered that I had seen similar spiders on goldenrod flowers, but they were yellow.  Now I know they are the same species.

This is a "wait and pounce" type of spider that does not spin a web.  Instead, it sits quietly on flowers, blending in and waiting for something to land.  When I checked back a few hours later, the spider was still there and feeding on a yellow jacket wasp that she had caught.

Which brings me to another nature observation.  This summer, I have not seen a single honeybee anywhere on my land.  Not one!  As you may already know, the honeybees are facing a serious health crisis and are dying out by the droves.  Years ago I used to stand under my apple trees when they were in bloom and hear a constant, busy humming as the bees did their work.  But no more.  This year, the fruit trees were silent. 



Hornet on milkweed

However, I am still getting pollenation on my flowers and vegetables.  The niche has been taken over by various other insects, including paper wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, flies,  moths, butterflies, and a variety of species of bumblebees.

This is why I do not remove wasp nests unless they are in a spot where they might be a problem for animals or humans -- such as right over a door way.  Otherwise, I leave them alone.  To those visitors who complain about wasps flying around, I reply that these are the insects responsible for pollenating the vegetables we harvest.  Plus they are insect predators, removing a lot of destructive caterpillars from the garden.  Really, the wasps and hornets are more beneficial that bothersome -- and if you don't bother them, they won't bother you.

Why was this hornet's nest so close to the ground?

Now that the leaves are all down, you can sometimes spot interesting things that were hidden during the summer.  Like this Bald-Faced Hornet's nest that has its opening less than a foot above the ground, which is probably why I couldn't find it earlier in the summer.   I knew there were hornets around because I saw them, but I was looking UP into the treetops, where these nests usually are.  And here there was a nest less than 30 feet from my chicken coop and practically ON the ground -- not more than six feet from where I was harvesting wild plums!  I probably walked past that nest dozens of times and never even knew it was there.  I didn't bother them and they didn't bother me.

Bald-faced Hornet

This is the second time I've found a very low nest on my land -- the first was only about 3 feet off the ground, near another outbuilding.  There are plenty of trees around here to nest in, so I am wondering:  Do hornets often build so low, or do I have an unusual strain of these insects breeding here?  Hornets only use the nest for one season, after which they all die off except the new queens, who hibernate over the winter, producing new colonies in the spring.  So it is conceivable that some mutation is causing queens here to nest low.  I'll have to watch for more low nests next spring.

Before I go any further, I should mention that there is NO HONEY in a nest like this, in spite of what Hollywood might think.  In both cartoons and live action films (such as in Doctor Doolittle 2, where a bear climbs up to a nest for honey) hornet's nests are mistakenly confused with old-fashioned garden beehives.  Climb up to one of these nests and all you will get is a bunch of stings, because hornets don't make honey.  They are predators that feed their larvae on  insects.

Back of my coop -- the lighter areas
are where the hornets scraped off
wood fibers for their nest.

Where were the hornets getting their wood fibers to make this nest?  From the back of my chicken coop, where they scraped the bare weathered wood clean.  I've seen this behavior here before, both with hornets and wasps, but wasn't paying much attention this summer because of the heat wave.  It wasn't until I found the nest that I went to look at the coop.  You can very clearly see the lighter areas where they were working (click the pix to enlarge).

Interestingly, they seem to follow the vertical lines of the boards.  In cases where I have actually seen hornets doing this, they are always clinging vertically, never horizontally. Most likely, they are following the grain of the wood.  And if you listen very closely, you can actually hear them chewing.  In fact, the first time I observed this behavior many years ago, it was by first hearing a strange scraping sound, looking for the source, then seeing a hornet busily chewing along a dead goldenrod stalk.

In this closeup,  you can clearly see where they left off and the patina of the old wood (darker area on the left) still shows.  When you look at the nest itself, you also see variations in the color of the paper, with clear stripes from both the dark and light areas.  This suggests to me that each wasp goes back to the same part of the coop wall, gets a load of fibers, then returns to the same area on the nest.  But since I have not actually observed this, it is only guesswork.

All of this brings up the question of where wasps and hornets get their wood fibers in developed areas.  An old weather-worn shack like my chicken coop would never be tolerated in more upscale neighborhoods.  Ditto for dead trees and other suitable debris.  Maybe they use wooden fences?  I have seen photos of nests that are more reddish in color, as if made from redwood.

Hornets, along with their cousins, the paper wasps, are very good for the garden -- which is where the inhabitants of this nest were hunting all summer.  I watched them searching among the broccoli and cabbage leaves for those little green caterpillars.  When they find one, they sting it and carry it back to their nest.  Ditto for army worms and other pests, including flies, which can be found in abundance around the coop and manure pile. Plus, both hornets and wasps visit flowers to eat pollen and nectar, and seem to be moving into the niche that has been vacated by honey bees around here.  I only saw two honey bees all summer, but lots of wasps were on the flowers, and we got a good harvest.  So unless the nests are someplace dangerous to me or my animals, I leave these very beneficial insects alone.   Besides, they give me an excellent reason NOT to paint the chicken coop!

Closeup of the nest after I collected it, showing the
variations of colors of wood pulp used.

Thousands of USA heat records broken -- new widget tracks them all

The weather has finally cooled down here in Minnesota -- at least for now.  Over 4000 heat records have been broken so far this summer in the USA, and the PBS Newshour site has developed this widget to track them all.   Use the scroll arrows to see records set by day, month, and year.  (You can get the widget code for your own site at:  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/08/is-this-record-breaking-record-breaking-heat.html, where you will also find an informative article.   And yes, the widget will run year round, since records get broken in winter, too.)

 

As you can see, some of these records stood for more that 50 years.  Clearly this is a disturbing pattern -- and one that does not bode well for the future.  Global warming is here, whether the deniers like it or not.  Perhaps that's the REAL meaning of the endtime prophecy that says people will be "eating and drinking as in the days of Noah."  Maybe not gluttony as has been thought, but apathy in the face of warnings.   No doubt they laughed Noah, too: "A flood?  In the desert?  You've got to be kidding!" And we all know what happened to that generation.

And it's not just a matter of things warming up.   Climate change means weather patterns are changing, too.  Places that used to get rain are turning into deserts -- witness the drought and famine in Africa.   I remember hearing years ago that the monsoons in India were no longer coming reliably, but nobody heeded the warning.    Those same monsoons are what used to water the fields of Somalia.  And the southwestern USA (where a lot of these records are being broken even as I write) is experiencing the worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

On the other hand, Minnesota has been drowning in much more rain than usual.   Rivers reached record highs, there have been numerous flash floods and many more severe storms than usual.   Every time the Jet Stream takes an  abnormal plunge south, it sucks up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and pulls it north.   Here in Pine County, MN, it rained just about every other day (sometimes several days in a row) in July.  I ended up growing a lot of my garden veggies in containers, because it was just plain too wet to till the ground.

Down the road from me is a cornfield that never got planted.  Lots of other fields lie fallow, too.   All of which is resulting in higher prices in the supermarket.   Parts of my lawn got so out of control I just let them go to seed and will mow it down for chicken bedding when -- if ever -- it dries up a bit.  Meanwhile, I struggle to keep up the mowing around the house and trails to the outbuildings.  Wild plants in general are huge -- I've got ragweed with inch-thick stems, eight-foot-high Jerusalem Artichokes (sunchokes), and enormous blackberry canes trying to take over my garden.

 On the other hand, pollination has been iffy.  There were very few wild berries in spite of all the rapid growth.  And not one wild plum on my trees.  Pollinating insects don't fly in the rain.  Some don't even fly on cloudy days.  And I have not seen one single honeybee -- not one!   Whatever is causing the demise of the honeybees has apparently reached here.  This spring, when I stood under my apple trees, I did not hear the happy buzz of honeybees, although some pollination did happen from other insects, because apples are forming.  The honeybee niche seems to have been taken over by a  species of small bumblebee, which I have seen on my cucumbers and squashes in large numbers.  Something is pollinating my tomatoes also, although there are fewer fruits than in other years.   And as I wrote in a previous blog post, the Monarch butterfly population crashed here this year -- I have not found one single caterpillar.

All of this is very disturbing, to say the least.  Nature will eventually adjust to climate change -- but will we?