November seems to have run its course very quickly. The first few snowfalls have whitened the landscape, though mild weather still returns often enough to melt it away. Thanksgiving has come and gone. Christmas now looms. A fresh coating of light snow from some unsettled weather this past weekend gives the lawn outside the appearance of winter, even though technically it’s still late fall and not all of the leaves have gotten raked up.
A morning walk several weeks ago turned up this interesting discovery.
A fallen branch from an old beech tree shows a series of holes drilled into the bark. This is the work of a type of woodpecker called a sapsucker. In New Hampshire, it’s the yellow-bellied sapsucker which abounds.
Like other woodpeckers, it feeds on insects, berries and fruits, but it derives its name from its habit of drilling neat lines of holes in live trees and feeding on the sap that oozes out. Healthy trees can tolerate the minor damage caused by the birds, though sickly ones may eventually succumb if the damage is significant enough. For the most part, these little holes, or sapwells as they are sometimes called, can serve a beneficial purpose. Other birds, insects and small mammals like squirrels will also feed on the oozing sap, exploiting an important food source.
The sapsucker nests in cavities they excavate in tree trunks. Once the nestlings are raised, other birds such as swallows and bluebirds will make use of the ready made holes for their own young.
Because of these modest but helpful benefits, sapsuckers are regarded as a keystone species in the northeastern woods of North America. If you’re interested in seeing these small birds, they will frequent bird feeders and appeciate suet placed out for them. So keep an eye peeled for them this winter.
Fall foliage is past peak and either turned brown or fallen. The first few snow flakes of the coming winter got spat out of a dreary raw rainy sky yesterday along with a few pellets of sleet. Halloween and November are on the doorstep. Plenty of seasonal lawn ornaments, some cute, some ghoulish.
Already plenty of leaves to be raked up with more to come.
While there’s been no frost or freeze yet, the weather has been raw enough so that growing season has pretty much ended, except for the occasional fungi bursting out of the ground.
I find it hard to think of it as still fall, with the first day of winter still over a month away. Rather it seems more a curious pause between fall and winter. The brilliant colors of autumn have vanished but the snows of winter have yet to collect on the ground. This little segment of the year ought to have a name of its own. Possibly Ember Days, which in Christian calenders marked a period of time following the change of the seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) when fasting and prayer were done. There are a number of different types of celebrations done at this time of year, honoring the summer and the bountiful crops (if any) it produced, allowing food to be put up for the winter to come.
Given what a short period of time it is (roughly end of October to Thanksgiving, or whenever the snow begins falling in earnest) perhaps it might best be named the Quiet Time. A time for taking stock of the past year and begin preparing for the year yet to come. A time for peacefully appreciating what we have, rather than going berserk in the wild consumer bacchanalias that Thanksgiving and Christmas have been turned into.
Whatever it may be called, enjoy and have a happy season.
With this past summer winding down and the first day of autumn this Saturday, I like taking a look around before the fall chill really starts to bite down. A few leaves have begun turning color, although the real show won’t begin for a few more weeks. Small flocks of birds are starting to congregate, in preparation for their migration south for the winter. The raised beds are past their prime with the potatoes having matured, their greenery dying back. Those I will leave in the ground for the time being. Wax beans have mostly gone by, with the last batch being just enough for a meal.
Zucchini has never done well for me, with only a single zuke on the vine that looks like it might actually amount to something, the others having withered and dropped off the plant without getting any longer than my thumb. This can be due to missing soil nutrients such as calcium or inadequate pollination by insects. Since I have seen a decent population of bumblebees this summer, I suspect that the soil may be the issue. Oh well, there’s always next year.
Carrots didn’t do all that great, with poor germination by the seeds this past spring. I had to replant and even then the seed sprouted slowly in a very desultory fashion. The excess amount of rain we received this summer may have affected their growth. Those that did grow will stay as long as possible in the ground before I pull them up to see how they did.
The carrots left over from last year that I planted as an experiment, blossomed profusely. Many, though not all of the flower heads are going to seed. I noticed with some surprise that ants seemed to favor the blossoms, climbing around on top of the flower heads. My initial suspicion was that they were farming aphids, but close examination of the flowers and stems showed no sign of aphids. Apparently the ants seemed to like the flowers themselves, but whether they did any pollinating is hard to say. I have seen ants on wild sarsaparilla blossoms also, so they may do a bit of pollinating here and there.
The last few weeks of September are when stores such as Home Depot and Walmart fill up with fall mums. The grocery stores offer them up as well. There seem to be just three main colors (that I saw), white, yellow and deep purple. I haven’t seen any of the orange-bronze color yet. As many of my potted flowers are going – well – to pot, I dug some of them out and planted fall mums.
Fall wildflowers put on a bold display with goldenrod and asters predominating. My personal favorite is the New England aster.
The blossoms are a vibrant purple with orange centers. Bees, wasps and yellowjackets zoom around over these tall flowers, eagerly pollinating them. Herbalists make use of these plants, employing the stems and root for relieving pain and healing wounds. The root by itself is claimed to ease diarrhea and fever. I haven’t had occasion to try them out, much preferring to just admire them and try sowing the seed heads about after they finish blooming in the hopes of helping them spread. If this plant does have medicinal value, it’s worthwhile to have as many as possible.
That’s all for this month. Hope your summer was a pleasant one.
As summer draws near its end, I like looking back at the season gone by. The biggest impression I have of it is the rain. Rain,rain,rain,rain,rain…etc. You get the picture. For almost a decade now, the summers have been abnormally dry, creating moderate to severe drought conditions in New Hampshire. Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction. For the month of July we received nearly 10 inches of rain in the northern half where I live, about triple what the average rainfall usually is. While I didn’t measure the rain in June, it seemed to be a similar amount. Flash flooding in the southern half of the state was severe, with many roads getting washed out and farmers getting their fields too soaked for anything to sprout. August has been drier with about four inches as of the 21st, but there’s still a few weeks to go.
The plants of course have been loving it. You can almost hear a collective green sigh: Finally some decent rain! After the freak hard freeze of mid-May, oak trees quickly rebounded with new growth, though I see no sign of acorns. Mosquitoes, after a noted absence during the dry years, have experienced a renaissance, back in full force and as ferociously hungry as ever.
I expected to see a bumper crop of mushrooms this year but was surprised to see they are in no more abundance this summer than last. Still, one type of mushroom popped up in the back yard that I haven’t seen for a couple years; the morel.
I’m not a mushroom eater, so I left this specimen to run its life cycle and drop its spores for the next round of morels.
I spotted this patch of ghostpipes about a month ago. Many people, unfamiliar with the plant life in their neighborhoods, confuse these with mushrooms but they are actually a vascular plant, a flower in the same family as heather. Ghostpipes are parasitic, feeding off certain fungi in the soil. Because of this, they have no need for chlorophyll, hence their white coloration.
Mullein is an herbaceous biennial, preferring roadsides and waste areas. This particular plant is in its second year, going from the rosette above in late spring to this in late summer….
Just over four feet in height, it will drop its seeds in late summer and early fall, sowing the next generation. I’ll be collecting a few seeds and see if I can get this plant to grow on the bank in front of my home.
My garden loved the drenching rains as well.
The echinacea is quite tall this year at over four feet (you can see some beebalm in the background).
Phlox, both pink and white, are blooming profusely.
Black eyed Susans are doing well. I have both a domesticated version as well as the wild form. This is the domesticated flower.
I’m trying a experiment this year. At the beginning of the growing season, I found I still had several carrots which I had grown last year, in the bottom of the refrigerator drawer, unused. They had bright green leaves sprouting from their tops, so on a whim I planted them to see if they would grow.
They quicky took off with great gusto as the above picture shows, obviously ready for the second half of their life cycle. Carrots are biennials. The roots we see in the stores are the first year growth. The second year they produce flowers looking much like Queen Anne’s Lace, which isn’t surprising since Queen Anne’s is a wild ancestor of the store-bought carrot. They will hybridize quite freely, producing their ancestral form rather than the carrots we’re fond of.
Since there’s no Queen Anne’s Lace growing nearby (that I know of), the carrots I’m using, a Yellowstone and a Chanteray, should have each other to cross with. Yellowstone is open pollinated but I’m not sure about the other as the seed packet is long gone. Any seeds I collect, will be planted next year. What will grow, if anything, is anyone’s guess. Stay tuned!
Several months ago, at the end of May, I found myself engaged in a peculiar battle. While puttering around the dining room, I spotted a robin flying low past the window with plant material in its beak. Realizing it was probably nest building, I watched eagerly for its next trip back. When it did fly by, it flew directly into the two-car garage attached to my home. This got a big NOPE from me, as I close the garage door (electric) whenever I am away. So I went out to see where the pair of robins were building.
I have a two-car garage, legacy of when my parents were alive and each owned their own car. Now that they have passed on, I use only one half of the garage for my own car and the other half for storage. Peering around, I spotted the nest being built on top of the garage door-opener mechanism for the storage side. As robins tend to be messy, using mud as part of their construction, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving the garage door open all the time for their convenience, this needed to be discouraged. I really didn’t want other critters getting the idea my garage was prime real estate; like skunks, raccoons, squirrels and the occasional bear.
The simplest tactic was to just keep the garage door closed, opening it only to make grocery trips. This proved to be effective, though I’ll admit they were persistent. When I came back from one trip, one robin flew OUT of the garage when I opened the door, so it must have scooted in when I was backing out to leave. Finally they gave up. I felt bad about it, but you have to put your foot down sometimes. Once they were gone, I used a broom to sweep off what they had accumulated. It was mostly weed stems and dried grass, loosely put together, so the nest building process had only just started.
A garage-door opening mechanism is not the most unusual nesting site for a pair of birds to select. Given that we humans hog a good deal of the scenery, there’s a serious shortage of good spots for our avian neighbors to set up housekeeping. This forces birds to try to adapt to what’s available. In fact, birds will often use considerable ingenuity in picking a nesting spot.
This pair of robins selected a basketball hoop (presumably unused) for their nest.
A wind chime was just the thing for this hummingbird.
And this mallard found a flower pot to be a perfectly ducky place for her nest.
For more eye-opening, not to mention laugh-out-loud, nesting choices, the BoredPanda web site has a long list of unusual nesting sites with accompanying photos. Given how determined our feathered neighbors are, it might be worth our while to create additional sites for them. Bird houses can easily be set up. Small platforms in an area secure from squirrels, cats and other predators will no doubt be greatly appreciated. The reward? Ensuring birds and their progeny will be around for a long time to come.
