MamaStories

This should have been a joyous day, a glorious day. Instead there was cussing. I don’t often cuss, so it was shocking. What happened? The chipmunks got to the first tomato of the season.

THE first tomato.

The ICONIC tomato.

The one you take a picture of:

Its good side

Its chipmunk side

They also got the second one, which wasn’t nearly ripe. There are, by my latest count, hundreds of tomatoes ripening in that hoop house. At this rate we’re not going to get to eat any of them.  The chipmunks have dug tunnels underneath the sides, so putting on doors will not help. What do you think? Coyote pee?

I wrote last time about my concern that my colony is behind. At my last inspection they still hadn’t drawn out (built wax comb onto) enough frames to warrant the second brood box. Still, my inspection indicated that the queen would soon run out of immediately available space to lay eggs. In the summer a good queen can lay 1500-2000 eggs a day!

So yesterday I went in to move one of the empty outside frames in couple of spots in.

When bees build comb and then fill it up with brood lives in two boxes, they will always use it for brood {UPDATE: this turns out not to be true: the bees can clean out honey and use the cell for brood}. As the new bee emerges from her cocoon, her pupal lining stays behind and is not cleaned out – neither are waste and bits of pollen and propolis. Over the years, brood comb, then, gets darker, even black. Since the chance of disease rises and the cells become smaller with each new shedding of a cocoon, brood comb needs replacing every four or so years (though it depends). Comb filled with honey will always use be honeycomb {UPDATE: nope}, which is lighter in color, because each cell always gets cleaned out totally when the bees go into their honey stores.

The brood nest (adult bees, eggs, larvae and pupae) forms a sphere in the middle of the hive. When you add a second box on top, the bees will gradually move the nest up. By winter, the nest will be in the top box. In spring you reverse the boxes, so the nest is in the bottom box again. And so forth.

My brood (B) nest, confined as yet to one single box, was honey-bound: it was enclosed on both sides with honeycomb (H), and not large enough.

One of the solutions is to put the second  brood box on top: no less than ten empty frames. But it is desirably that the bees draw out all the frames in both boxes. This means the beekeeper often needs to move frames around. I moved the empty first frame into the third slot, in between two frames of brood, so the bees will draw it out and fill it with brood.

This is what I love about beekeeping (or what I have experienced of it so far). It is like a good game: rule driven, with a challenging array of variations. You observe patterns, deduce what is going on, and manipulate to get the best outcome. But the game is much bigger than that. All that the bees do, all that the weather brings, all that the flowers offer and all the interference from other animals and beekeepers, etc., it is all rule-driven: it has causes, reasons. Most of these are natural.  And nature is vast. We, beekeepers, have very limited insight in them. So the game is new every time. Keeps you on your toes.

Every Spring, since we’ve been here, we’ve had a Robin’s nest near the house. That’s why we call the place Robin Hill – plus it has a little bit of Robin Hood in it.

Year One (2008) they chose the rafters of the carport and Year Two they chose the nook next to Year One’s nest.� We never understood why they do this, as the carport is a relatively busy place. Each time we would walk in or past, the Robin on duty would take off with a great flutter of wings to perch on a nearby tree branch from which to scold us until we left.

I know that Robins will return ever year� but will never re-use a nest, and now it seems that they won’t even use the same space. In anticipation of their return I had moved the two old nests so they could go there again, as they seemed to like it so much. Instead they chose to move into the Japanese Andromeda that is right next to the mudroom entrance and the guest room window. An even busier place!

We now use our other (main) door – which leads straight into the living room – as often as we can, and try to tiptoe around, but it is difficult not to disturb them. The frantic escape from the dense bush is even more alarming what with all the leaves flying off as well. Still, it makes for great observation. Maybe we will install that webcam.

So far there are three beautiful blue eggs in the nest (Robins lay one egg a day and usually stop at four) — ah, that was based on my quick peek yesterday: today there are four!

And one wary Momma Robin (it’s usually the females who incubate the eggs).

There must be a bird’s nest in our shed as well. Each time we walk in there is a loud chirping, but we haven’t located it yet, so I can’t say what it is. Maybe the wrens, who always hang out in that shed.

My friend, Laura Medrano-Hernandez, has been nominated for the Ocean Hero Awards and I’m voting for her.

Oceana, which organizes the awards, was founded in 2001 and is the largest international organization focused solely on ocean conservation. Their website is a gem, with tips for play, research, activism and (if you’re so inclined) shopping (with a sustainable seafood guide).

You can vote for my friend too by simply clicking the button. Please do, she so deserves it!

This morning started with shooing a couple of wild turkeys away from the veg garden and the hoophouse (which stood wide-open). Luckily it was just the two of them, not a whole flock.

I brought the seedlings up from the basement and watered and fed them seaweed emulsion to get those root systems nice and strong. It takes ages to do this: sixteen trips up and down the stairs, the feeding of sixteen trays of seedlings in two watering trays, sixteen trips down and up the stairs again when the air gets too nippy… Let’s just say a lot of other stuff gets done while they sit and drink.

The tomato seedlings are looking nice and sturdy, much better than they did last year. I credit the early potting up. I potted up many of the herbs as well, so now my “bank” downstairs is truly full. There is no room for new seeds, and I want to start squash and zucchini, and a slew of other things. I’d transplant some out but the weather is too variable – 90F yesterday, 34F tomorrow night.

Tomorrow there’s 90% chance of rain. I hope there will be a dry spell when I can run out and plant more peas, and favas, and some flower seeds. But mostly I’ll be designing the earth oven and the herb spiral and making the final drafts of the new hoop house.

While hacking out a stump in one of our “wild” side gardens, we scared this (harmless) garden or garter snake. He, or she, was very defensive, striking out several times and unwilling to leave the spot. So we left. Amie understood: it’s the snake’s garden too. In any case it brought home the importance of raking the leaves in the more oft used gardens.

And that’s exactly what we were doing.

We were outside all day long, from 10 to 5, we even had our quick lunch out on our new patio. The weather was chilly (in the 40s) but sunny, and we were hot from working hard. We got rid of some piles of stones in the beg garden, opened up the fence for better access to that garden, but mostly raked leaves in the back yard, where the kids play. Witness the huge leaf piles in the corner (it grew even larger after I took the picture).

The stone ring in the foreground was here when we bought the house and we love it. Wild irises grow in it in Spring. Haven’t see any popping up yet. But the peas are germinating! We also collected heaps of pine cones for kindling or hopefully for burning up in my (bee) smoker.

We also booked our lumberjack neighbor to take down four spindly pines in this back yard. He’s giving us a good deal because he won’t have to dispose of the (useless) wood by chipping it or dumping it. Instead we’re going to use it to make a little log house later on, for Amie.

DH did some dumpster diving in our neighbor’s discarded wood dumpster and surfaced with a nice Atlantic cedar log, the perfect size for a gate post. And the Mountain Laurel I put on Freecycle wasn’t a Mountain Laurel, but a Japanese Andromeda. The Freecycler took it anyway. Now I have room for depots, right next to our parking lot.

And now I am going to sleep, because I. Am. Exhausted.

The other night my birdwatching neighbor came over to tell me there are is Barred Owl (Strix Varia) nesting in the trees behind our property and that I should listen for its calls. That evening, there it was, that typical “Who Cooks For You” call. By the time we got the mike out there, the call had changed to:

owlhoot1 and owlhoot2

(We are thinking of placing a mike on top of our roof, and whenever we hear something – the fisher cat, or the owls – we plug it into a laptop and record it. Yet another scheme here on our Hill!)

As we listened that evening I said to DH how wild it was, how I love how wild this place is (I wrote about the contrast with Europe here). DH remarked that surely an owl is not that wild – maybe he had jaguars in mind, and grizzly bears.

I replied an owl is pretty wild. What do I mean by wild, or wilderness? It took me not a second to answer it: Wild is Old.

That owl up there, high up in the tree, in the wind and the total darkness, is calling for a mate as it has been calling, with that exact same call, for millions of years.

Compare this with us, humans, our many, many languages, our many more ways of wooing, of saying “I want you” and “here I am”. And we’re changing  those every thousand years, every generation, every day. We are constantly adapting, transforming, cultivating, culturing.

The owls, the fisher cats, the bees, they don’t change. They stay wild. Their wild ways work for them as they did millions of years ago. That is wild. Wild is Old.

One of my ambitions is to make a phenology of this place. I’d love to use many media. Words foremost, then drawings, paintings and photographs, and  occasionally audio recordings and videos (but those I wouldn’t be able to stick in my favorite “container”, the book). To make a little drawing every day, of the newly arisen chipmunks, a flock of Robins, the daffodils finally poking through or the flowering buds on the bushes?

In any case, it’s not going to happen today, or tomorrow. Though a wonderful day, the first day of Spring, I should say, the only time I made it outside was to release three more mice (the full count is up to 10 now). Also got the Mama mouse this time, so perhaps it will be the end of them! They got themselves trapped but not before eating half my tomato seedlings. And there I was, yesterday, gleefully entering “100% !” in the germination chart for nearly every one of them. I resowed.

So last year the garden was weather-doomed (“dimmest summer on record”, wet and blighted). This year will be pests and varmints? Wish we could get all the plagues over and done with in one year (i.e., last year)!

So why didn’t I get out there? Amie has caught a bad cold and she (and I) got no sleep last night, and today she spent on Mama’s lap, hip, or shoulder, and then next to Mama taking a long nap (Mama too!). I did love the way the sunlight flooded our bedroom, so bright and warm as I drifted off to sleep.

Hopefully I can get out there tomorrow to do some surveying, bed and hoop house cleanup, compost turning, and perhaps even some tucking in of peas and favas.

I heard the sound again and this time we ran out to record it. It was further away and it sounded a little different from last time – less catlike – but though the “words” are different, the voice seems the same (to the one in my memory). In any case, if you can tell us what it is, if not a fisher cat, let us know!

animalsound

You guessed it: it’s time for another episode in the Calcium in the Soil and Plant series! Take heart: we’re getting close to the end (maybe only one more part to go?). Actually, it took me so long to post on this again because this one took me a long time to figure out. If you want to brush up on the previous parts, check out this page.

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Part 8. Selective Nutrient (and Water) Uptake by Roots

Nutrients arrive at the root surface in three ways:

1. The first of these is root interception. As roots grow, they make direct contact with nutrients. This mechanism is less important because roots come into direct contact with only 1-3 percent of the soil volume exploited by the root mass. Mycorrhizae – fungi that form a symbiotic association with plant roots – can increase the surface area that roots can extract nutrients from. Calcium and magnesium, because they are so abundant, are often intercepted by root contact.
2. The second mechanism is mass flow, wherein plants, sucking up water (through the various pumps and pulls discussed in the previous part), also move the nutrients that are dissolved in it. Especially mobile (free) nutrients are “attracted” in this manner: nitrate-nitrogen, chloride and sulfur, which are never absorbed by the colloid and thus always exist in solution, and calcium and magnesium, which are held only loosely to the colloid. The drier the soil, the less mass flow.
3. The third mechanism is diffusion, by which ions in the soil spontaneously move from a point of higher concentration to a point of lower concentration (like in osmosis). Diffusion happens in the soil because the immediate root area, once it is depleted, has a lower concentration of the nutrient ions. Immobile nutrients like phosphorus and potassium, which have a low solubility, are strongly held by the colloid, and are only present in small concentrations, reach the root through this mechanism. The soil porosity is important here: smaller pores will block diffusion.

The last two mechanisms are the more significant mechanisms of nutrient uptake. Which one is predominant depends on the nutrients, the amount of water in the soil and the physical conditions (e.g., crumb structure) of the soil which dictates the movement of water through it.

Nutrients (especially immobile ones) then need to be wrested from the colloid by an ion exchange – the cation exchange capacity (CEC) talked about on a soil test. As we saw, the positively charged nutrient cations are held to the negatively charged colloid by a small electro-magnetic bond. When the root hairs release hydrogen ions (H+) and these come into contact with the colloid, they take their places on the colloid, breaking or weakening the colloidal-nutrient bond. The nutrients are knocked free and this makes them more available to be taken up by the root hairs.

Once the nutrient has arrived at the plant root surface and has been made available, the root needs to take it in: the nutrient-ion needs to travel from the root’s exterior to its interior.

As we saw in Part 7, the membranes of the cells making up the epidermis and the endodermis of roots are semi-permeable. This means several things. First, roots allow movement in, but not out, which allows osmosis to take place, by which water is taken up by the plant roots (cf. Part 7). Second, they allow only small solutes in, so they are impermeable to the large molecules of organic solutes (more about that in the next part). Third, some small solutes are allowed in, but others are not: plant roots are selective about their food.

It is the last aspect that interests us here. The uptake of the nutrients (as well as sugars and amino acids) by the roots is selective because of two main features:

1. First, the root membrane has channels that are ion-selective: one type of channel will let through only phosophorus ions, another fits only calcium ions, or potassium or nitrate, etc. Think of the toddler’s toy: the box with the star and pentagon and circular shaped holes into which only the star and pentagon and circular blocks fit. The root too is constructed like that.
2. The actual ferrying through these channels is done by ion-selective carriers: so-called coupling proteins that are embedded in the membrane of the root cells and that only react with specific ions, passing them on. Different plants require different amounts of nutrients, and so they will have different types and densities of ion carriers on the surface of their cells. These ion carriers are also most numerous on the surface of root hairs and root tips, which shows that roots are the main conduit for nutrient uptake in plants.

That explains the root’s selection of particular nutrients. Now, how does it select their quantity? How does it say, that’s enough?

As for water, its protein carrier is the aquaporin. Aquaporins are embedded in the cell membrane, forming transmembrane pores that conduct just water molecules. They prevent the passage of ions and other solutes by a filter (the ar/R filter) of amino acids that bind only water molecules and let them in (single file), while excluding all other molecules. When there is a lack or an excess of water, a gating mechanism changes the shape of the aquaporin so that it blocks the pore and stops the water flow. These gates can fail and an excessive amount of water can break the gates, as it were, and “drown” a plant.

Nutrients like calcium ions are taken up by different transmembrane protein carriers, which actively transport them, that is, they require energy to do so, because they have to pull in ions against their concentration gradient. For instance, there’s a good chance the root cells already have a higher concentration of calcium than the soil in the root area, but it might still need more. The energy required comes from a part of the cell (called the ATP, a nucleotide). If the plant has enough of a nutrient, it can simply stop drawing on the energy source. Also this mechanism can fail, and an excess of nutrients can lead to a toxic overdose and kill the plant.

So, however well-equipped roots are to select what the plant is in need of, it is still up to us, gardeners, to know how much of what a certain plant in our care needs and how much of it is present in our soil.

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Next up, nutrients not in mineral but in organic form, and how those can make it into the plants. Yes, the egg shells. Finally!