This Summer's Fruits

I spent five days picking fruit this summer. Strawberries first.

Then raspberries. Click to enlarge.

Here's the pretty raspberry patch.

Then blueberries on a very hot day in Hammonton, NJ. Hammonton is the blueberry capital of the world!

We picked a lot of them. 

Then big fat ripe juicy New Jersey peaches.

The trees were laden with fruit.

I made my signature peach upside down cake.

When the weather cooled in September it was time to pick Italian prune plums. Look at this beautiful orchard, beautiful day.

The plum trees also were covered with easy-to-reach fruit.

 Tasty, sweet, and juicy.

Picked a whole lot of them, too.

So here is my rainbow of fruit jams. Left to right: strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, peach, plum. Each of them like a little jar of summer. A very pleasant summer's work is done.

A Wasp At Work

 

Here's a pretty paper wasp, the kind that makes those fan shaped nests of hexagonal cells you see under eaves and overhangs. It's scraping wood fibers from a fence post.

Click to enlarge and you can see under its chin the little ball of fibers it has accumulated. That gets broken down to a soft pulp in the wasp's mouth by saliva and will be used to build and expand a nest. 

Looks like hard work.

And here are a few wise words from Iris Shah: 

"A king who feared wasps once decreed they were abolished. As it happened, they did him no harm. But he was eventually stung to death by scorpions."

Caterpillar Transfer

 

Have you ever had to perform an emergency caterpillar evacuation? This monarch butterfly caterpillar is relaxing in its new emergency quarters after being carried across the yard to this host plant.

The plant is an attractive low bushy kind of milkweed called butterfly weed or orange milkweed. In summer it's covered with orange flowers. Now it has pointy seed pods. I grew this from seeds and got it started in the yard a few years ago.

I wanted more of this milkweed, so this spring I planted it in another spot in the yard. The plants were puny, though, so I temporarily filled in around with marigolds. The milkweed did great. It flowered and got bushy. I never got the chance to take a picture of it because, suddenly a few days ago -- this. Do you see the bare stem sticking out of the marigolds? That's one of the new milkweed plants, completely defoliated!

What happened? Just enlarge this photo and count all of the munching monarch caterpillars. I think I see six of them.

Consider the area to the right of the caterpillar, full of fresh delicious milkweed leaves. And to the left, just naked stems. There were hardly any leaves left on this plant. The caterpillars were eating a dwindling supply and getting perilously close to stranding themselves in a sea of unpalatable marigold foliage, which they cannot eat.

So -- they all got carefully carried to the big bush on the other side of the yard where there is adequate food for them to finish their voracious eating stages. It was a long journey in caterpillar miles. Each of them curled up for the trip.

And each of them uncurled and stretched after a few moments in their new digs and recommenced eating. I've transferred eight of them so far. I''m looking forward to upcoming blogs about chrysalises and eclosions.

Happy Labor Day

I'm resting for Labor Day so no blog today, just this picture of hard-working monarch butterflies from a past migration. Click to enlarge. Happy Labor Day!