homeless ants

Today's lunch was brought to you by: garlic.
(Pesto sauce, garlic bread, roasted veggies) and then apple pies and salad and lemona-a-ade

After lunch was cleaned up I took out the compost and did some weeding in the rye patch. Now here is the trick: rye looks like, well, rye - if you were to draw your idea of "grain" or "wheat", that is what rye looks like. About four feet tall, all of it is brown and dead. Mixed in with the rye, however, very not-brown and very alive, is a weed, the grasses that look like fuzzy green caterpillars on the ends. In other words, very similar in size and shape to rye. Harvesting the rye involves gathering a handful of the stringy stems and chopping them, and there are about 10 stems to a square foot, it's quite sparse. The weed is densely populated, making preliminary weeding of the whole strip a requirement. So it's been an ongoing project, weeding out the green grass parts (around the interspersed corn plants, about 1" tall, did I mention?) then going back and cutting and collecting the rye.

What struck me today was how many ants and beetles, spiders and crickets really inhabit these plots. When I unearthed the grasses, ants would come flying out of the root section. All different kinds, too. My fear of skittering bugs (outdoors) is on the decline. The other night there was a click beetle 2" long flying around my room, and I watched from the doorway until it landed: on my bed. It made its way around in my covers for about 10 minutes, till I threw a shoe over at it to get it to fly. It took off and landed on the wall, so I was able to cover it with a bowl and chuck it out the back door. (paralyzed with fright, admittedly).

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