Author Archives: Ellen Snyder

Cabbage Butterflies

The most common butterfly in our yard throughout the growing season is the Cabbage White, Pieris rapae. This is not surprising as it is distinguished as the most widespread butterfly in the world. It is quite adapted to all sorts of environments and feeds on Brassicas — broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale. I’ve discovered, slowly, that to grow any of these crops, I need to cover the row from seed to harvest with Reemay cloth to prevent the adults from laying eggs.

Cabbage butterflies mating

Despite the caterpillar’s ravenous appetite for our garden vegetables, I still like to see the adults flitting about our gardens, serving as pollinators and prey (for other yard denizens). They appear like white cloths skipping among the plants, landing for a spell before lifting off.

The cabbage butterfly is sexually dimorphic. The female has two black spots on the forewing, and the male only one. iNaturalist says that males are mostly white, while females have a tinge of yellow. My thought is in the above photo, the male is on the left and female on the right.

A Sac of Spiders

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Tuesday, September 10, 2024

The female yellow garden spiders in our meadow and flower gardens have each spun their final web and left behind a small brown paper sac of eggs. Each sac hangs by a series of thin threads. (Can a spider egg sac be cute? I think so.) I usually find a sac tucked among a cluster of tall goldenrod stems or other flowers. But not always. This year, one spider built her nest between a fence post and the electric fence charger. Very exposed to predators, weather, and the accidental whisking away by a human. Oops.

Yellow garden spider egg sac

Yellow garden spider egg sacI’ve not opened a sac to estimate the number of eggs. The literature says it could be hundreds or a thousand or more. We are in the climate zone where the spiderlings will hatch soon and either stay in the sac all winter or venture out this fall. Either way they are so susceptible to nature’s chaos.

I found another sac situated between a short fence and our Swiss chard patch. Again, not such a good place. I removed the rabbit-proof fence the other day. I forgot about the spider sac until I saw it hanging from the fence. I carefully moved it to a safer place, for now, among the chard. I’m hoping the warm weather will encourage the spiderlings to choose the move-out-soon option.

My biggest dilemma is what to do about the sacs in the meadow. We cut down and mow the meadow once a year. This helps keep it in wildflowers of goldenrods, asters, ironweed, Joe-pye weed, boneset, and free of unwanted woody plants. But I have to think about the spiderlings. Just as I move carefully through the meadow when the females have their webs strung across my path, I’ll proceed carefully with the fall cutting of plants. I’ll try to leave an uncut cluster around any sac I find.

Our Crabapple Tree

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Thursday, August 29, 2024

Many years ago we bought an apple tree that, if I recall correctly, was supposed to be a Cortland variety. As it grew and started to produce fruit it became clear that this was a crabapple. It has produced reddish fruits every year, some years more than others. This year, it is a bumper crop — large fruits (as crabs go), deep red color, and so many fruits. I’ve yet to learn the variety — maybe a Hyslop?

We are making our third pie with these beautiful ping-pong ball-sized fruits. Crabapple pie, as you might except, is a bit sour (although plenty of sugar sweetens the pie) and to me tastes like a sour cherry pie that my mother used to make from our cherry trees. I still marvel that she would pit so many small cherries to make a pie. Now we are chopping the flesh of nearly 40 crabapples to make a pie.

A partial harvest of our crabapples, August 2024

Pies are a gesture of love, especially when you harvest the fruit from your own yard. A group of my wildlife friends from UMaine gathered every year for Thanksgiving, with everyone bringing a pie. That’s a lot of love.

Our crabapple tree produces lovely white flowers each Spring attracting many pollinating bees and flies and birds in search of insects. All summer it provides shade in our front yard. In winter it houses our suet feeders, bringing in woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, among others. The trunk is ringed with rows of sapsucker holes. A few weeks ago a hummingbird buzzed around the holes, snatching some sap or spiders. Recently a doe that we’ve seen often this summer wandered past the tree, first nibbling on leaves then pulling off a few crabapples and mashing them around in her mouth. She didn’t show any surprise at their sourness.

The crabapple in May.