Year of the Bug

Almost to the end of the year.  This is no time to get behind on my blogging!
Had a great day in the field Sunday- my normal blog day.  It was overcast and foggy from here all the way to SF and up Hwy 92 to Skyline, where it really got foggy.  Eventually, as I had been counting on, we broke out of the fog into a beautiful crystal clear blue sky and sunshine.  Our spirits rose perceptibly, everyone got all bouncy and bubbly.  It's been a long time since we worked in the field on a Sunday.  But traffic was nonexistent coming and going, and aside from the day being so darn short it worked out really well.  Plus our experiment turned out really well.

This has been the year of the bug.  First the spotted wing drosophila ruining our cherries, blackberries, and raspberries- that actually started in 2009- then an amazing infestation of stink bugs, which rendered our tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos inedible.  Lastly, our elm had the worst infestation of elm leaf beetles I can remember in a long, long time.  As a result, there are many elm leaf beetles looking for a place to spend the winter and they seem to think the living room of my house is a possibility.  So within 15 minutes of vacuuming there are again elm leaf beetles creeping across the floor. I took this picture of the elm this morning, and you can see it still has plenty of leaves left on it.  What you can't see is that many of them are still green, so our leaf pickup job is going to continue for a while.
We had one cold snap of frosty mornings, and since then the weather has been mild.  Lows only in the mid 40's.  Lots of rain.  I noticed a cluster of earth stars in the bed outside the kitchen door.