Picking strawberries

Wet green leaves hiding
red fruit flecked with seeds.
Picking strawberries.

And before you say my haiku doesn't have the right number of syllables in line two, I challenge you to read the wikipedia article on haiku. I think fruit and flecked could both be counted as two syllables!

We have a wonderful strawberry crop this year. I'm spending a lot of time picking them and washing them up and freezing those which we can't eat now.

And speaking of observations, re my last post, note the fine tracing of leaf veins in the picture. Only it's not a leaf. What is that??

Oh yes, I had a tomatillo plant here last year and that network of veins is all that's left of a tomatillo fruit. Look, one still has seeds in it.

Observation

In the fall we often see hermit thrushes. They hang about in the bushes around our house. They particularly like to snag berries from the pyracantha. They glide low over the driveway and pull up to slip into an opening in the shrubbery. They are around all winter long, but we never hear them singing. They last into May before they disappear. Or so I thought.
It was Ted who first suggested that the thrushes we are seeing now are not hermit thrushes. Huh?
Well it is true that the spots on their breast do seem to be gray and not black. They also seem to be even shyer than the hermit thrushes. Lastly though, what about their tail color? Is it rusty against a brown or gray back, or is it the same color as the back?
At this point I'm unsure. I just wish I had paid more attention for the last several weeks, really looking at what I was seeing, instead of just seeing what I expected to see.

Spotted wing drosophila

Back in the good old days, in other words, prior to last year, we were able to grow cherries with our only concern being late spring rains. But that was before spotted wing drosophila snuck into California.
Last year I was blissfully unaware of the disaster heading my way. I happily watched my cherries ripening. I anticipated spending hours pitting and freezing cherries which I would enjoy all winter long, as I had every other year. But this happy dream did not come true.
When I went out with my baskets to pick the cherries, they were all soft, they would disintegrate as I pulled them off the stems. Huh? How could that be? When squeezed into the cherry pitter, juice would come out little holes in the cherries. Huh? What's going on? Finally I see a little white worm squeeze out of a cherry. WHAT?? Worms in my cherries!!!!!!! Impossible! Very upset, I threw the whole batch away. ( I didn't even want to THINK about the cherries I had been enjoying on my granola every morning). When Ted got home I showed him my findings. He picked cherry after cherry, pulled them open, and found each one full of little white worms. A total loss. Could this be medfly? We went to the internet and learned about a recently discovered drosophila (in CA that is). We collected a sample and Ted took them to the ag commissioner. The find was confirmed by CFDA. My cherries were all infested with the maggots of the spotted wing drosophila.
Then my raspberries became infested. Luckily apricots, blackberries, and strawberries remained unaffected.

Now another cherry crop is on the tree. In April my neighbor and I (her cherry tree leans over my fence) began to plot strategy. I looked around on the internet and found two good websites http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/EXOTIC/drosophila.html and http://ucanr.org/blogs/strawberries_caneberries/index.cfm.
The bait suggested by the blog uses this recipe- 1.5 C water, 4 t sugar, .25 oz yeast (2.25 t).
I put some of this bait into a clear plastic frozen grape juice container at the beginning of April. I hung the container in a cherry tree. Fifteen minutes later I went back to check on the trap. It had dozens of SWD fruit flies in it. Oy. What a disaster appeared to be heading our way. I put out more traps.
In my experience so far this spring, clear plastic seltzer bottles work best for traps. I put 2 little holes (about .25 inch sq) about one inch from the bottom of the trap, fill with about an inch of yeast solution, and hang in the tree. I've tried milk jugs, but the flies definitely prefer the clear plastic containers. Also I catch mainly SWD in these traps. I've seen only one snake fly and one scorpion fly, although have caught some regular flies.
I'm sad to say that I'm pretty sure I made my SWD problem worse. I don't pick up all the fruit that falls off our enormous grapefruit tree. Last winter I noticed hordes of fruit flies on the fallen grapefruit, but I didn't think anything of it. But when I collected so many SWD in early April, I had an epiphany, and realized that the fallen grapefruit helped the flies to overwinter in my yard. The traps in the grapefruit are catching so many SWD!

Yesterday Ted and I checked the cherries. The ripest ones already were infested with SWD.

Now I see that the UCIPM site is recommending a different bait: a solution of 1/4 cup grape wine plus 1/4 cup water plus 3/4 teaspoon of molasses. I thought the blog had already figured out the best bait was the yeast bait, but I will try this bait too.
Oy.

Update:  This bait is definitely nowhere near as good as the original yeast bait,  SWD also gets into the blackberries and strawberries.  Even with a good sanitation problem, we loose tons of fruit to SWD each year.

Deja vu all over again

We visited the parents at the lake in northern Wisconsin the first week of May.

Eric drove up too. The trip was strangely reminiscent of our October trip. 3-5 inches of snow! (Note Kia Soul was the rental in October, the Prius was our rental for this trip, a whole other story.) But this time, instead of heading into winter we are heading into spring. The snow was mostly gone by the day after the storm. Barb M. drove up and the four of us worked hard to put the place in order before the snow storm came.


The mergansers were most fun to watch. Hooded and Common were in full breeding plumage and full breeding antics.

So. Long.

Well our concerts are now history. We didn't exactly cover ourselves with glory, but there were a few high points. Singing well is ridiculously difficult. The weather has turned warm and neither venue had the air conditioning on, so we, and the audiences, were quite warm.
F came home for the concerts (plus she needed more contacts). The concert ran 2 hours and 45 minutes. Since the concert started at 8 pm, that meant that we didn't finish till quarter to 11. Helping load the risers meant we didn't get home till 11.15.
F wasn't here. Aww... but- she never said she was spending the night. I dug my cell phone out of my bag and saw I had a text from her.
"So. Long."
How apt.
We talked our fearless leader into cutting 4 songs, and she on her own cut 2 movements from the Benedicite. Our concert today lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes. Still long. Plus 2 different people fell off the stage, and one person had their wallet stolen. Oy.
After all that we needed a ride so headed out on our bikes. It was a beautiful evening and we had a really nice ride.