Pink Sauerkraut

Merlot Variety of Napa red cabbage, regular green cabbage, carrots, garlic and ginger sauerkraut! YUM!! Good luck finding this at the grocery store!

Last spring, the weather was unsettled, and my seedlings were started late, because I was traveling overseas for all of January. But, I still managed to grow enough tomatoes, peppers, cukes, parsley, garlic and nasturtiums, among other things, to put away around 200 servings of frozen veggies to be Vita-mixed into a private blend V-8, V-9 or V-12!

Note the funny nose on the salad tomato. That’s fairly common with this early variety. I can’t remember if it’s a Sub-Arctic Plenty or an Oregon Spring. The purple onion is a Welsh Bunching variety that I cut the seed head off to allow it to form a larger bulb. I bought a packet probably 20 years ago and still have them. There’s a beefsteak tomato in the back, and a light green Armenian cuke, which grows with fancy scallops. They are delicious and stay tender even when ridiculously big. Like 2-3 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. The striped cukes were new for me last summer. Delicious and tender, but like many of my cukes the last few years, they are getting killed off by a fungus or virus. Along with the garlic, the beets did GREAT. I really liked the first time for me Red Cloud variety. Very uniform and clean.

The cabbage crop, the second most important after all the juice ingredients, was pitiful. The heads were not solid and I ran out of time in the fall. The two year old neighborhood “Kraut Party” was delayed when the usual participants got CoVid and then RSV. But come January, I figured I would make a small batch of kraut with the Chinese (Napa) cabbage that had been quietly reposing in the produce drawer of my fridge. Since this was a solitary effort, I put in more garlic and ginger than my friend would have wanted, along with the Suzuko variety Napa cabbage and carrots. I didn’t get a photo, but it tasted pretty good. I was surprised at how the unique Napa cabbage flavor was brightened, even with the strong overtones of garlic and ginger, delicious all together, with the extra garlic and ginger intended as anti-inflammatory to heal the after effects of the RSV.

After transferring the green / white Napa kraut to a smaller jar, I decided to try, despite my neighbor’s warning not to mix red and white / green cabbage in the same batch, to do just that. I used the Merlot variety Napa cabbage, and a small regular green cabbage head, along with what would probably be considered an excessive amount of garlic and ginger, as well as carrots. I did not know what to expect for a color, but certainly I was not expecting PINK!

Half gallon Ball Canning Jar at Left. A nice serving of fiber and probiotics at right. My arthritic hand was tired after slicing the Napa cabbage, so I chopped the green cabbage in the Vita-mix, as coarse as I could, but that was still pretty fine.

Since I cut out almost all the sugar in my diet after coming home from the hospital, I found myself really enjoying the flavor of the kraut for my bedtime snack. So once this batch was done, I got out the last of my cabbages, both small red heads, and made the last batch from last summer’s harvest. After two weeks, I put this garlic and ginger heavy batch in the fridge yesterday. Yet to be tasted.

The garden is a wonderful place and wonderful activity. I actually had a good year for fruit. First time the tart cherries produced enough / the birds left them for me that I could make juice. It was delicious. The cherries are technically tart, but are pretty sweet. The batch shown was about half of the harvest. Not huge, but it’s just me. So much better than buying the stuff at the grocery store. My Canadice red seedless grapes were also quite productive and I made and canned some juice from them too.

And then, at the end of the summer, there were quite a few Monarch Butterflies that came to get nectar from the Echinacae flowers.

This appears to be a female Monarch.
It was a good season for the coleus plants, too.

Beautifully Black: Chrysalis of 2020

The Monarch caterpillar hung itself from my trashcan, the week I forgot to take the almost full container out to the street to be emptied. So, I was sad to miss its exit Wed., but glad to find the chrysalis empty when I got home, so I could put the very full can out Thursday.

Monarch Chrysalis the morning just before it split. A few strands of spider web decorate the shell.

Fenced In

Monarch Chrysalis just before hatching

 

Where am I going? North, south, east and west
have no meaning.

Where am I going? Up and down, out and around
are equally meaningless.

I am fenced in by my freedom. Because the
geographical direction, and distance from the
center of the earth are not the point.

The real point is that since I newly don’t know
who I am, there’s no I to go anywhere, so the
invisible, non-existent fence is all it takes to
hold me in place.

I used to think I knew who I was. Cowardly in
the outer world, powerless, I try to use the
little freedom that is my lot.

Tried to use it and thus fertilize it. Let it grow.
So who am I?

The swallowtail chrysalis appears unchanged from
last week. It had turned brown,
to match the coffee filter it was looking
at when it shed its skin, after first revealing the green of
the parsley it had consumed.

The monarch chrysalis has no such tricks up its sleeve.
It doesn’t need to. Its nature is to transmute itself in
place, on the milkweed, while the swallowtail needs to
be flexible, in case it’s caught by chill, and needs to
overwinter on dry vegetation.

My current confusion, I hope, is another step on the
road. The apparent inactivity of the chrysalis.

The swallowtail still hangs, brown, from the drying
parsley stem it chose, rather than the sturdier plastic
spoon I offered it. But the monarch chrysalis, overnight,
or at least since yesterday morning, has turned black.
That means that the chrysalis has actually clarified.
Become its namesake’s material, while the insect
within has formed, its black and orange pattern now
visible within, if you know how to look.

Swallowtail Butterfly Caterpillar

This year I have found BOTH a Monarch and a Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar.

I could not figure out why the Monarch mother laid her eggs on some parsley that I nearly put in the blender to make vegetable juice, before noticing the caterpillar. Lucky for both of us, I did not have extra protein in my juice!

I finally did research and realized this was NOT a Monarch, but that the dill and parsley I had planted had succeeded in attracting a Swallowtail. The next day I found a Monarch.

I had them both for about a week when they spun threads to hang their chrysalli, and then shed their skins. The Swallowtail matches its color to the surroundings, in this case an unbleached coffee filter!

Eastern Swallowtail chrysalis above the coffee filter I had used to make it easier to clean out its “frass.” But it soon stopped eating and pooping, and went into this phase.

Detail of swallowtail chrysalis. Eyes are at right. Note the threads anchoring the pupa at both the tail (left) and abdomen areas.

A Confident Monarch

Early August, and I and a friend decide to take off for the north. I’ve lived in Michigan for 33 years, and never been more than a mile or so past the north end of the Mackinac Bridge. This time, we got as far north as Whitefish Point. We rode in separate cars, and I had to wait while he finished a business meeting before we hit the road. I went to the poor, rocky  “private” beach advertised by the cheapest motel we could find by the time we tried to reserve for the last minute trip. And there awaited a Monarch sipping nectar from a thistle. What a beautiful site. I took some photos with my phone, as I hadn’t bothered to bring my good camera while I killed time. Slowly, I moved closer, expecting Mona to fly away at any moment. But she did not.

Monarch on a thistle, undisturbed, for the moment, by the human.

A wider view!

I think these are the “thick webbing” patterns, indicating female. But now I know what to look for. Time to sip some daisy juice!

Beautiful Bio-Luminescent Luciferase

Daily Prompt: Luminescent 

Firefly Image with Flash (above) and its own light. Attribution: Emmanuelm at English Wikipedia

Way back in 1974, I was already a nerd. I had a summer internship at the National Bureau of Standards (now called the National Institute for Standards and Technology or NIST). My posting was to the micro-calorimetry lab, where I got to work on a project to determine the heat of reaction of the luciferase based chemical reaction that happens in the tail of a firefly

At one point, we actually put a live firefly- (this is not the kind we used) in the calorimeter, and watched the heat being given off by the insect. It was a very sensitive instrument, and the energy graph was pretty ragged. But then there was a big spike. The whole unit was opaque, so we couldn’t see anything, but we figured that the firefly was lighting up at that point. Who knows, maybe it was just mad at us and trying to get out. We released it, unharmed. Not so lucky were the ones that got killed for their tails. I wondered if they paid little kids to go collect them.

I was informed of the chemical reaction that allowed the fireflies their trick. That had already been figured out years ago!

It was a fun summer. I realized then that I did not have the patience to work as a scientist, and decided to go to engineering school instead. Twenty years later, I ran across an article in a technical journal about how scientists had finally managed to do something practical by using this compound to make a field kit to measure oxygen levels in streams and other bodies of water.

What I had realized years before was that the scientists were just having fun.

Nothing wrong with that. So did I. And I am still working in the field.

They didn’t pay us much. If we didn’t have family need, we got I think $12.00 a week. It almost paid my part of the gas money I gave to the janitor and the technician who gave me a ride out to Gaithersburg. The janitor was a down to earth, friendly guy. The technician was more of a grouch. I wonder what they thought of me. There were not too many females in technical fields then. Even less than today.

Daily Prompt: Luminescent 

 

Explore

Bee Head (Scanning Electron Microscope)

There is always more to explore.

You can look out.

You can go out.

You can look in.

You can go in.

Look up, or down.

But if it’s exploring, you have to see things in a new light, even if the things you are seeing are not new, or even new to you.

Every day, our experience reinforces some characteristics of who we think we are, and also offers us the chance to change.

I like to explore insects that I find lying around dead, using my microscopes.

Insects have fascinating structures. Here is a series of scanning electron microscope photos of a bee head, zoomed in to see the ball joint that lets the bee control the position of its antenna. 

Note the varying length of the hairs. Those that would cause interference otherwise are shorter!

Zoom of short hairs on bee antenna.

This last image was obtained at 500x original magnification. Note the 100 micron scale in the upper right. That is 0.1 mm.

When you are looking at something at even 50x, there’s a lot to see! You have to learn to see what’s interesting.

Daily Prompt: Explore

A Beautiful, Very Dead, Moth

“Who could look at these pictures and not believe in God?” my Muslim friend asked. My Christian friend had expressed a similar idea as a statement. I wasn’t going to disagree with either one.

Figure 1: Digital Color Photo of Moth Body: The wing was pulled off, stuck onto an electron microscope stage, and coated with palladium.

Indeed! Insects are always interesting to look at in a scanning electron microscope. But the beauty of this dead moth far exceeded my expectations.

I save dead bugs when I see them, for educational purposes. This poor moth had been sitting around for quite a while, before I decided it’s time had come.

Figure 1 shows the moth in question, after I had broken off one of its outer wings, and taped it down to an electrically conductive specimen holder (aluminum) and sputter coated it with palladium to render it electrically conductive. A kindof boring motley brown, but surprising orange and white on the hidden pair of wings.

The moth wing was also surprising in how soft it felt when I broke it off.

If you zoom in to Figure 1, taken with a Olympus Tough Gear 5 digital camera, in microscope mode, you can see that the individual scales have different colors. This camera is currently available on Canon’s website for $500.00. It can do a lot of things. It will also take me a while to make it do what I want! (It’s pretty complicated.)

Figures 2 – 4 show additional views, obtained with my scanning electron microscope, at magnifications up to 6000x. But it is still impossible for me to tell if the “holes” are empty, or filled with a thin film of some sort.

Figure 2: Center of length of the wing

Figure 3: Note scalloped scale edges.

Figure 4: Note lacy structure. Are the holes empty or filled with some thin film?

Figure 5 shows the pointed end of the wing, where it used to be attached to the rest of the body.

Figure 5: The wing at the “shoulder” attachment point.

 

The different shapes of the feathery scales are beautiful. Figures 6 and 7 show how the scales are attached to the underlying shell of the insect.

Figure 6: Detail of how the individual scales are attached to the shell of the insect.

Figure 7: Broken off scale. How like a leaf!

I don’t know the cause of death of the moth. I found it whole, so maybe it simply came to the end of its life span. I’ll never know. But I honor the moth, the miraculous world we live in, and the “ugly beauty” of this plain insect.