Today I finally harvested my first beet. As I've said before, I personally hate beets, but my wife loves them, so I grew them. I planted nine beets in the square foot designated, but one beet has been outperforming all the rest in both leaf size and root size. I figured that it was probably hoarding all the nutrients available like a bully beet on the little beet playground, so I went ahead and pulled it up.
The beet pictured above is on a board that is 24" long, so that gives you the idea of the size of it. None of the others are this large yet, so I'll wait and see how they fare into the late summer. I presented this beet to my wife, who peeled, sliced and boiled them to make herself some Russian beet salad. She claims that it was delicious. I'll take her word for it.
And now for something completely different...
I was poking around the tomato plants I had just pulled all the fruit from, and I found this thing pictured below. I had never seen one, but I thought "Oh great, now the Hornworms are building condos!"
I pulled that entire leaf off and buried it in the compost, but I saw another one. Curious, I carefully pried it off the leaf. You can see below the heads of the tenpenny nails in the deck, so that gives you an idea of how small these things were.
I was looking closely, and thought I saw movement from inside the hole. I took out my knife to cut one of the spheres in half. It was full of caterpillars! So THIS is where they have all been coming from! But wait...
If you look closely in the left side of the sphere, you can see a small, yellow egg. Something in my mind began formulating a theory based on something I had learned years ago about mud daubers, and this sphere looked strangely like a tiny pot. What I found shocked me. I introduce... the Potter Wasp!
The female Potter Wasp, just like the mud dauber, will construct these little clay pots and place one of their eggs inside. Then, the wasp will fly around searching for caterpillars. Her sting is just enough to paralyze them, and she stuffs each one into the hole, usually to the count of a dozen or so. When the pot is full, she caps it like the pot on the left (in the pic on my deck above), and the caterpillars are trapped in there. When the egg hatches, the baby wasp emerges and begins to eat the paralyzed (but still alive, and so preserved) caterpillars ALIVE!!!
John Carpenter or Ridley Scott need to look no further than real nature, because real nature is as horrifying as anything seen in The Thing or Alien. When the wasp is large enough, it breaks out of the clay pot and the cycle begins anew. For this reason, Potter Wasps are considered beneficial to a garden, not for the pots they make, but for the dozens upon dozens of caterpillars they collect- caterpillars who would otherwise be eating my tomatoes.
Also of note, the tomatoes are continuing to bud, so it looks like I may expect a second crop this summer. Excellent!