The Pea Patch

As usual, Thursday was field day. It was warm, but not hot. It had rained a little earlier and had fortunately spared us in the field. We hilled potatoes, dug up and transplanted green onions and harvested what was ready. The beans that we planted and and trellised about a month ago are now coming on. The beans are difficult to pick as they are the same color as the leaves. You have to constantly change your angle to see them.

As I was picking, a little salamander skittered out from the leaves. He must have been hunting insects. The bean patch is a micro-jungle full of all sorts of tempting delicacies for a salamander, I'm sure. He stayed very still and I reached over the top of the trellis and shot this.

The pheasant was very vocal, crying from various places on the perimeter of the field. I glimpsed him briefly in the next field of pampas grass. I did not see his mate, but then she blends more easily with the dun color of the pampas.

It is interesting how quickly vegetation becomes an ecosystem for whatever critters are in an area. We have a type of badger that makes its appearance in the summer. It's nocturnal so I haven't seen one as I'm there only in the daytime. The badgers love what people love: corn, tomatoes, eggplant and peanuts. Insects are prolific and are a major problem in an organic garden. Last year most of the potatoes were ruined. A type of lady bug decimated all the leaves on the plants and stunted the potato growth. The harvest was a disaster. Most were hardly bigger than the seed potatoes we originally planted. Mr. Maeda says that can't be helped. You have to figure in a certain amount of loss in organic gardening. He said that if he was doing this for his survival he would judiciously use pesticides as needed. But he isn't. So he doesn't. He prefers not worrying about it and being able to eat his produce without the concern of chemicals. It's obvious that the wildlife prefer it that way.