Nut drop was more important this year than others. I needed to seed a few clearings in the woodlot created by the logger last winter who removed the dead and diseased American beech trees from the property. The prescription called for reseeding the clearings with pine, red oak and such, but I wanted to try black walnuts. In 1964 the previous owner of our property allowed a selective cut of hard maple logs for use as veneer. This left a legacy of towering, over-aged maples and clearings.

Three black walnut trees grew at a junction of the fence lines near the sugar bush. The squirrels got to work to the point that middle-aged black walnuts now dominate the southern half of the woodlot. I had assumed that the upper half of the woods created a mini-climate which allowed them to withstand the winter cold and the late spring frosts which kill their flowers. But the climate is changing, and for years I have gathered nuts from an exceptionally cold-hardy walnut right at the northwest corner of the woodlot.

Last year in anticipation of the cut, I had planted about ten gallons of walnuts. No sprouts appeared this year, though I have found the odd walnut seedling amid the logging debris which a squirrel must have planted, along with a few little oaks.

In 2005 when I started the walnut orchard, the Grey squirrels (black squirrels named after a biologist) took an inordinate interest in my work, perversely digging them up only to replant them, usually six to ten feet from their original positions on my 20 foot grid. Because I had planted two per hill, I was forced to compare the squirrels’ planting efficiency to mine. Suffice it to say that it is hard to mow two, 4 acre fields with the best seedlings stuck in the middle of the rows. At the time this was a real annoyance, but over the years when it has become harder to stomp around over fallen limbs, I decided to see if I could put the Greys to work on my project.

One of the truisms of forest management is that if you want to plant nut trees, take two pails of nuts to the woods: one for the squirrels to eat, and the other one for them to plant. Whoever dreamed that up had never watched a chipmunk stow the contents of a five gallon pail of nuts in his burrow between dusk and dawn. Red squirrels also work notoriously long hours. With my game camera on my first cache, I recorded a single red squirrel working its way through a pail of nuts, pausing only to attempt to kill a Grey who dropped in to pilfer one. The red started an hour before dawn and worked quite late in the evening, with every scene showing it tracing the same route up the side of a large maple tree with a walnut. The red also outwitted me when I attempted an assassination with my shotgun, so I gave up and moved elsewhere for my seeding efforts.

Later efforts with camera and pails of nuts showed that a Grey squirrel takes a long time with much tail-shaking before she touches the first nut. Before long, though, the whole family gets involved, hulling the nuts and burying them in shallow holes in a widening radius from the initial pile. One camera setting suggested that the three Greys might be running up a maple tree behind the camera, so I reversed it and shot down a long lane. The following day every Grey which descended the tree had a hulled nut in her mouth, and often travelled as far as 400′ down the driveway before the film clip ended. They certainly appeared to be planting walnuts in the area.

The gray squirrel was easy to identify as the matriarch of the nest. She also has a habit of planting things around the flower bed outside my breakfast window, so she was an ideal test subject. One day she worked extremely hard to plant a nut at the edge of the driveway where the fuel truck stops. It took her a long time and she put great effort into getting the nut into the hard earth, thencombing the grass to make the planting disappear. The next time I looked, the nut was gone and she was planting one on softer ground next to a cherry tree fifty feet away. I have begun to wonder how many times a walnut gets planted before the Grey decides to leave it.

In the woodlot I decided to locate my baiting sites where I had observed Grey squirrels fleeing at the approach of my UTV. This seems to work, according to the camera.

A typical nut cache

From what I have seen, here are some guidelines for getting squirrels to do your work for you:

-Avoid chipmunks and red squirrels, unless you are looking for an easy supply of nuts. If so, shovel pails-full of them from red squirrel caches which they seem to forget. Yesterday with a little aluminum shovel I filled three, five-gallon pails from a gap between rotting logs in a pile beside the trail (see photo above). Last year I shovelled twenty gallon loads from two separate open-air caches around the walnut trees.

If your bait pile disappears overnight, it’s not a good spot for Greys.

If the bait sits for a day or two, and then starts disappearing sporadically until about half of it is gone, that’s a Grey. They seem to loose interest in a cache after a while. Perhaps they are motivated by a sense of scarcity, or perhaps it is the novelty of a new discovery which intrigues them.

Red squirrels ignore overly large walnuts. A Grey tried valiantly on camera to carry one of these, but gave up after a couple of half-dozen I had left him. I decided that the likelihood of successful planting greatly increases if the nuts are more like golf balls than tennis.

Greys learn very quickly. At first I put caches near tree trunks for safety, but gradually I started advertising the baits on stumps. They seem happy with this arrangement. It may be that the hawk has finally left.

Walnuts don’t always sprout the first May after planting. They can take two or three years to grow, according to Ed Patchell of the Kemptville Forest Centre.

I wish I could take credit for planting this seedling.

In The Review Mirror this week I ran onto a mention of the Wesport Lions’ giveaway of rubber bands impregnated with gypsy moth pheromones at their recycling depot on Salem Road, beginning today. They opened up at the shop at 10:00 a.m. Parking was an issue, and the line-up had the air but none of the solemnity of a vaccination program. A guy named Maynard (not a cousin of mine, it turns out) explained that a Waterloo professor discovered a way to make an ordinary rubber band utterly irresistible to a male gypsy moth. A hand-out showed a variety of extremely low-tech traps, all of which were well filled with dead brown moths.

Please consider the device in the photo below my contribution to the growing literature on the subject. The original paint in the tray was a shade of green for my grand-daughter’s bed entitled “Lazy Caterpillar.” She suggests that this decorator touch may have enhanced the trap’s effectiveness.

To build the trap I tried an old paint tray with a twig and an elastic band tangled on it over a pool of diluted doggie shampoo. Within the hour it had drowned a dozen moths. The tray sits on a shelf in an open shed next to my UTV. It is out of the weather, but readily available to the moths. I believe that the infestation of the adjacent tree stemmed from a series of egg sacs along the ridgepole of this outbuilding.

As of press time there were sixteen casualties in the pan, with no evidence of other swains in the offing. On a hunch I turned off one outdoor security light for tonight and left the overhead light in the shed on to attract moths. The local cohort may be a little late to mature, so I shall remain vigilant.

UPDATE: 9 July, 2021. 7:30 a.m. Four more moths entered the trap overnight, including one brown specimen which may be of another species. The thorax is fatter than the others. All four bodies are larger than the earlier crop. There are no other moths which I could see in the area this morning.

UPDATE: 9 July, evening. When I turned on the light in the Kioti house this evening, I noticed the rafters of the shed. They were loaded with pupating gypsy moths. I had at them with half a tank of water from the Koti’s pump, but then I started scraping the insect clusters down with the back of a garden rake. It became rather mushy underfoot on the gravel floor of the shed.

UPDATE: 10 July, 2021, 9:37 p.m. In early afternoon my sister called to report that, despite the success of the moth traps, she discovered huge gobs of pupating moths in the red ornamental maple at her house. I Googled an idea and the screen which came up suggested that yes, a pressure washer works well for blasting moth pupae off trees, though you still must track them down and step on them to be effective.

A tank of gas and a litre of dish soap, along with a lot of water, made an appreciable improvement on the appearance of the tree. We’ll see better in daylight.

UPDATE: 13 July, 2021. The hatch is now on and abundant male moths are filling the trap to where they are walking on the bodies to get to the elastic lure. I dump and replenish the trap twice a day. There is no question that the trap works, though it may have the effectiveness of a child’s plastic shovel in a blizzard. The pressure washer works quite well at my sister’s house to clean up trees. My red maple is taller than hers and not nearly as encrusted with pupae because of the convenience of the shed roof where I had at them with a rake.

Of personal importance, the caterpillar attacks upon my little apple trees and the row of ten young cherry, red oak and basswood trees along the edge of our front lawn have ceased. The twenty Saskatoon berry bushes are finished bearing for the year and I haven’t seen a caterpillar on one in a week. For low vegetation if you have the time, the best approach is to locate and squish individual raiders.

This old truism took on a new and unwelcome meaning today when my wife was removing sheets from the dryer and shaking each, as is her habit. When snapped, one discharged a black-legged tick, fully alive and ready to wander off to other adventures. Bet decided that a tour of the septic system would be a fitting next destination, and away it went.

If laundry won’t work to rid clothes of ticks, perhaps the only remaining tactic would be to hang them on the clothesline and let the birds pick them clean.

Edna P. Croskery will turn 95 this month.

Allison, the nurse-in-charge at Rosebridge, called me today in early afternoon, July 1st.  “Edna is fine, but her hearing aid’s battery door is stuck.” 

I promised to pick the implement up but suggested that, as this was my first fully-immunized day (2nd jab two weeks ago) I wondered if I could meet with Mom while there….in the back garden.  “She likes it back there, under the tree.” 

Allison bounced me to another department where voice mail marooned me, but an hour later Life Enrichment Director Kathy Barr called me:  “Can you be here for 3:30 today?”  I was there on time for pre-screening and then Gary the maintenance guy undid a padlock and let me into the back garden. Nurse Susan wheeled Mom out into the shaded bower around a stately maple.  d

The rules permitted brief touching, and when I produced from my wallet a vaguely-remembered certificate from the second vaccination, Susan ran it in to the administrator for registration, and then came back beaming and allowed me to be alone with Mom as long as I kept my mask on.

I had fixed Mom’s hearing aid while sitting on the fender of an electrician’s trailer outside the gate, so it wasn’t hard to get things going again.  Mom could hear me well enough to nod in response to obvious questions.  It was clear that she enjoyed the garden visit, though, and the photos of Ada on my phone.  I plopped my hat onto her head in case of deer flies, as was my habit before Covid.  She had no objection.

The four long-term residents of Rosebridge whom I saw today all seemed relaxed and in good condition.  It was good to renew acquaintances, albeit from a ten-foot distance. The staff at Rosebridge have clearly risen to the challenge of the last eighteen months. They deserve our commendation and our appreciation.

And my tomatoes and cucumbers are doing better than the ones in their garden.

Toronto takes a perverse pride in its losing Leafs. Like a beloved but useless pet, it lavishes hope and attention upon this organization only to share in the catharsis of yet another playoff loss.

It’s as if, with the Leafs as the worst thing that can happen to them in a given year, Toronto fans can feel no guilt about their growing hegemony over the rest of Canada and the world. They take one for the team, and away they go.

It’s hard to retain one’s belief that he is the smartest guy in the room when he can’t remember right from left on some occasions.  One of these happened last night when I decided to turn on the outside water supply after three days of work with Les on my sister’s bathroom ceiling.  We had tired each other out. 

 
A walk around the garden had determined that the newly-transplanted raspberries would soon need water.  That involves emptying the Kioti of chain saw, chains, oil, gas, and the winter clutter, washing it out, and installing the 25 gallon tank and 12v pump for watering.  First step is to turn on the water supply to the taps out the lane.

I’d had it on once this spring, but then the tap froze up during a heavy frost, so I had shut it off and drained back the water.  I thought. Today I tried to turn the tap on.  Stuck.

Now this is where the problem is for me.  Over the years I have accumulated a lot of force multipliers for my diminishing wrist strength.  At hand was a strap wrench, so I grabbed it and used it to ease the tap open.  It didn’t ease.  More force.  Still more.  Eventually the top broke off the tap.  No leaks.  Frantic searches through online listings of local hardware stores provided no leads as to how to replace that part of that 3/4″ threaded brass check valve.  Replacing this key component involves a total shutdown of the house water supply.

At 5:00 a.m. I woke up thinking that the tap might already have been open.  This proved to be the case.  We now have outside water, though I’ll need to do some plumbing before it can be shut off for winter.

Back to the force multipliers.  The worst of them is the 1″ pneumatic impact wrench in the shop.  This tool definitely should not be operated by someone who is iffy on left vs right, especially when removing a stuck wheel stud from a Porsche.  On the other hand I get a grudging respect from Porsche acolytes when I admit to twisting off one of the studs in the left front hub of my Cayenne.  Nobody has ever done that before.

Archimedes and his screw principle provided the foundation for modern machines, and his right-on left-off precepts have served me faithfully until these few lapses over the last couple of years, but I must remember not to use available wrenches to reinforce a wrong assumption when in a hurry.

“After you have had one shot of the vaccine, you still have a 10% chance of contacting the virus, but you will not need admission to hospital or the ICU, and you will not die.”

UPDATE: 19 April, 2021

I guess I should complete the story, though there are no perplexing or funny twists yet to be revealed.

My neighbour had warned me about the geography of the parking lot. His jab was a couple of days earlier than mine. He further told me that the whole thing was a class act with many, many staff and volunteers ensuring that it ran smoothly.

Come to think of it there was a complicating factor colouring my experience of the best of local health care, but it had nothing to do with the assembled, smart and highly-motivated individuals.

No, the whole thing arose out of my misguided attempt to impress my 4 year-old grand-daughter. Ada loves to forage. Her first task for me on the afternoon before the jab was to crack her some black walnuts. I dutifully retrieved the Duke Walnut Cruncher from the shop and resumed my seat in one of the three grandpa chairs on the lawn. Ada backed across the lawn to me, dragging the 5 gallon pail of black walnuts which she and her mother have been consuming since last September. It was now light enough she could move it on her own. I sent her back for the safety goggles which she stores under the stuff on the bench. I started to crack some nuts.

If you have cracked black walnuts, you will be aware of the forces associated with getting to the kernels. The shells routinely resist 750 pounds per square inch of force. The Duke cracker makes ingenious use of gears and levers as well as a large base to make the task feasible, if not easy for an old guy sitting in a lawn chair.

In any case, as soon as the nut cracks, swift and nimble fingers free it from the mechanism and the pieces of kernel normally disappear into Ada’s grinning mouth. This time they did not. She saved them for a salad she was making for her toy peacock. The kernels rapidly accumulated in the apple sauce container she had salvaged from the kitchen.

Then she dashed around the yard, first to the spice bed for chives, then to the walnut tree for some of the wild onions underneath it, then to the lettuce patch where the seeds she planted March 23rd were bearing fingernail-sized leaves. No kidding.

It looked pretty good, but was somehow inadequate to the needs of her peacock toy. Then she remembered my casual comment about the wild leeks that grow in the woodlot. “Come on, Grandpa. It’s time to get some wild leeks for the salad. Get the Kioti out and I’ll tell Grandma.”

And so away we went to the woodlot where we found a large and perfect clump of wild leeks. Ada picked a good handful for her salad and then commanded us back to the house.

She broke the leaves up into bite-sized sections and fitted them into the salad dish on top of the bed of walnuts and other green ingredients. She had just finished her task when her dad, finished work for the day, came out to find her. She shared her salad (peacock forgotten) with him, and with Grandma, and with me.

To everyone’s surprise, black walnut kernels wrapped in wild leek leaves are quite delicious.

The salad exhausted, the next logical step was to see if those leaves had bulbs under them. Charlie was up to the challenge, so he drove us back to the woodlot again and we harvested the recommended “quart” of leaves for a proper wild leek soup. The bulbs were hard to win from the entangled roots, but Charlie managed to wrench enough of them out to please his daughter, who was eating the clean ones immediately, but saving the dirty ones for the kitchen sink. More charming video footage ensued.

The outcome of this was Bet’s wild leek soup, served at dinner the day before the vaccine appointment. Neither Bet nor Ada would eat it, so I bravely had a double bowl of the earthy and interesting concoction. Then we thought no more of it until I was walking into the arena to get my shot, when I suddenly felt inflated by some malicious gas bomb. The woman I met asked me for the time of my appointment. I said 9:09. She asked me to return to my car for four more minutes. I mentioned something about wild leek soup and asked if I could please find a washroom. She smiled sagely, turned, and led me to the other end of the building, delivered me to the entrance of the Men’s loo, and asked me to return to the entrance and my car to serve out my remaining time when I had finished.

Blessing the woman, I made it to the washroom, and eventually was assigned a disinfected, numbered chair in the auditorium, spaced on a Covid-grid. Not much happened until an elderly fellow discreetly pushed a cart over to me, introduced himself as Doctor Stein (?) and told me about the Phizer vaccine which I would be receiving today.

“After you have had one shot of the vaccine, you still have a 10% chance of contacting the virus, but you will not need admission to hospital or the ICU, and you will not die.” That had a way of lightening my outlook. In fact, it made my day. I almost lasted through the 15 minute observation period before the leek soup intervened again, but afterward I found my way to the check-out desk where the attendant emailed me a vaccine certificate, gave me directions around the arena to the parking area, and bade me good day.

Ever since that blasted soup I have felt great.

Things got lively over the morning e-news articles today.  The Globe said that Ontario is now booking 1951 models, so a brief scramble got me onto the Ministry of Health site where I had checked my Covid test results, and wouldn’t you know it?  Brockville site let me into the inner workings of its algorithm to blunder around until it eventually gave up and assigned me appointments for a jab on April 16th and August 3rd. 

My wife tried, but was rejected as a 1953 model. I don’t think she minded getting carded all that much.

I had no sooner finished when my neighbour told me about the same block of appointments.  His is a day or two earlier than mine.  My sister and my pal Les were too late by the time they got to the website this morning, though my neighbour just told me that 48 spaces were available at Loyalist College in Belleville.  His neighbour found one there. 

Les tried, but they were gone by the time he got through.

This is like shopping for concert tickets.

Today I took a set of plates from my mother’s car to the Elgin license bureau to turn in for a refund of the interval between March and July. The nice lady asked for my driver’s license, health card, and power of attorney form. Then she asked for $140 for the transfer. I asked about the rebate from the license plate.

“That plate is expired. There is nothing remaining of its license fee. You should check the permits on your other vehicles. Many people have forgotten to renew their plates this year because we did not mail out reminders because of Covid-19.”

I went home to check, then returned to renew the plates on three family vehicles. $360. Feeling rather lucky to have had my scofflaw behaviour discovered by such a gentle and understanding agent, I forked over the money.

The health card? It had expired on my birthday, along with my driver’s license. New ones are in the works.

Bet’s cards are O.K. until August of this year.