Backyard
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Back 40 Grasshopper
Less than half an inch long, this little grasshopper leapt out of the Back 40 greenery when I started to water and clung to the plastic (yeech!) fence.
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Brooklyn Bridge Park
Painted skimmer, Libellula semifascianata. (Oh, come now, much more than just semi fascianata!)A ladybug larva demolishing aphids. Perhaps the seven spotted, Coccinella septempunctata. Twice or more as big as the insects below, and a little more lumbering, hence the best shot of the post! This is an Eastern carpenter bee, Xylocopa virginica, working the swamp…
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Mulberry Overhang
We don’t have many trees or bushes that have differently shaped leaves on the same plant. Sassafras (S. albidum), with its three different leaf-shapes, is one. (The roots of these used to be made into sassafras tea and sodas; a crushed leaf smells like a soda fountain root beer and is immensely refreshing.) The mulberries…
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Beyond the Back 40
If you leave it alone, they will come. Oh, yes, they will. Daisy fleabane, Japanese knotweed, and some worts (perhaps a hogwort or two?) fill the back 2/3rds my building’s backyard. This veldt is beyond the fence containing my own Back 40 and under the purview of the upstairs neighbor, known here ’bouts as Stompy…
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Aphids
A fine crop of aphids are raising themselves in the Back 40. These tiny sapsuckers are a photographer’s challenge, a gardener’s nightmare. There are more and 1,300 species in North America, according to Garden Insects of North America. They generally reproduce asexually, with a sexual phase once a year (which produce over-wintering eggs). We may…
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Welcome wasps!
I first noticed this mud-dauber wasp nest in my backyard in January. It’s the work of a female black and yellow mud dauber, Sceliphron caementarium. The mud-pellet nest is right outside my back door, on one of the mini I-beams that support the balcony. The nest had probably been built late last summer, or even…
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Back 40 Spiders
Very late spring cleaning in the Back 40 reveals some spiders, as usual. This one had two silky egg cases nearby:
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Sapling?
I’m not the only half-assed gardener in the Back Forty (inches), my little plot of backyard concrete. The wind, the birds, and the squirrels have been known to plant things as well. In a weeding mind, I over-zealously pulled this out of a pot: Oops, hello, sapling! The seed here looks like a hazelnut or…
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Meanwhile, in the Back 40
The seam or gutter between the concrete out back ripened with all sorts of things while I was away. Beneath the plants are ant colonies.There are at least a half dozen species rooted in this little trough of dirt and BQE dust. Or, ah, were, until I weeded them. Meanwhile, behind the fences are two…
Backyard and Beyond 