A bagful of bugs

Over the winter, I wrap a few of my more sensitive potted plants in several layers of recycled brown paper bags. In the spring yard cleanup, the bags get their second (or third) recycling, this time shredded into the compost. After I remove the critters that have used it for their winter quarters, of course.

In the bags around my sausage vine, besides a humongous slug, I found a nice assortment of tiny creepy-crawlies.

A striped springtail, Orchesella cincta. Most of these were impossible to catch, and went into the compost with the bag. This guy was lucky.

A quick red mite.

There were quite a few of these long snails, about the size of a short grain of rice. (Update: Columella edentula)

Spiderling with a yellow belly.

As I demolished the bags, I brushed off all the little ones I could into a pill bottle. Before I took them outside and set them free, on a whim, I pointed the camera straight down into the bottle. I liked the result:

8 or 9 snails, several different springtails, a couple of spiders, and a handful of sowbugs. The mite is in there somewhere, too.

And then they all went out into the warm spring night to find a new home.

Compost critters, Part II

The little moths I found in my compost pile (see yesterday's post) puzzled me. What were they doing there? What moth pupates in rotting leaves? None that I knew of.

I had captured one. It was tiny, about 1 cm. long, with feathery wings, golden and shiny. It looked vaguely familiar.

I took a couple of quick photos, and foolishly released the moth. Later, examining the photo, I remembered. It looked like the Shy Cosmets that I hatched a couple of years ago. But they live down on the marshes, not here.

Shy Cosmet moth, 2008. A careful photo, and a tidy moth, but it matches  in all the essentials.

Head shot, 2008.

A bit of background is in order here.  In March of 2008, Seabrooke Leckie, in Ontario, brought home a cattail head, following the example of Gerry Wykes in Detroit, who had found the larvae of the Shy Cosmet protected from the January weather inside one. (Bug in a Cat-tail Rug.) Seabrooke examined hers and found one larva. (Her post: Cotton candy for blackbirds.)

In April, I brought home my own cattail head. (Blanket on a stick.) I found dozens of caterpillars; they looked like Seabrooke's, even though the shy one is an eastern species. After I photographed them, I left them in closed containers and forgot about them until August. When I examined them then, I found the moths. And they were Shy Cosmets. (Pure Gold!)

Back to the present. The Shy Cosmet is a marsh dweller, feeding on cattail seeds, and being eaten, in turn, by red-wing blackbirds. The larvae winter inside a downy blanket of cattail fluff and emerge as adults in June or July. If my compost moths were Shy Cosmets, what were they doing up here on the hills, so far from home?

I needed a better photo. I went out and raked around the edges of the place where the compost pile had been. Under a mat of dead nettle, I found about a half bucket of unsorted compost, which I dumped on the tarp and examined for moths. There were two; one flew away as soon as I saw it, the other waited until my hand was a few inches away, then led me on a merry chase around the lawn, into the cedars and then the rhododendrons before I lost it. Uncooperative beast! I think I heard it giggling.

So I sorted the compost, as I had the rest, pulling out all the sticks and rhodo leaves.  When I pulled apart one clump, it contained a fist-full of creamy fluff. Fresh, undecomposed cattail fluff!

Cattail "down", 2008

Oh.

Now I remember; Laurie brought home a cattail a few months ago. I must have tossed it in the compost when it started to break up. And I didn't notice it was carrying dozens of healthy little caterpillars.  Mystery solved. And it seems that the moths have decided to stay in BC. Can't blame them; the weather's better here.

Compost critters

I garden as much for the pleasure of the work itself as for the results; the shapes and colours, scents and tastes of the growing garden and its harvest. I just love to get my hands dirty, to dig in a shovel and turn the soil, watching the earthworms twist and squirm and head back down into darkness, to crumble friable loam in my fingers and smell its nutty aroma, to make holes and fill them with new plants, to trim and weed and prune. I love to straighten up after a few hours on my knees, holding my aching back, to stand for a bit, looking at the newly-loosened earth, the happy plants. As Mom used to say, "It's clean dirt," and so it is also "good pain."

I love the fixings: peat moss, well-aged manures, humus, fish fertilizer "tea", mulches, compost.

There's a limit to my madness. I draw the line at making "hot" compost; it needs a large pile or container; it must be turned frequently and soaked even more often;  it involves heavy lifting. And I have to wear gloves. Which never, ever fit, and always irritate my hands.

So I make lazy gardener's "cold" compost. In a back corner, behind the hydrangea, I toss all the day's clippings and cuttings and raked-up detritus, as-is, stems and sticks and all. A piece of log holds it down until the next time. Occasionally, I mix it up a bit, maybe shoving the new stuff underneath the old, maybe pulling out a few sticks from the middle and tossing them on top again. That's it. In between, I forget about it.

It takes years to build up good compost that way, but the end product is perfect, a joy to dig and to spread.

Last week, I dug up my compost pile for the first time in three or four years. I shoveled everything onto a tarp and hauled it out to the lawn to sort. Sticks, evergreen cones and unrottable rhododendron leaves here,  dead nettle runners there, stones from the soil underneath over there, clean compost in a loose heap in the center. And hundreds of live critters scrambling for cover everywhere. There were sowbugs of both types; the small, panicky ones, and the big, calm ones that just roll into a ball when things get awkward. There were ants, all disorganized, looking for the way home. Earthworms and spiders, millipedes, centipedes and assorted grubs. And at least a dozen small, shiny moths.

What was this doing in a compost heap?

I collected a moth and a few of the less frequent residents to look at later, then worked for another couple of hours weeding, raking, digging, transplanting, then finally spreading chicken manure and the compost. I cleaned up my mess and went in to examine my critter collection.

All that hard work is my excuse for what I did next; I took a couple of photos of each animal and released them without double-checking my photos. I was tired and hungry, and my back was aching, so I was careless and foolish.

Unidentified grub. There were many of these, about 1/2 inch long.

Fat, brown grub. Unidentified. Probably something that will eat my plants.

He's about 1 inch long, and has a series of black dots down each side. (See full-size.)

Centipede. (One pair of legs per segment.) This is the tail end.

Head end.

Woolly caterpillar. Unidentified.

When I looked at the photos later, I realized that I had a mystery on my hands. I'll explain that tomorrow.