Stupid Turnips

"I'm a GOOD turnip farmer."

There's a famous scene in Gone With the Wind in which Scarlett O'Hara gnaws on a turnip ripped from the soil, gets sick, then rails at the heavens, "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!" Turnips proceed to sustain Scarlett and her family during those first tough years bringing Tara back to life.

Well. Scarlett would have gone very, very hungry indeed if she'd been relying on our turnip crop.
Turnips are supposed to be fairly easy to grow. So trouble-free that they're used for feeding pigs and cattle.

According to one farm's website (whose testimony I don't doubt, as they actually successfully grow crops), "Turnips require very little care, tolerate a wide range of soils and positively thrive in cold temperatures. "  

What turnips SHOULD look like.

The Seattle Times gardening column lists it as a standard winter crop. "Turnips are frost-hardy and like cool weather!" warbles Sunset Vegetable Gardening. "Where winters are mild, plant in fall for a winter crop," assures the Western Garden Book, adding that the plants need "ample space for root to reach full weight of 3-5 lbs."

I don't think our entire turnip crop registered 3 to 5 pounds in weight, though possibly it would've achieved this heady status if I'd weighed it before cutting off the greens, wiping off the slugs, and washing off the dirt.

In fact, it looked as if all the turnips had taken a vote and decided that just one of them would grow to anything like normal-turnip size, while the rest of them would remain little.

"I'll do the growin' around here, and don't you forget it."

Not only were most of them just cruciferous Ping-Pong balls, they were also riddled with tunnels. And a pillbug was cozily residing in one of them. Could the culprits be root maggots?

According to a gardening advice column in The Seattle Times, "Root maggots overwinter in the soil as larvae and pupate near the surface of the soil in the spring, using root crops like turnips for sustenance."

If they're pupating, they wouldn't be eating, and when they emerge from their pupae they'd be full-grown flies and wouldn't be gnawing roots, either, so they have to be talking about the larvae (which is what maggots are, after all).

Canadian Organic Growers notes cheerfully that "winter turnips or rutabagas are riddled by the maggots but only superficially at the bottom of the root which can be trimmed off at harvest," so I thought maybe the rotten little creatures were busy very early in the mild winter season.

Now I'm wondering if it was just our old familiar slugs rasping away at them. The University of Maryland Extension website chronicles the hollowing-out of turnips by young slugs here and notes "If your turnip crop yields stunted, hollow turnips...don’t overlook the possibility that slugs have found and adopted your turnip roots as near perfect places to live."

Though why the turnips stopped growing is a puzzler to me. Then again, I guess I wouldn't have much motivation, either, if I'd been gnawed by maggots or slugs.

Oh well. We'll get one pan of roasted turnips out of the lot, anyway (after having composted the heavily damaged ones). And the leeks did astonishingly well --the p-patch is a veritable old-growth forest of leeks. Too bad we haven't figured out a dish we like them in all that much...maybe we'll just use them as inspiration for writing and pen an ode to "Spring: A Leek."

Living Under a Rock (Literally)

Turned over a paving stone in the garden yesterday to see if anything was stirring yet, as spring has been dragging its feet around here this year. Things appear to be busier in the hidden parts of the garden as there were many small creatures bustling about out of sight. They were none too pleased about their roof being lifted, so I didn't leave them uncovered for long--just long enough to take some paparazzi shots.

The most obliging subject was this little mollusk, which I am pretty sure is a Garlic Snail:

The "garlic" in the name refers to its garlicky smell, which it produces when it wants to ward off a predator. This little guy is an import from England, where its pungent odor serves to repel hedgehogs. One would think that smelling like garlic would be a bad idea for a snail, as it might attract French chefs and give them ideas, but apparently it works against hedgehogs.

There aren't any hedgehogs here, so I hope the snail's defenses work equally well against our native predators, particularly this slug- and snail-eating insect that also lived under the stone:

It's a rove beetle (I don't know what species), a kind of beetle with very short hard wing coverings as opposed to the body-length elytra of most beetles. It looks a bit as if it's wearing a short tuxedo jacket with the tails lopped off. Like its snail prey, the rove beetle emits a terrible odor to repel predators. It also takes up a defensive stance, its mandibles ready to pinch and its abdomen arched over its back in scorpion style.

This pugnacity earned it a superstitious association with the devil back in the Middle Ages, one that's clung to it ever since. One species of rove beetle, also an import from the UK, can be up to two inches long and is known as the Devil's Coach Horse, a name that's also commonly used for the thousands of other, smaller rove beetle species. Poor things, all they want to do is eat snails, slugs, and fly larvae, and people run around screaming that these little critters eat sinners and aim their "tails" over their bodies to curse humans.

Another little stinker under the slate was a millipede:

This millipede was very sluggish, acting as though it had just been roused from a deep sleep and had to look for each of its hundred or so slippers before responding to the removal of its roof. Millipedes spend their time munching on decaying plant matter and only produce a dreadful aroma if something tries to eat them, so they're good roommates for the snails.

The pillbugs are, too, as they're not predators, either. This one took offense at my nosiness and did the armadillo thing:

Finally, assuming that I'd gone off to eat other arthropods, it unrolled and trundled on its merry way, shouldering aside garlic snails as it went.

No iPod, but lots of isoPods

Memorial Day weekend brought gray skies and extra-low tides to the Puget Sound area. The conditions were excellent for beachcombing at Carkeek Park--foul weather kept crowds at bay, and the low tides revealed all sorts of squishy, squashy, scuttling, and secretive seashore creatures.

Ochre sea stars in neon orange and purple clung to the undersides of rocks amid a welter of barnacles and mussels. Also nestled among the rocks were a multitude of green anemones and what looked to be a painted urticina (a red and green anemone that can live for up to 60 years). A red-orange blob of what might have been a reclusive octopus lurked deep inside a crevice. If you stood close to a big rock, you could hear the clicks and whispers of barnacles scrabbling inside their shells.

Life in the tidal zone is packed tighter than a subway car at rush hour. The first photo shows a limpet, which clings to a rock; tiny barnacles, in turn, cling to the limpet.

I especially liked the teeming zoo I found under a looseleaf-sized thin slab of red slate. It was dense with tiny mussels, hermit crabs the size of peas, and weird worms that I think were sand or pile worms. (A field guide suggested gently pressing the worm behind its head to cause it to evert its "sharp black pincers," a suggestion I found it easy to ignore.)

The best critter hidden under the slab was a rockweed isopod, a marine cousin of the pill bug and the sow bug (those little gray army-tank minibeasts that live in your yard and are sometimes called roly-polies or potato bugs). This one, as you can see, was bright olive green.

Apparently the isopod wears this color most frequently but can also be black, pink, or tan, depending on what color its background is. It's also called Vosnesensky's isopod. Which is a lot of name for a little guy like this to tote around, even if it can grow to be 2 inches long.

Vosnesensky was some Russian guy who studied marine isopods on the west coast in the mid-1800s. And he got to have one named after him. Some people have all the luck.

Apparently there is a similar species in the southern regions of the coast that looks much the same but has "round eyes instead of kidney-shaped" ones. Remember that if you ever go eye to eye with an isopod.

The birds were out in force, too. Crows poked and probed at the rocks, as did gulls, feasting on the bounty laid out by the extra-low tide. A bald eagle circled over the beach. The song of a Swainson's thrush spiraled up from the woods, and this cheerful song sparrow piped away in a shrub near the entrance to the beach.