The Sound of Monarch Wings Flapping

On By StefanieIn Food, Gardening, Seasons, technology

The milkweed has been blooming for a few weeks now and it is utterly delightful to see all the monarch butterflies flitting around the garden. I think of butterflies as slow and gentle beings, failing to remember that monarchs migrate thousands of miles every year. The speed at which they move through the garden is astonishing. The other day I was standing in the middle of the garden watching them, enraptured. One of them flew so close past my head I heard their wings flapping! I had never imagined that butterfly wings make noise, but they do. The sound was akin to the fast beat of a bat’s wings, only softer and quieter. What a gift that butterfly gave me!

A loaf of sourdough sandwich bread with oats on top in the bread pan on a cooling rack
Multigrain sourdough sandwich bread–I’m still baking!

Since I am not growing zucchini in the garden, a friend of mine who is and had too many, asked if I would like some. Couldn’t say no! And in fine zucchini tradition, she left them in a bag on my porch and then texted me afterwards. Not a completely anonymous zucchini porch delivery, but well performed in the spirit of sneaking excess zucchini onto neighbor’s porches.

James promptly wizarded up a zucchini lasagna in which zucchini slices played the role of lasagna noodles. Creative and delicious! We still have enough to make zucchini bread and a small batch of sweet zucchini relish.

In the middle of the week we had a huge, slow storm move through with some gusty winds and a long period of rain. It was cool and pleasant and kept us very cool for a couple of days, a welcome break from summer heat. The storm also caused a bit of a pole bean failure. Not the beans themselves, they are doing so well they actually helped contribute to the fail. Between the beans growing so tall and being so heavy, the wet ground and the gusty wind, the 8-foot tall end pole of the trellis tipped right over!

We couldn’t get the pole buried back in the ground so it would remain upright and had to add a couple smaller poles around it and tie them together to brace it up. We’ve since had more rain and some wind, and the pole still stands. It wavers around a bit, but hopefully will make it to the end of the season without any additional support.

bean trellis covered in pole beans and an 8 foot tall support pole covered in pole bean vines
My beans might be magical

The pole failure reminded me that the skunk beans did the same thing to their trellis last summer. But I blamed it on the fact that I had three different kinds of pole beans climbing up a series of poorly planned out trellising. This year it’s just the skunk beans on this trellis. Clearly next summer I will need to upgrade their trellis structure further. And I know exactly how.

We’re going to get some mesh panels and make super cool arches I won’t be able to make a tunnel like in the DIY article because my garden beds are laid out east-west, but I will be able to plant beneath them vegetables and greens that don’t mind a bit of protection from a hot summer sun. Growing butternut squash up a wooden ladder has worked out marvelously, so having sturdy arches for beans and pumpkins too will be useful and pretty!

On a completely unrelated to gardens note, if you are incredibly annoyed that search engines give you AI results, you can filter them out! All you need to do is put -ai (that’s minus or dash ai) after your search terms and you will get AI-free results. Or at least, you won’t get the AI generated summary crap at the top of the page. It also appears to cut down a bit on advertising. AI has infiltrated everything these days whether we want it to or not, so to be able to filter some of it out with this simple little trick is a relief. Plus, by not allowing AI in your search results, you are also saving planetary resources, namely water.

Oh, speaking of saving resources. We’ve had our heat pump since early May and it has been performing beautifully in the summer heat. Plus it is saving electricity. For the month of July so far we’ve used 282 kilowatt hours of electricity compared to 479 KWH for the same time period a year ago. That’s a 41% savings! Some of it has to do with the air conditioner being over 20-years-old, so we’ve gained in efficiency. And, since the heat pump cools by drawing humidity from the air, we no longer need to run a separate dehumidfier. So many wins on this one!

Reading

  • Book: The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere by Nicholas Triolo. A thoughtful book about circumambulation, walking in circles around, usually a mountain, but other places as well. It’s about beginnings and endings, healing, and the refusal to conquer and dominate.
  • Poem: This Evening Let’s by Adrienne Rich
  • Essay: Book Bans Don’t Work by Michael Dirda (gift link) A really wonderful essay about how book bans don’t work. A kid who wants to read a book is going to manage to read it whether or not you want them to. Just ask 14-year-old me about pilfering my mom’s copy of Judy Blume’s Wifey from where she’d hidden it so I couldn’t read it. I asked if I could read it, she said no, it disappeared, I found it, read it, then put it back, and she never knew.

Quote

“I had internalized a larger cultural fixation for results, starving a slower and more reverential approach to time and place. Encircling moves in slower motion, and seems to better match foot and breath and intention. Mountains might be lesser served when atomized as single-serving objectives, for to perceive summits or planets or people as useful only when tackled and controlled is to lose sight of a far larger opportunity to belong in an ecology of uncertainty. There is merit in leaving things alone. There is merit in surrender. There is merit in mystery.”

~Nicholas Triolo, The Way Around, page 89

Listening

  • Podcast: Planet Critical: Why Earth Needs a Feminist Movement: Silvia Federici. Federici is one of the best, most interesting Feminist critics working these days and she has lots of things to say about the control of women’s bodies and the how and why women’s rights are being eroded.
  • Podcast: Between the Covers: Robert Macfarlane: Is a River Alive? This book is currently on the top of my TBR pile and after listening to the interview, I am looking forward to reading it even more than I was before.

17 thoughts on “The Sound of Monarch Wings Flapping”

  1. I feel like this quote woke me up: “I think of butterflies as slow and gentle beings, failing to remember that monarchs migrate thousands of miles every year.” I mean…. that was seriously special. Thank you. I actually said “eek!” when you mentioned James making zucchini lasagna because FINALLY, a dish I’ve made, too! Huzzah!

    So much love to you, Stefanie.

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    1. My thoughts exactly, Jeanne! I need to try it with zucchini.

      Thanks for the “-ai” tip, Stefanie – I hadn’t heard that one. Very useful 🙂 I can also recommend DuckDuckGo, which works pretty well as a search engine and is more privacy-respecting than Google etc. It offers an AI feature, but you can choose whether to switch it on or off. “Off” works for me!

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      1. Check out Vivaldi, if not only privacy is a priority for you, but if you also love the idea of a worker-owned operation. It’s a solid alternative.

        I’m not sure that adding that line to the search request will actually save resources … that might be worth investigating; I believe it’s only a matter of changing the display of information retrieved, the way that it’s presented for you personally, not changing the actual act of retrieval back-channel if that makes sense. It does, however, still create a data trail, which will indicate you’re not interested in AI results. I recently discovered how to turn off the AI features inside Office which was a great relief. There’s always an opt-out in those products (for now, anyway), but it’s often awkward to locate (and frustrating that we have to take the extra step to disable, rather than the other way ’round).

        Love your zucchini story! And OMG, your mom had Wifey? Whyyyyyy weren’t we friends back then? Whyyyyyy?

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        1. Thanks for the tip on Vivaldi Marcie! It looks great!

          I got the -ai tip from an article by a librarian about how to resist AI. I don’t think anyone actually knows what happens in the background of searches, but at least I can feel better about the search results. I don’t use Office at home and sadly my workplace has everything locked down so I can’t change browsers or settings, etc. So frustrating.

          Yup, my mom had Wifey. She also had a big box of Harlequin romances under the bed that my sister and I would raid to read “the good bits” when she left us home alone 😀

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          1. We bookish folk might not know what’s happening behind-the-scenes but coders do! I made enquiries. So apparently adding that to the search string only changes how the information is displaying for you, it doesn’t change the process of searching: so it doesn’t alter the results, only the way you see the results. And, if the ultimate goal is to decrease resources (water, specifically), there’s an argument that it uses more resources by lengthening the search string. As for my idea that it might, even so, register a vote against AI even if the resources weren’t affected… that’s also not how it works. Back to drawing signs and hoisting posterboards! hehehe On the up-side there are ways to change your displayed results that work more reliably than -AI, to remove that interpretive/generative layer, and there are other services/companies that are not prioritising AI that we can choose instead. We just got our last device onto Vivaldi last week so now we’ve moved onto the next stage of the plan (tho, as you’ve said, work requires some compromises…but things can be better even if they can’t be perfect).

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      1. Thanks for the AI tip, it will be very useful! I would love to hear those butterflies wings flop-flop too! In Europe butterflies are small and quiet but in Asia they are huge and I can imagine they might make some noise too!

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    1. It was so amazing Laila!

      I hope you made some zucchini bread! I’m really tired of Ai showing up everywhere too. It’s now even in our library discovery interface and the backend too. No one asked for it, but there it is. Grrr.

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  5. Just catching up on your posts after a few months’ absence, so lovely to hear your summer tales! 😊I can only imagine the magic of the monarch butterfly migration, not something we have here in Britain, where butterfly numbers are in serious decline. Your zucchini story had me smiling, I love the idea of surplus smuggling, ~ here it’s a case of no visitor leaves without an armful of something from the garden at the moment but I might have to graduate to leaving things on people’s doorsteps! 😉 The recipes sound delicious and your bread looks amazing. Fingers crossed your beans will recover, it’s a similar story here, so frustrating when a summer storm brings us some welcome rain but blasts the tall plants out of the ground. Still, it beats going to the supermarket, that’s for sure! 😆

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    1. Monarch numbers here have declined drastically but since I have numerous monarch friendly plants, they always find me and I feel good about helping them out 🙂 The beans have all recovered and if anything have gotten even more wild! I love how resilient they are. I’m sure if you ever resort to leaving stealth garden produce on your neighbors’ doorsteps, no one will really mind. I know I wouldn’t 🙂

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  6. I remember your writing years ago about the Monarch butterflies. I have never forgotten that you see them in your neck of the woods on their migrations.

    I enjoyed your quote at the end, particularly “There is merit in leaving things alone …” etc. And this necessity to conquer peaks! I recently saw a pic of people lined up to ascend Mt Everest (or some section of it, I didn’t take the detail in, because the point was made.) It just looked horrendous. And for what? On a sort of related matter, I have an interesting challenge when out and about with Mr Gums, because he is always focused on the endpoint goal – where we are planning to go etc – whereas I am always interested in the journey. SO while he strides ahead, I am loitering behind looking around, discovering interesting things, that, you know, might even be better (or might at least enhance) the end-point.

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