Observed today, Dec 30 at 10 am

[Allan Balliett]

Out feeding the chickens a little late today, ice still in the buckets, but the promise of 60+ days between now and the end of the week in the air, I saw a brown spider the size of a quarter walking slowly, but with intention, across the crusted snow.

Maybe I'm learning the hard way: last February I transplanted tatsoi from the greenhouse to beds and lost a great many of them within a couple of nights to CUTWORMS. I eventually gave up all of my mystic theories on why the plants were whithering or disappearing and took a walk in the cold one night. With a flashlight, I saw that almost every plant had a large worm working on it. I harvest a handful in a 30ft row. All of this, at the time, was well outside of my belief system, since I thought that the cold blooded had no choice but to slow down when the temperatures were below 40.