Critters and Clams
It’s been almost a month since we've had free time to spend at Hytte, but we have had some uninvited guests spending time there while we were away. In early April we had a planned trip to Hytte, looking forward to a bit less rain, warmer weather and low tides during the daylight hours. We were hoping to be going to be clamming and hunting for early mushrooms, but what we ended up doing instead was confronting, controlling and containing ants -then leaving ASAP! I'll save you the details of the nightmare making entrance the ants made, pouring from the hole in the wall as we were heading to bed, but needless to say, we have a lively carpenter ant infestation at Hytte right now. It was treated 3 weeks ago, but never the less there were a few strong survivors to greet us upon our most recent arrival. We will be having another round of treatment in the coming week to hopefully finish the job for good! (Or for the season at least). That's just one of a few critter control projects we have in process at this time. There is also a friendly mouse that takes a close up photo on our security camera a few times a week, a squirrel that was just evicted from the celling, and "who knows what" (but it's bigger than an ant) living in, and tearing, up the crawl space insulation. We found a little bit of ant damage that we will have to address this summer, just another thing to add to our to-do list. Here's a screen shot from our live stream video of the mouse in action, I think they are darling, if only they didn't have so many issues.
Fortunately for this visit the ants were not unbearable so we were able to enjoy the quick 24 hours that we had to spend at Hytte. The tide was as low as we have ever seen it, boy oh boy was there a lot of beach! It's apparent that Ivar was literally running in circles.
Clamming was the plan and the hunt was on! Based on all the shells that are strewn on the beach, it is obvious that the birds, moon snails and starfish were eating well, but we didn’t know what we would find when the shovel hit the sand.
Butter Clams were the first and easiest to find, they are abundant and huge!
Ivar joined us in the digging, living up to his namesake, he even uncovered a clam on his own. I was looking hard for cockles to steam. We found some, but only a few. I hope that we were just digging in the wrong place or maybe they are all still small. Meanwhile, butter clams are great as far as I'm concerned and chowder will be on the menu.
Oh! There's one final critter to tell you about, a teensy-tiny white crab. This little guy came running out of one of the big clams after I opened it up. It was still alive and presumingly happy to be free. We were talking about maybe finding pearls in the big clams, an low an behold- out crawled a crab! I named it Pearl and took it back to the beach to grow big and strong, to maybe be captured at a later date in our crab trap.
At the last minute I put together a quick planting of annuals in the window box outside the kitchen window. Gage had an errand at the hardware store so I asked him to grab some white flowering annuals for me. We spend so much time at that window, the view of dried dirt just had to go. I hope there is enough sun for those guys to thrive, they will be good test batch before I commit to long lived plants. Ideally herbs would be there, maybe I'll swap them out when time permits, but this is fine for now. If they don’t make it no one will be heart broken.
Lastly, Gage tossed down some grass seed to cover the muddy spots in the yard until there is a landscaping plan. I kinda have a feeling that the grass will become our "landscaping plan" for the years to come. I didn't get a photo, but use your imagination and hopefully in a few weeks I'll post a photo of the new grass, grown just in time to host a springtime birthday party. Happy May Day!