The far-reaching effects of Hurricane Ike were felt even in West Michigan; it came in the form of rain….lots of rain. The deluge lasted three days, without letting up, and by the time the last raindrop fell, we received 10 to 12 inches here ... eight inches of it ending up in our basement.

Eight inches equals a lot of soggy stuff; nearly everything in the basement was stored in cardboard boxes. When the rain stopped, our garage and driveway looked like a soggy free-for-all trashy rummage sale with everything from the basement thrown in heaps. All those packed cardboard boxes of clothes, Halloween decorations, Christmas ornaments, family photos, financial records, and whatever else was down there had to be picked through to see what could be salvaged. What a mess!

Sifting through a disintegrating box of sopping wet linens, I found an old tablecloth – a green, cotton square with a printed border of little hearts, Dutch girls and flowers. I smiled remembering the last time it was used.

When my oldest daughter, Shelby, was in third grade, she had to bring an old family heirloom to class and give an oral report about its history, using the heirloom to illustrate how people lived and thought in days past. This heirloom could not be a picture. Shoot – nearly all we had were pictures … or trinkets that mean a lot to one member of the family or another, but nothing that would be considered an heirloom with a history behind it. Mom’s house is packed with such things, but she lives hundreds of miles away – too far to drop in and grab something off one of her packed-to-overflowing shelves. My daughter and I searched our house. In a box in the basement, we found a tablecloth that I had somehow acquired from Mom. I called her to explain my daughter’s homework assignment predicament, and find out if there was a story attached to the tablecloth. It looked kind of Pennsylvania Dutch to me, and because Dad grew up in rural Pennsylvania, I thought perhaps it was from his childhood home.

Mom must have heard the desperation in my voice; I know I heard the wheels turning in her head. She thought for a moment before answering my plea with, “That was a favorite of mine when I was young – we used it every Sunday. On Saturdays, I remember helping my mother do laundry, and it was my job to put the clothes through the clothes-wringer before we’d hang them on the line to dry. We used that tablecloth so often, I’m surprised it isn’t worn thin from all those wringings. Your dad – they didn’t have an automatic washer growing up. When one of the kids got in trouble at home, their punishment was to turn the manual crank on the washing machine – and doing laundry in a family with fourteen children was no picnic. It could take all day! Your Dad was a character; he was always in trouble as a kid ... he did more than his share of laundry.” Great – this could work; we’d found something with a bit of history!

My daughter wrote the report about how laundry was done in the “olden days.” I ironed the tablecloth for her to take to school. While doing so, I noticed that stamped on the backside, in the corner in small print, were the words “Prentiss Lane Inc. 'Sweetheart' Rd. 1962-63.” Now, I know my kids sometimes think I’m old; ancient even – born before the days of the wheel or any other modern convenience, but I’m almost positive there were automatic, electric washing machines the year before I was born, 1964 ... and it was certainly not even close to a time when Mom would have used a clothes-wringer. I called her. “Yes, yes … so the tablecloth was not from my childhood – and it was not used often; I think I bought it off a clearance table and used it once. But the story about how we did laundry was true. Does it really matter if this particular tablecloth was part of that laundry?” I laughed. It would have to do – there was no time to find something else for the report. My daughter took the tablecloth with the date safely hidden inside the folds, aired our family’s dirty laundry history in front of the class, and received an “A” on the assignment.

Shelby didn’t know the tablecloth wasn’t really a favorite of her Grandma’s when she was a little girl until I pulled it out of that box, soaking wet, and told her the story behind the story.

“Grandma lied?” she laughed.

“Well ... sort of. Because she loves you and wanted to help.” I laughed too. It was a tiny secret shared between Mom, me, and now my daughter.

So, do I keep a tablecloth that I think is not particularly attractive and would use even less than my mom did? Or throw it in the pile of things that can’t be salvaged or are too much bother to clean and save, only to be put back in the basement and most likely never to be pulled out again? It was an easy decision; I put it in the pile to be laundered.

Merriam-Webster’s defines heirloom as something of special value handed down from one generation to another. It does not have to be something of monetary value. It can be as cheap as a dime-store tablecloth on clearance – one that has memories of three generations laid upon it.

Janice arrived at the nursery on a Saturday in late August. As we crammed a couple of hydrangeas, half dozen pots of transcantia and a couple pieces of kitschy yard art into her truck, she was kind enough to pause for a minute and pose for a picture. After the plants and kitsch were loaded, we chatted for a bit in the parking lot.

Janice and I had never met, but we are part of the same organization; we’re both Master Gardeners. She was volunteering her time to pick up plant donations for the yearly Van Buren County Master Gardener plant sale at the Wine and Harvest Festival. The sale is the Van Buren chapter’s fundraiser, and its success determines the budget for the next year’s projects and programs.

The programs and projects are many, and all are aimed at serving the community. Since the Master Gardener Volunteer program started in 1972 in Washington state, Master Gardeners have been busy serving the community through projects such as diagnosing disease and pest problems on gardening hotlines, developing and installing landscape plans for Habitat for Humanity houses, and manning information booths at county fairs in about 46 states and parts of Canada.

A friend of mine, who lives in New York state, saw one of these Master Gardener information booths at her county fair and was interested in the program. She’s an avid gardener but was afraid she didn’t know enough about the technical aspects of soils, plant diseases, and such to become a Master Gardener. “No, no, no,” I told her. All you have to have is a love of gardening, a desire to teach what you know and your county extension service will help with the rest.

Here in Michigan, the Master Gardener program is run by Michigan State University Extension (MSUE). Trainees take a two to three month course which provides classes in plant science covering everything from botanical Latin, to integrated pest management. Training begins with a reference manual – a big and heavy manual – and lugging it to each class builds the muscles required for some heavy-duty gardening. And that was when I took the course nearly nine years ago, by now the manual might have grown so large, that Wheel-barrowing 101 is needed as a class prerequisite. (Check with your local extension agency for dates and times.)

In addition to the classes, there are weekly quizzes and a final examination. After a trainee passes the exam, 40 hours of volunteer work related to horticulture and environmentalism are required to become a Master Gardener. The hours required may vary slightly state to state, but in Michigan, a Master Gardener must complete five hours of continuing education, and 15 hours of community service each year thereafter to remain an active member of the program. For those wishing to go a step further, they may become Advanced Master Gardeners by completing an additional 25 hours of education in horticulture and environmental subjects, and volunteer another 50 hours in the community.

The knowledge and skills cultivated through this program enable Master Gardeners to take their skills and share information with the community in a variety of ways. The projects a Master Gardener undertakes is only limited by their imagination.

I’ve had some very rewarding experiences throughout the years teaching even the youngest children that they are stewards of the earth by launching a recycling drive at a preschool and teaching tree identification at a state park to middle-schoolers, happy to be out of the classroom for the day. I’ve chaperoned field trips to nature centers and led children on nature scavenger hunts through the woods and fields at the nursery. This spring I taught a Brownie troop about the basics of soil science, and the look on their faces was priceless when I told them the compost they had their hands in was made of worm poop. My biggest on-going project is the Children’s Garden at the nursery. With the help and generosity of my bosses, fellow co-workers, family and all of those who have donated time, materials and hard work, the vision I had in my head has become a garden in its fourth year that is enjoyed by both the children and adults who visit.

I love gardening; there is something so satisfying about planting a garden, nourishing it … watching it grow and flourish. Equally rewarding is sharing what I’ve learned with others, and the Master Gardner program is a way to do that and give back to the community at the same time. Mary C. McLellan, the Michigan State University Master Gardener program coordinator wrote in that heavy muscle-building reference manual, “If the program were a plant, we would say it’s a well-established, native north American perennial that is thriving and that is continually being planted in new fertile ground.”

If you enjoy gardening and have a desire to learn and pass that knowledge on to others and you’d like to be part of this thriving program, contact your local county extension agency. I bet they’d love to cultivate a new crop of Master Gardener volunteers.

Each morning, before anyone else is up, I sit on my front porch with my coffee, and watch my yard wake up. Sometimes, sloshing hot coffee, I stroll, taking stock of what’s happening in my gardens.

Look who I found on the swamp milkweed toward the end of July! A monarch butterfly caterpillar; I named him Clyde. Clyde the Caterpillar. What? Naming an insect is strange? But monarchs hold a special place in the annals of my childhood memories.

Which came first the monarch or the caterpillar? I can’t remember, but two different monarch encounters left a lasting impression, one involving a caterpillar, and the other the butterflies they become. One summer my brother and I found a monarch caterpillar on a milkweed in the field at the end of the street, and brought it home. My dad built a screen cover to put on an old aquarium, and we kept the caterpillar (I don’t remember its name, but I’m sure it had one), in there along with some milkweed leaves and stalks, and watched it turn into a chrysalis. It hung there, attached to the screen, until the beautiful butterfly emerged before we released it back in the field.

The other childhood memory is of a special place. We were camping up north in September, and my parents took us somewhere other campers mentioned was a sight to behold - a field high on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, with a single tree. That tree was covered in monarch butterflies – hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, and even more fluttering through the field. Word was they were gathered there, readying themselves to make the flight south. Just imagining seeing that many butterflies gathered in one place is amazing. Being in the center of the gathering was magical.

Clyde was the first caterpillar I’ve seen on the swamp milkweed, and I’ve waited for him for nearly three years. He’s one of the reasons I planted the milkweed; they are a host plant for monarchs. In their caterpillar state, monarchs eat only milkweed leaves. Like Lori wrote in “Of Parsley and Caterpillars”, I was thrilled with my caterpillar’s arrival. My excitement was short lived however; the following morning, when I went out to wish Clyde a good morning, he was missing!!! He was there just the evening before…and it’s not a large garden; I checked everywhere without any luck.

Oh, where, oh where, did little Clyde go? Maybe a bird ... gasp ... don’t even think it, Cindy. I thought monarchs tasted bad and therefore birds left them alone ... but maybe that’s only in their metamorphed form and doesn't apply to caterpillars.

For days, I search and searched for Clyde ... and found Claudette. She was smaller than Clyde, but just as pretty. I found her a couple mornings later while drinking a cup of coffee, and combing the milkweed again for Clyde. Not that any caterpillar could replace Clyde, but I was happy Claudette came to visit, and I then settled to my spot on the porch to finish my coffee and watch the birds.

Oh, look - there's the little house wren; the busy little bird that darts all over the yard, and hops throughout my gardens. Right now he's in the front garden ... where Clyde was! And Claudette is ... er ... was; I passed by the milkweed on the way to my car less than an hour later, and Claudette was gone too! For weeks afterward, my husband called the little bird The Wren Reaper, and teased me that the monarchs fluttering around the garden were Clyde and Claudette reincarnated. Toward the end, though I found no chrysalis to indicate either of them made it past their caterpillar form, he could have been right. Monarchs have fairly short life cycles, and it was possible they turned into butterflies by that time.

From egg to butterfly, the life span of a monarch is about six to eight weeks. The time spent inside an egg is about 4 days; as a caterpillar it lives for about two weeks before changing into a chrysalis. After ten days inside the chrysalis, it emerges to live as an adult butterfly for approximately two to six more weeks. There are four to five generations of monarchs repeating this life-cycle each summer, but the last generation lives about six to eight months. This is the generation that makes the long migration to hibernation sites in Southern California and Mexico. In February and March they begin to re-awaken, and after mating and laying the eggs of the next generation, they finally die.

Monarchs aren’t an endangered species, but this amazing migration is. Their over-wintering habitats are being lost as more and more land is cleared. During the summer months, food supplies are threatened as herbicides are used on the milkweeds that the caterpillars eat, and some of the other plants that the butterflies use as nectar sources. Insecticides used on mosquitoes and other insects are also killing both monarch caterpillars and butterflies.

If it weren’t for another batch of monarch caterpillars I found, I would have gone on blaming the wren for the disappearance of Clyde and Claudette. In one of the hoop houses at the nursery where we keep perennial re-stock, grew a common milkweed. Though it was rooted between the houses, it escaped the mowers by growing up under the shade cloth, its stalks reaching nearly three feet above the potted perennials surrounding it. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed the familiar white, black and yellow stripes on its leaves, and found not one or two, but five monarch caterpillars on the plant, and another crawling outside of the house, on the shade cloth. I didn’t have my camera, but brought it the following day ... only to discover there were no caterpillars to capture on film. Every last one of them was gone! Frass and chewed leaves were the only evidence that they’d been there.

I decided some investigative work needed to be done, and set out on the Information Super Highway to see if I could determine what was eating my caterpillars. It was just as I had thought: monarchs taste bad. The milkweed the caterpillars eat and store in their bodies even as adult butterflies, contains a toxin. This defense mechanism works so well, that birds that have attempted munching monarch caterpillars and butterflies rarely try the same dish twice. In one study, birds that previously ate monarchs got physically ill and vomited upon even seeing another monarch. So it was doubtful the wren ate both Clyde and Claudette, or that the caterpillars at work were eaten by birds.

There are other predators though, that aren’t bothered by the milkweed toxin. Spiders, wasps, and some other insects, will eat the caterpillars, but this too seemed unlikely to me. There were just too many caterpillars that disappeared in too short a time for me to believe that insects were the culprits.

Cats? They’re a common denominator at home and at work. A big orange one walks down the sidewalk past my house each morning, returning home after a night out on the town, and just recently we noticed a stray at the nursery, prowling the children’s garden…which is close to the hoop houses. Does “erpillar” mean “free food” in feline? Is a caterpillar an advertisement for a feline open buffet? There were no signs of a struggle; no broken stems, disturbed mulch or kitty footprints in my garden, and no overturned pots in the hoop house. I suppose I’ll never know where my caterpillars went.

But this past Sunday, I found this little guy on the same hoop-house milkweed. He’s extra-special – a part of the last generation of the season, and one of those that’ll migrate in a few weeks. I hope he makes it; I hope he’s still around to give it a try.

"All that lives beneath Earth's fragile canopy is, in some elemental fashion, related. Is born, moves, feeds, reproduces, dies. Tiger and turtle dove; each tiny flower and homely frog; the running child, father to the man, and in ways as yet unknown, brother to the salamander. If mankind continues to allow whole species to perish, when does their peril also become ours?" ~ The World Wildlife Fund

I ran across that quote on a Web site my co-worker showed me at work.  I’ve read some interesting blogs about nature since joining the GRIT community a short time ago – beautifully descriptive stories about box turtles and liatris fields; gorgeous photos of swans, caterpillars, and waterfalls that take my breath away.  I’ve written of a few of my own experiences with nature; of flowers, and an evening walk with my daughters while surrounded by fields and forest.  And then there were those mouth-watering nature’s bounty blogs – blackberries, sweet corn, and blueberries; what could be better than something sun-ripened and freshly plucked?  But nature is not always so pretty as blooming flowers, as sweet as box turtles in love, or cute and cuddly as baby goslings.  And fair warning:  if you’re eating something fresh from your garden, you may want to put it down to continue reading; I wouldn’t want anyone to lose their lunch.  But as icky as it might be, the following story is fascinating and has a lot of people excited. 

My co-worker is extremely excited about carrion beetles she discovered in her yard in the woods. Coming home from work one day, she spotted a dead mouse. With an armload of stuff, she went into the house first, thinking she'd come back to dispose of the carcass after she got settled in. She forgot about it until later that evening when she and her husband went outside to sit on the porch swing.

They found the carcass was already being taken care of by a couple of big black and red spotted beetles. Carrion beetles are flesh eaters – specifically dead flesh.  Scavengers, they play an important role in returning decaying materials back to the earth.  These two beetles, working together, had rolled the dead mouse over twelve feet from where she had spotted it earlier. Somewhat grossed out, but fascinated, her husband ran to get the camera.

Later she did an Internet search on carrion beetles, and found a site containing a description and photos of what she thought were her beetles.

The American Burying Beetle can detect the smell of death from two miles away, and swoops in to retrieve the carcasses of small rodents, to feed on, lay their eggs in, and then bury. Once the eggs are hatched, they actually tend to the larva as do bees, social wasps, and ants ... or even as a mammal tends to its young – a very rare thing for a beetle to do.

And the beetle itself is rare. Once living throughout the eastern and central United States, it’s now endangered, and is thought to still survive only in a handful of states – Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and South Dakota.  Attempts are currently being made to reintroduce it to Ohio and Massachusetts.  The last recorded sighting in Michigan was over thirty years ago; it's thought to have long since become extinct here.

After reading the website, she contacted the Michigan branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, emailed them the pictures at their request, and now they are as excited about this discovery as she. They are in the process of calling in the beetle experts to determine if, in fact, what looks to be the American Burying Beetle, is what they saw.

Meanwhile, she's taking care not to fall asleep on the porch swing; she doesn't want to wake up, and find she's being rolled off into the woods by a couple of bugs.  I’ll post any updates in the comment section here.  I’ll leave you beetle then; you may now safely carrion with your lunch.  Get it?  “I’ll leave you be ‘til then; you may now safely carry on with your lunch.”  Sigh.  If a couple of flesh-eating beetles didn’t turn your stomach, surely those couple of bad puns did.