This morning I began work on trying to get rid of the carpenter ants I discovered in my pile of brush to be chipped. I basically just relocated everything in the pile, sorting it into a pile of larger, straight pieces that could go through the chipper and smaller, less straight pieces that would have to be fed through the shredder part of the chipper. My hope was that by doing this I would find a large branch or two that were serving as the nest for the ants. I really didn't expect to find that, however, since I had built the pile specifically for chipping, and try not to include anything larger than 3" in diameter. What I found is that the problem may have been caused by the amounts of leaves in the pile. Much of what was in the pile had been recently cut, and I had not bothered to remove the leaves before adding the limbs to the pile. There were a lot of leaves, and underneath them were many ants, and what appeared to be many eggs. I raked the leaves into another pile, so I could at least keep them isolated from the stuff to be chipped.
It has been hot and humid in the evenings, so I didn't even try to go out after dinner. That may have been a mistake, though, since the weather forecast calls for overnight storms and rain throughout the day tomorrow. I may not get to work outside tomorrow, we'll just have to wait and see.
Speaking of dinner, we had pizza on the grill tonight. Its amazing how much better pizza is when made on the grill. It is nice to have fresh garlic, peppers, and basil to use on a pizza, or in any dish for that matter. Hopefully we'll have a supply of those and much more for several months. We recently harvested so many of the hot peppers (cayenne, serrano, and habanero), that Andrea decided to go ahead and dry some of them because it was very unlikely we'd be able to use them all fresh. Looks like I'll at least have dried versions of the hot peppers to last me, and I suspect we'll harvest several more before the season is out.
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