Eat The Yard

It shouldn’t take constant surveillance to bring in a moderate, suburban harvest on less than a fifth of an acre — not all of which is even under cultivation.  We have no frost, no deer or woodchucks or gofers, which I hear can be particularly menacing.  We just have plain pests that happen to exploit [...]

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Several times in the past week or so I found myself on the back porch taking in our less than a fifth of an acre by 6:30 a.m. light.  I’m sure anyone who has ever worked a real farm would think this a late start, noting that the sun had already been up almost an [...]

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I am winning neither the battle nor the war against the grasshopper(s) that for several weeks now has chewed the same path around our yard, daily visiting all the major plots of edibles we have growing.  Two months into the warm-season crop many of our key vegetables are still struggling to get established, largely due [...]

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A frost-less winter had me ready to write a breathy tribute to my great success in overwintering last season’s tomatoes — a pair of Beefsteaks and a Husky Cherry — despite the fact that I put no effort into the overwintering and had even less to do with whether or not our region had a [...]

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I marched into our front yard this week with the intent of tearing out the fava beans that grow there. It’s not just that these beans hadn’t done anything for me lately — they hadn’t done anything, ever.  I originally sowed this supposed cool-season crop in November, when San Diego finally begins to give cool [...]

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At 10 weeks old our chickens are very chicken-y.  Which I guess is what you hope for with chickens. They have become foot-tall, four-pound birds with vibrant colors and sleek feathers. Yet, despite their appearance, they still have some growing into themselves to do.  They all have lingering tufts of fuzz here and there that [...]

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Despite the array of barriers I have defensively erected around my young warm-season crop, my experiences from a year ago have left me in an distrusting frame of mind that has eroded my relationship with the animals with whom we share this property. There’s not a lot of love there. Even though we had a [...]

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To combat several pests this season, I have put a load of plastic bottles to reuse before I recycle.  With their caps and labels removed, their insides washed free of lingering beverage, and their bottoms sliced clean off, I employed the menagerie of bottles I collected as a fairly effective shield. I’m not sure where [...]

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In the past few days I have noticed some nibbling in disparate parts of my yard that suggests grasshoppers.  The complete consumption of leaves here and there in a particular area and the fact that I can’t find the culprit on the hit plants also point toward this pest among others.  Caterpillars I tend to [...]

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Last season I made an in-expert attempt at fencing.  The barriers I erected were created in desperation in the midst of losing my entire warm-season crop — for the second or third time — and were hastily, poorly constructed contraptions.  They failed to keep the ground squirrels, rabbits, voles, skunks, and opossums out.  We lost [...]

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