If this effort were just a hobby garden, I would wholly agree with the assertion that the deaths of several squirrels presents a waste unbalanced by the return of a handful of veggies, but this has never been about a few summer tomatoes, half cared for in a pot on the porch.  It is not an idyll or lark to mark the time while the weather’s warm.

For me, this is about the future of food, or at least what agriculture must look like, in part, if we want any squirrels left and anyone to appreciate them.  We each have to achieve some level of food independence from industrial farming if we really want any say in how the entities that control what we eat produce those goods.  And we have to distribute the responsibility for feeding billions of people among billions of people, because concentrating that food production concentrates waste and encourages environmental, human, and economic degradation.

I find a few critiques interesting and emblematic of the food debate.  First, I have been talking about killing insects for months, in a variety of ways, such as luring them into bowls of sugary beer so they will drown, crushing them, and releasing predators in the yard that will catch them and eat them alive — yet no one has spoken out on behalf of the bugs, which are no less alive than the squirrels.  They’re just not mammals, and so harder to relate to because we cannot see ourselves in them, or don’t find them as aesthetically pleasing as, say, a cuddly squirrel on whom we can project human qualities.  Secondly, there is a presumption that just because someone elects not to eat animals, somehow their food choices are clean and guiltless, with no impact on the environment.  Yet, industrial agriculture results in massive environmental impacts that kill thousands of animals of all kinds — insect, amphibian, fish, and mammals like squirrels and things even cuter and more kin to us than that.  Lastly, there is the suggestion that if I had eaten the squirrels, their deaths would somehow have not been wasted, and instead would have had purpose as their meat and organs made their way through my gut.  No less dead, but somehow more justified than killing that same squirrel so that I can choose to eat a squash or a tomato.  This is a self-serving rationalization that allows us to eat meat without feeling bad but not kill so we can eat something else.  And it is argued in surprising disregard of the wants of the squirrel, which would probably find neither option satisfying.  The squirrels I killed will nourish the soil, and the environment, but not me directly, and this, for some, is not okay.  Don’t kill it unless you’re going to eat it.  Well, why not have the same policy for grasshoppers and pill bugs and flies?

These critiques come in part because there is the presumption that I don’t have to eat from my yard because I can just go to the store and buy what I’m trying to grow, thus making my effort invalid or odd and the deaths of a few squirrels completely unjustified because going to the market doesn’t result in the deaths of those same squirrels.  But it definitely results in the deaths of other squirrels and other animals by supporting the large-scale, commercial agriculture that devastates the world to stock those shelves with food so that I don’t have to grow my own, so that I don’t have to kill those few squirrels.  It is only an illusion that a head of lettuce or an apple or a beet is a vegetarian dish considering the amount of dead animals that likely went into its successful raising and harvesting.

Generations past have so degraded the ecology in the neighborhood I call home that the squirrels flourish in numbers that can’t be supported by the local environment, and so they have become dependent on humans.  In other words, they’ve become unbalanced, they’ve become pests, and because they exist in such a way they make any effort to be self-sustaining near impossible.  Does this mean that each year I’ll start the season by killing squirrels?  I sure hope not, because for me, I recognize and live with the conflict it poses to my ideals, my aspirations.  I don’t even want to kill the grasshoppers.  I have always liked grasshoppers and found them interesting.  But until the ecology sings a little bit better here, killing a few squirrels might be a last-ditch option a time or two again.  Or maybe I’ll find another way, for which I’m intently searching.  Or maybe next year I’ll eat them, instead, as well as the bunnies that gnaw my carrots, and we’ll see what kind of heat I take then.

I hate that the squirrels died, but I want to eat food I know, with a history I recognize.  I want unquestionable food, squash I don’t have to wonder about where it’s been as I use it for a base in baby food for my daughter.  She’ll take her first bites in a few months, and I’ll damn sure know where at least that first meal comes from.  Last year, I stuffed my pregnant wife with strawberries for nine months only to hear on NPR shortly after she delivered that those same California strawberries were covered in toxic pesticide residue that increases the risk of miscarriage — a situation I refuse to repeat.  Yeah, the squirrels died, but I can own that impact and grow from it like I can’t do with items bought at a market, whether its super or farmer’s.

Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, including the grasshoppers that proved such trouble in early spring.  A lot of hands contributed to this success.  For my part, I noticed where new grasshoppers tended to emerge and returned there daily to crush the nymphs.  The praying mantises I released are rapidly maturing based on the few I’ve encountered, and I can only assume they’re doing their share of the pest control since other insects are all they eat.  And we’ve begun letting our four chickens range and eat what bugs they will, turning problems into eggs.  I also distributed 50 feet of floating row cover around sensitive areas of the yard, which seems to have given the seedlings in those plots time to mature unimpeded and uneaten.  However, the heat the covers trap tends to wilt the plants during these hot days of July, so I’ve begun phasing them out.  But they did their part and will be key to next season’s success in the cooler months of early spring.

Nature has finally begun to work with us, or the other way around.  Several pairs of birds are nesting in our yard, including a set of Orioles, and I have watched on several occasions as a bird has swooped in and plucked a caterpillar off a broad squash leaf.  And I haven’t seen the gnawing, strawberry devouring rabbits in weeks.  They used to make daily forays into our yard, but no more — prey to something, I assume.

I have also been fortunate in keeping the powdery mildew that plagued seasons past at bay by treating outbreaks immediately with a spray of one part milk, 10 parts water.

That just leaves the squirrels.

Right outside our property line a colony of California Ground Squirrels took up residence, and the eight or so animals seemed to feed only on our edibles, chewing the growing tips off of every vine, eating new sprouts into the ground, pulling down wheat and rye stalks, biting into immature squash, melons, and almonds, and generally ravaging plots in our lower, upper, and front yards — including those planted right up against the house.  The row covers seemed to provide a bit of a temporary obstacle, but the fencing that kept the rabbits out sure didn’t.  Marigolds and other defensive plantings proved ineffectual.  I put out packs of pelleted fox urine in an attempt to make them fear fear itself, and this worked, except on windy days, of which we have many.  The scent deterrent was most effective on days when it could just hang in the air.  But the squirrels only needed one breezy afternoon to devour weeks of progress.

While planting a last effort at a late-start warm season crop in June, I felt I had little choice but to get rid of the squirrels.  Trap and release is no good.  In California it is only legal to trap them, not release them, because they carry diseases and are classified as agricultural pests.  Shooting them with a .22 is only recommended in rural areas, and would likely be ineffective and time consuming.  They won’t scare easy with a scarecrow or other predator mimic.  Natural predators and domestic pets can’t control their populations, typically.

I decided to poison them, which infringes a bit on the permacultural ideals I’d hoped to establish here.  And it’s hard to say how it’s much different than the poisoning practices of industrial agriculture.  I find arguments of scale and magnitude self serving and unconvincing.  It’s clearly an industrial move.  But, at the same time, I found the prospect of harvesting no warm season edibles for a second year unacceptable.  Resources are wasted on an organic, super-local effort that yields nothing.

Poisoning is not a friendly, humane enterprise.  I chose an anticoagulant bait, which is housed in a feed station only squirrels and similar animals can access, rather than a pelleted poison broadcast on the ground.  This minimizes the collateral damage like a smart bomb does.  It’s also a low-dose poison that must be eaten regularly over several days to kill — again to reduce the likelihood of a non-target animal dying.

But, in the end, something does die.  Horribly.

An anticoagulant prevents blood from clotting, so a bruise or a bump turns into an internal (or external) hemorrhage that never stops.  I have no fantasies of squirrels curling up in warm dens and drifting off to a peaceful sleep from which they will not awake, none the wiser, because I have found them immobile, panting, and scared, the ants already upon them.  And I should find them and see it, and own the decision, so that next season it doesn’t come to such a false dichotomy: food or squirrels.

I haven’t seen a squirrel in weeks.  The garden flourishes.  Next year we’ll do better.

At least one of the praying mantis eggs I placed in our yard three weeks ago as a pest control has hatched — just in the nick of time, too.  In the past few days I have crushed dozens of little green grasshopper nymphs.

According to an article my brother passed along, this season the western states will face their worst grasshopper outbreak in decades.  The infestation is predicted to reach its dire height in July, despite the plague already visited on our emerging warm-season crop.

Luckily — if not strategically — our mantis nymphs should be fledgling everything killers by midsummer.

Over the weekend, I killed our third adult grasshopper of the season, the first since my 41-week-pregnant wife charged from the house to chase one down shortly before our daughter was born in May.  This latest sat in our orange tree, perched just above an as yet unscathed set of plantings: a Burgess Buttercup squash, a Cherokee Purple tomato, a pair Scarlet Emperor pole beans.  Hopefully its demise proves a good omen.  I crushed it with enough vigor to startle friends visiting the baby, and cursed it perhaps a little too viciously.

It was gratifying.

If all goes well, the grasshoppers of July will find themselves outmatched by the mantises, our newly-ranging chickens, and my sporadic victories.

Several of the control methods I have tried have so far been nonstarters — though it’s hard to see when a deterrent has deterred something because it’s been deterred.  However, companion planting marigolds and cilantro has done little to ward off the grasshopper(s) that feeds regularly.  Dusting vulnerable plants with diatomaceous earth has failed to irritate or lacerate the culprit(s).  And providing a suitable habitat of tall grasses at the margins of our property has not encouraged this particular insect(s) to stay there and chill.

I had a moment of euphoria a few days ago when I returned home to find a grasshopper sitting on our patio, wide open and vulnerable.  I raced out and crushed it, thinking it must have been The One — what other insect would sit so arrogant and exposed?  I relished feeding the remains to the chickens.  All seemed right in the world until the next day revealed the familiar devastation, unchecked.  The nab and squish method is the only tactic that works with certainty, but the grasshopper I got is the only one I’ve seen in the yard.

Because I don’t have the opportunity to lie in wait for hours at a time, nor the visual acumen or reflexes that would make such an effort worthwhile — and because it feels like catching the pest in the act is the best, and only thing left to do — I recruited some predator specialists to hopefully accomplish what I’ve been unable to: kill the bastard(s) that’s been systematically ruining my crops.

I bought a pair of praying mantis egg sacks, or oothecas.

Each sack contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 eggs.  It’s a kind of flood-the-zone approach, as many biological controls are.  Most of the nymphs won’t make it to adulthood (which is fine by my wife, who was not too keen on introducing a large flying insect to the property), but the few that do will be voracious predators — a profession for which they are finely built.

I fixed the oothecas to sturdy stalks with hemp string, positioning them a foot or so off the ground on opposite sides of the yard and in the midst of the edibles I most prize.  They have the texture and weight of Styrofoam.

The success of this season’s harvest hinges on getting our resident pest(s) under control.  The grasshopper’s(s’) feeding habits have become more destructive and mean-spirited since I wrote on this last (see “Not biblical, but troubling” posted on April 15).  Old growth in addition to tender new shoots and leaves have become a target.  Pole beans get severed half-way down the vine so whole sections of growth are lost.  Immature squash flowers are gnawed before they can bloom.  Young sprouts are cut clean to the ground.  And the growing tips on most hit plants have been chewed clean off, in some cases repeatedly — which is a real dick move and completely unsustainable.

Hopefully the mantises will bring some balance to the yard.

There’s no Plan C.

I noticed that several of the new sprouts — Kentucky Wonder, Contender, and Scarlet Emperor — had wilted and looked chewed.  A few had pill bugs on their tender new leaves, but all had dozens of these tiny crustaceans just beneath the surface of the soil, devouring the seed from which the plant had sprung, as well as the young roots.

Pill bugs are a type of woodlouse, a bug I’ve always regarded as kind of harmless.  Typically they come out at night to feed on dead plants, which benefits soil fertility, but apparently they can be a pest in cultivated environments.  They breath through gills, and so require moisture, which I have been providing regularly to germinate the bean seeds.  The combination of a wet environment and new growth drew the pill bugs out of the nearby leaf litter where they typically dwell.

At least half the beans are a loss, but will be easily replanted — a benefit of having started the warm-season crop early this year.  However, starting over sets up the same conditions that caused the problem in the first place.

There are, of course, dozens of chemical options with which I could firebomb the entire planter, but that’s not really the way we roll.  Sprinkling the bugs and the area around the new plants with diatomaceous earth is a greener option.  D.E. is simply crustacean and algal fossils that have been deposited in marine layers, crushed and pulverized for millions of years, and then mined as a fine powder (I suppose the mining’s not really green).  When used as a pesticide, D.E. slips between the segments in a hard-shelled animal’s exoskeleton and has a desiccating effect — in other words, it dehydrates the animal to death.

However, karma-wise, that sets me up for, what, an Australopithecus bone bludgeoning?

I ended up going with a solution that accomplishes two goals: reduce the population of pill bugs to the point where it no longer poses a threat to my bean sprouts (hopefully) and put the dead to good use.  I guess third goal that my solution satisfies would be gardening without inputs.

I picked the 50-or-so woodlice from my plants and fed them to the chicks.  I wanted to see how they would react to their first non-feed food.  And you know, it doesn’t really take a biologist, or an experiment, to know that a bird will eat a bug.

They did.  And they were damn happy with their handfuls of hand-picked terrestrial crustaceans.

For about $8 you can buy 1,500 ladybugs.  Since August, I have released 7,500 in my yard.

Despite all of the troubles I’ve had getting things rolling in the garden this year, I have avoided dousing my edibles in chemicals to ward off or kill the pests.  It’s felt like a Pyrrhic victory, at times.  Sure, maybe a little chemical deterrent would have boosted my harvest and put more food on the table, but if I want fruits and vegetables that have been repeatedly sprayed with deadly herbicides and pesticides, I can always go to the supermarket.  The chemicals individuals apply to their household pest problems wash into the soil with watering, and wash into the water table, rivers, and ocean with the rains just as easily as those used by industrial farming operations.

An alternative to the chemical route is bio-control — applying the checks and balances that exist in nature to agriculture.  The plants, animals, and fungi commonly referred to as “pests” are often essential components of local ecology that have simply gotten out of balance.  They become pests when there are more of them than there should be.  Nature always balances, but not always on our schedule and not always in time to save the crop (one way of balancing is the over-sized population eats all of the crop, then starves or disperses).

I have a heavy infestation of aphids on half of my remaining squash.  I haven’t mentioned this last bunch of out-of-season squash because I didn’t want to jinx it (as if jinxing could explain all of my issues), but I have hope for my Delicata.  The failed Butternut, Pink Banana, and Acorn varieties suffered from similar infestations of aphids, and I had some success with the four packages of ladybugs I released then, though they didn’t stick around as well as they have this time.

The aphid population went from a few hundred to a few hundreds of thousands in a week’s time.  Typically they’re kept in check by a variety of predators and diseases, and if left alone their numbers will eventually attract the things that feed on them.  A few ladybugs and lacewings had already arrived when I took my $8 to market.  But seeing as how aphids reproduce asexually, skip the egg-laying stage, and go right to live birth at the rate of 12 offspring per aphid per day, I thought a massive influx of predators couldn’t hurt.

A natural enemy of the aphid is the ladybug.  Despite its unassuming North American name (in Iran it is called the Shoe Cobbler, and in Finland, the Blood Gertrud), the ladybug is a voracious insectivore that devours as many as 50 aphids a day.  These beneficial beetles reproduce quickly, though not as efficiently or as voluminously as their prey (to be expected).  Yet, even in its several larval stages the ladybug feasts.  In some ways the immature ladybug benefits the eradication effort more than the adult in that it is flightless and less apt to wander off.  Introduced predators are under no obligation to accomplish anything on your behalf, much like Congress or bailed-out financial institutions.

And you can hardly tether the little bugs in place.  But, if there’s plenty of prey and somewhere for them to hide when things get tough, then they tend to hang around for longer.

Of the 450 species of ladybugs in North America, the most common commercially available type is the Convergent Lady Beetle.  The natural habitat for this beetle ranges from Canada to South America, so it’s native, but large infusions of this particular species can disrupt local populations of unique regional ladybugs.  When buying ladybugs for bio-control, be sure they are pre-fed.  Since they are often collected while hibernating in massive colonies, if they haven’t eaten, they cannot ignore their instinct to disperse, and they will fly — even from aphid-infested plants — before feeding.

I deployed my recent surge of bugs five days ago.  By day two at least half had deserted.  Today there are still a few hundred willing to eat and mate with abandon.  They’re doing a heck of a job, but something tells me there are 1,500 more ladybugs with my name on them at the nursery.