Eat The Yard

I have tried many things to keep safe this latest round of edibles, so it’s hard to say which of the many worked best, which was the bellwether of our current good fortune.  Likely, our flourishing garden results from a confluence that would be hard to parse. Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, [...]

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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 [...]

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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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This morning I found myself picking pill bugs off my bean seedlings. 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 [...]

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In the spirit of the listing that this season entails — the New York Times has no fewer than 11 book lists to guide what readers read and buy — and the good reading weather the cool season brings (though it is 77 degrees in San Diego as I write this), I thought I’d jot [...]

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The several storms that hit San Diego this past weekend left me little to do in the way of gardening but plan.  So I fiddled with my designs for a living-roof chicken coop — designs that needed no fiddling.  That will get built in January.  Chicks in February or March (We can’t wait!).  I flipped [...]

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A few weeks ago I planted a perennial gourd called a Chayote, and in this brief period of time it has displayed the durability I’d hoped for in this enduring class of plants.  If the squirrels and rabbits are too numerous to be controlled and starved of other edibles by drought (which they are), then [...]

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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.  [...]

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When crops start small, they start vulnerable.  This was an essential weakness of my warm season crop: 90 percent of the loss occurred early in the plant’s development.  Birds pulled just-sprouted veggies from the ground to eat the seed off the bottom, leaving the first inch of growth to wither in the would-be garden.  Rabbits [...]

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It’s harder to hurt a rabbit than I thought. Since the biblical devastation of our spring/summer crop I have been talking all kinds of tough about the creatures that share this fifth acre with my wife and I — taking aggressive stands against all manner of animals that are completely hypocritical since I’ve been preaching [...]

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