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.

The destruction was less swath-like and more potpourri-y: the compost potatoes in the lower yard, the (used-to-be) thriving pumpkins in the upper yard, the potted squash, the veggies started in trays for friends.  I suppose a little bit of everything is the permaculture ideal, rather than a lot of one thing.  The grasshopper(s) did not wipe out a single crop, and if the chewing stays at this level and with this dispersal throughout the season, the plants will likely recover, take it in stride, and still be productive.  The grasshoppers will be dead in 60 – 90 days, anyway.  At the start of this season I wrote that I’d be willing to share about 25 percent of my effort with the wild, and this — despite the initial panicked, palpitation-inducing flashbacks it caused — is right about there.

My concern is that grasshoppers don’t do math.

The key to dealing with this insect is prevention — which is always nice to learn when the pest is present.  Luckily, much of the prep I did to combat other threats in the pre-season is recommended to reduce grasshoppers to nuisances rather than conquerors.  In had planted winter rye and wheat around the margins of my yard and until recently had allowed a wall of weeds to thrive as a cover around some of my early sowing.  Apparently, such areas provide havens for grasshoppers that they will rarely find reason to leave.  I also planted early this year to get a jump on other pests, particularly the local varmints.  This works against grasshoppers, too, in that it allows the young plants to get established while the grasshoppers go through several of their less mobile, pre-wing stages of development.  And I have done mixed planting this season; no area is devoted to a single crop in abundance.  The benefit of this particular strategy is playing out in the way the current feasting has been spread around.

Additionally, every forum I read and each book I picked up suggested getting a few chickens because they will eat most of the grasshoppers in their range before the bugs fully develop.  We did this, but unfortunately our chickens are too young for roaming.  Next season.

Once present, however, grasshoppers seem to be persistent, voracious, and nearly indestructible.  They will chew through cloth row covers, eat entire plants, and do not succumb to many pesticides — even if sprayed directly.  A parasite called Nosema locustae can be used to control outbreaks, but it takes several weeks to be effective, by which time a small garden can be destroyed.  Diatomaceous earth can work on them as it does woodlice (see “A roly-poly problem” posted on Mar. 24), but grasshoppers are so mobile I’d have to dust much of the yard and reapply every time I water.  Hand picking and squishing (or feeding to willing chickens) is the only recommendation without a caveat.

I’d be happy to follow this last bit of advice if I could find one of the little buggers.

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.

Must read.

1. The Ominivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
2. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
3. The End of the Wild, by Stephen M. Meyer

Should read.

1. When the Rivers Run Dry, by Fred Pearce
2. Citizenship Papers, by Wendell Berry

Could read.

1. Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
2. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Skip it.

1. The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
2. Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan

This last book I’m working my way through now, and it’s a bit wandering and self congratulatory without imparting any real knowledge or sense of experience.  At best.  Which is disappointing because I had high hopes: It recounts a guy’s attempt to consume only what he can get from within 220 miles from his Arizona home (a bit far for “local”, but a great goal).

I have a “to read” stack on my desk that includes The End of Food, by Paul Roberts; Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman; Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser; and Second Nature, by Michael Pollan.  That’s where I’ll be heading next, trying to read as many as I can before the spring semester starts and my reading turns back to student work.

If there’s anything else I should read, or any of the above that I’ve misread — drop me a note.

But mostly what I did (besides grade final exams) was watch the rain run off things.  Suburban areas are pretty well waterproofed, with roofs, patios, driveways, streets, gutters, and slopes that ensure the water goes to a particular place — away.  For a drought-stricken area such as San Diego, it’s a strange objective.  Then again, this is a place where people have to be reminded to turn off their sprinklers when it rains and threatened with fines to adhere to rationing during the driest months.  It’s a mindset that comes from never having lived without water, and it’s luxurious thinking.

Watching the runoff made me think about rain catchment systems and wish we had ours.  We have plans, but that’s all.  For someone who intends to grow edibles here in July and August, saving the rain seems like the right thing to do.  Forget edibles — for anyone planning on growing anything in San Diego in July and August, it’s the right thing to do (unless that San Diegan is making trips with a bucket to the San Diego river — not recommended).  But I don’t know a single person who catches the rain.

The weekend storms twisted and tied my tidy climbing snow peas into a knotted ball, and the harsh winds and cold proved the final blow for the Delicata Squash, following on the heals of a massive aphid infestation and powdery mildew.  But the peas are still producing, and there are a few salvageable squash.  The leafy greens looked vibrant by Monday morning, so we ate some, and all the newly planted, second-round winter crop seems to have gotten a boost from the downpour — including the winter wheat fortuitously sown the day before the storms.

So not all the water went to waste.  We kept some.

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 I need plants that can defend themselves or take a hit.

The Chayote can take a hit.

This cucurbit resembles a large pear that’s been smashed a little, creating a gnarly fold that tucks inward and runs along the base of the fruit.  Inside sits a single, edible seed reminiscent of an artichoke heart.  The Chayote is often referred to as a squash since it shares so many attributes with this plant to which it is related.  I bought one for 69 cents at a market — just any old one out of a pile shipped from Mexico — and set the whole gourd in a dark, cool, dry cupboard to germinate.  In a week’s time the fold parted a little, and an albino shoot sprouted and grew upward, despite the absence of light to direct it.

It had grown to about eight inches before I got it in the ground (six is better).  I left only the tip of the vine exposed, yet within a few hours it had been gnawed into the earth by some animal and dug at.  I fenced it off anyway and gave it regular waterings, and within two weeks a healthy, green vine had developed, leafed out, and sent tendrils searching for something to climb.

The tough, whole fruit planted deep proved key.  A typical, annual squash seed would have been eaten with the rest of the immature vine since it is planted at a depth of only an inch or so, and even if it had survived the nibbling, it likely wouldn’t have had the energy to re-sprout.

If it makes it, this Central American native will become a robust, 30-foot vine producing heavy loads of crisp, yet mild-flavored fruits that can be substituted for summer squash in any recipe.  At the end of the season, the vine will die back, then grow again each year without the need for replanting.

And with any luck, it will stay tough.

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.

It seems like the small and vulnerable stage would be hard to avoid since all creatures pass through it at some point; I concede that I have no trick for bypassing this early development.  But not everything has to do it every season.  I watched my Gala Apple tree leaf out, bloom, and fruit without the slightest disturbance, and I wondered how such resilience could be transferred from the orchard to the vegetable garden.  (In truth, if a rabbit or squirrel had been able to take out this 12-foot tall tree, we would have moved.)

The thought of going all orchard crossed my mind.  But you can only have so many trees on a suburban lot before it looks crowded, and we’ve already got a plum, an orange, a Bartlett Pear, and two Gala Apples in the ground, and three avocados, a tangelo, a pear, and an almond waiting to be planted.  And we’re trying to protect our canyon view out the back.

We already have grapes, strawberries, and asparagus established (and hopefully producing next year), but what about more vegetables that stick around and toughen up so they’re less likely to get taken out by pests?

Perennial vegetables form an interesting set of crops, at least those that can be grown in my region.  Many of them strike me as near-edibles, the kind of thing that Bear Grylls eats on Man vs. Wild, not so much by choice but to survive.  And many of them have potent adaptations — defense mechanisms that help them survive year-round.  In searching for perennial vegetables for my space, I passed on a number of options because they require special preparation or else they are poisonous.  For experienced cooks or bolder gardeners than myself, this challenge might not be a deterrent to growing a number of different plants.  For me, I don’t want to end meals by wondering if I just poisoned my wife.

Despite this hesitation, I like the “not your mother’s vegetable” quality that many perennials have, the fact that you absolutely won’t find them at Ralphs, and probably can’t even find some of them at the farmer’s market.  Sure, some that I’ll try are common like our asparagus.  I found that lima beans, runner beans, and sweet potatoes can be grown as perennials, and I plan to try.  In the coming months I will also plant nine star broccoli; chayote squash; winged and hyacinth beans; ceylon, sissoo, and New Zealand spinach; perennial cucumber; and Egyptian walking onions.

If I can find them, that is.  As we have become a common crop society, limited by ourselves and mono-crop industrial farming, we have consistently reduced the acreage devoted to fruits and vegetables that fall outside the mainstream.  But these are growing somewhere.  All I have to do is find the person with the seed.

My hope is that these perennials will become durable lifers, that if I can coddle them along to adulthood once, or once every few years, they will be able to hold their own against my local pests and I can move away from caged gardening.  That they will bring some stability to my edible yard in the coming year.

As always … we’ll see.