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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How many iterations can a single season’s garden have? Since sowing our first sets of Contender bush beans on March 12, I have reconstituted our warm-season plantings four times, resulting in a landscape completely different than that of early March — and certainly one far removed from what I conceived in winter, when all there [...]

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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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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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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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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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