Eat The Yard

For weeks — even before our shipment of chicks arrived — I have been reading about the perils of being a chicken.  And there are many.  However, our brood will not face most of the horrors about which I have lately learned simply because of its size.  As with any animal, high population density encourages [...]

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So, the earliest of the spring-blooming perennials have barely had a chance to bud, let alone bloom and fruit and ripen — and the pests have already nibbled.  It feels unsportsmanlike, and I know sportsmanlike conduct is a human ambition, even further, a gentleman’s conceit, and that little is accomplished by measuring nonhuman animals against [...]

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Despite winter’s rep as a food-less time of year, a season during which many home growers and their yards hibernate, waiting for warm weather and the common edibles that come with it — we’ve been having a good growing experience.  Our cold season crop has been a windfall compared to the pest-devastated warmer months earlier [...]

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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.  Sure, [...]

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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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When I wrote a few weeks ago about the preponderance of male flowers in my winter squash as the culprit behind the failure my cucurbits to fruit, I had also spent some time researching another symptom that had been plaguing those plants.  The fruitlessness is the result of insufficient pollination, as I previously indicated.  The [...]

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There’s something to be appreciated and despised in finding a caterpillar munching the baby beets in my raised garden.  There’s also some futility wrapped up in there.  And curiosity, because it’s a cool-looking bug (even 30-year-olds have their five-year-old boy inclinations).  It’s an emotional moment, apparently.
This particular insect stretched about three inches long and towered [...]

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At the Del Mar Fair with some friends back in July we spent time perusing the landscapes local businesses enter in competition each year.  A good place for ideas and to escape the blazing heat that dominates the otherwise exposed fairgrounds.  One display emphasized edibles and grew everything off the ground in containers — a [...]

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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 the [...]

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