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.

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 is that needs doing is cooking up best laid plans.

Looking back, I jumped the gun planting so early this season (an overreaction to planting so late last year). I stuck my first seeds in the ground when the temperatures were too low for the young sprouts to thrive.  This lack of vigor left them vulnerable to the woodlice that were still thriving in the spring rains, as well as to the numerous young grasshoppers whose voracious nibbling the first-round edibles were not able to withstand.  Several attempts to reign in the grasshoppers failed, and the second round of plants followed the first into a hundred tiny bellies.  By April the weather had warmed sufficiently to coax the rabbits and squirrels out of their winter burrows, and the third wave of plantings, having had no time to mature, got eaten up after just a few days of foraging.

Thus, version 4.0.

The latest iteration differs from those that came before, having acquired several key adaptations in the grueling march of natural selection that has dominated this growing season.  Whereas my first and second attempts involved direct sowing of seeds in the ground, much of our current garden is potted so it could be grown close to the house, tucked into the zone we most frequent and can closely guard.  While little of the initial plantings were located in our front yard, much of the current garden resides there — far from the canyon and near where the frequent traffic of people and pets and cars deters the rabbits and squirrels.  And those plots that have been replanted in the upper backyard (we have yielded the lower yard, for now, to the varmints) are made inaccessible with floating row covers, which, while unattractive, have succeeded in keeping out the squirrels and insects where the fencing we’d used in earlier plantings failed.

At this point, it’s not about aesthetics.

I have also introduced a few new varieties of squash, including several heirlooms that are native to the west, in the hope that an uncommon, traditional type might prove resilient and endure to harvest — perhaps possessing an adaptation that can compensate for the slow evolution of a novice grower.  These include Sibley and Golden Hubbard squash, as well as Calabasa de las Aquas, Mayo Kama, and Navajo Gray Hubbard.  These last I acquired through Native Seed Search, a site that specializes in “aridlands-adapted heirloom crops”.

So far, so good — though I hesitate to tempt fate with such a rosy assessment.  Many of the vegetables I have recently planted need 100 days or more to mature, which puts a lot of time between now and picking and eating.  But in many other climates we’d be working against a hard deadline of declining temperatures, and at least in San Diego we hardly ever do that kind of deadline.

There’s still time.

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.

And this past week, I took my eye off the yard.

We celebrated the birth of our daughter, Charlotte James Williams, on May 25 at 2:05 p.m., and after two days at the hospital, we’ve spent the past week acclimating to life as a family with a newborn.  She’s a darling, exceedingly enjoyable, and no more difficult than one might anticipate.  Nothing but sleepy joy around here.  That being said, I’ve had little time or inclination to upkeep the property.

While I focused my attention elsewhere, the struggling warm-season crop suffered several blows.

We lost nearly all of the Black Coco and Tiger’s Eye beans that I had recently transplanted after growing them to a reasonable size in starter pots.  I raised these replacements to stand-in for the original crop that had been direct-sown in early March and subsequently devoured by woodlice as the seeds sprouted.  Initially, these larger plants seemed to hold their own, but in the past week it looks as if the pill bugs worked in packs to gnaw the pencil-thick stalks (which should have proven resilient), and like little beavers brought these foot-high bean plants down.  Once collapsed, the pill bugs swarmed the now accessible leaves, flowers, and immature pods.  They pulled a similar maneuver with a pair of lemon cucumbers.

At this point in the season, the rabbits and squirrels have risen fully from their winter naps, and with nothing to deter them — and the summer crop not nearly as established as I’d hoped — have rooted around in pots and beds all the way to the house, biting through un-bloomed squash flowers and young fruit, snipping wheat stalks at their base, nibbling still short corn, and in one case climbing a four-foot sunflower, snapping it at the center.

To boot, the grasshoppers are still keeping the winter and summer squash clipped and stunted.

As Charlotte settles, the coming week will call for rebuilding.

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.

This yard’s hardly hubris-worthy, for now, and if my current losing battle with a lone grasshopper isn’t enough to rein in a bought of unproductive pride, then the time I spent today tearing up and tossing out those triumphant tomatoes should be.

And it’s not like they burst onto the spring scene as paragons of this South American native.  They were just doing better than the season before, which is a pretty low bar.  Last year I grew them from seed, planted them in the yard, then watched as they were successively mowed down by varmints every time they sprouted above a few inches.  The fact that they rebounded while the pests slept off their summer bender and had become bushy and a few feet tall had me talking of perennial tomatoes that produce year-round.

Well, mild weather overwinters more than plants.  The first indications that these tomatoes were ill-fated was present almost from moment the cold weather lifted.  Many of the leaves developed what looked like a yellow rash, and the plants lost their healthy deep green.  Growth ceased.  Flowers wouldn’t set fruit.  Inputs of fresh compost from our pile and iron-rich mulch failed to counter what looked like a nutrient deficiency.  The soil was neither too wet nor too dry.

A local nursery identified a sample I provided as having spider mites, an incredibly tiny (less than 1 mm) insect that spins silk webbing on the undersides of leaves.  The mite punctures and feeds on individual plant cells, and when the weather is warm and dry (i.e., no frost), eggs can hatch in three days and the young can be sexually mature in five.  Like aphids, this is a reproductive cycle that can be hard to keep pace with — especially in a chemical-free yard.

The overwintered tomatoes were inundated.  Nearly every leaf had the sallow look of infestation.

A strong blast of water can dislodge the mites, which once knocked to the ground are unlikely to find their way back to a leaf.  However, the density was such that even regular, repeated washings failed to impact the population.  I combined the spraying with a light, weekly application of an organic pesticide called End All (a sterling non sequitur).  The fact that the packaging included several prominent references to the product’s organic merits, and that the company went by the name “Safer”, made me skeptical.  However, it came highly recommended, so I gave it a try.  It, too, failed to significantly reduce the number of mites after several weeks.  In a desperate move, I trimmed off every branch with a hint of discoloration, denuding the plants, but this also failed.

The final blow came when the tomatoes began to develop powdery mildew, perhaps as a result of the frequent dousing the leaves received in my attempt to wash away the spider mites.  Fearing that the mites and the mildew would spread to this season’s Brandywine, Yellow Pear, Gardener’s Delight Cherry, Ace, and Cherokee Purple — I pulled those tomatoes that overwintered out, not even giving them the dignity of the compost pile to avoid risking contamination and encouraging future outbreaks.

So the brilliantly overwintered tomatoes now sit in the trash, annuals after all.

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 fair return on our cold-season crop, and the between-season learning’s been good, the failure from the time before has festered and, quite frankly, left me a little twitchy.  When my wife says, “The garden’s looking good!” and I say, “Yeah!” — I do honestly think it’s going well.  But in the back of my mind I can’t help but grumble out a dour, mopish little, We’ll see.

To combat this unwarranted near-pessimism and as a hedge against any real catastrophe, I have planted replacements — for almost everything.

A month or so ago when my first round of beans succumbed to woodlice (see “A roly-poly problem” posted Mar. 24), a friend and former student of mine recommended that I grow beans in pots until they are sturdy enough to withstand the bugs, then transplant.  This was an astute suggestion since once the plants pass a certain stage (when their stems start to darken and thicken), the pill bugs lose interest.

I followed Mike’s advice and immediately began potting bean seeds.  In the process it became clear that this idea could be a way to work with nature, generally, in addition to thwarting this particular pest and saving this particular plant: Why not have a variety seedlings at the ready to replace those in the ground that are bound to get destroyed?  With this strategy, it seems like I can have my acceptable crop loss … and eat it, too.

Only small-scale farming could allow for such a strategy.  As I have watched a few plants here and there lose out to this or that pest, I have often thought with some chagrin that a larger operation could absorb the occasional lost plant without losing out at harvest.  But for me, that plant might represent 25 percent of my Burgess Buttercup Squash or 50 percent of my Jack O’Lanterns.  I can’t plant 30 — or even 10 — of a particular variety on less than a fifth of an acre.  What I can do is plant a seemingly unlimited number of little seeds in little containers.

So, I’ve potted a few backups for each of my key warm-season edibles, and I still have seed left over to pass along (see “Spread your seed” posted on Oct. 22, 2009).  If the spring goes so well that the replacements aren’t needed, I can always surprise someone with a shovel-ready garden.

We’ll see if this is practical or fanciful when I dig in the first few in the coming days.

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 the original inspiration came from, whether to pat myself on the back for recognizing the common-sense of it or to laud someone (my wife says my mother-in-law, Kat) for an explicit suggestion.

Either way, I first made use of this reconfigured plastic as a barrier to keep the slugs, snails, and especially the legions of pill bugs away from my new bean sprouts.  This method involved some trial and error before it became mostly effective.  After clearing away all visible pests, I pushed the sliced end of the bottle an inch or so into the soil with the plant at center, taking care not to disturb the developing roots.  However, I initially neglected to ferret out any subsurface bugs, which is where the woodlice tend to hide during the day.  Because of this, several of my second-round sprouts died despite the bottle.  But, when I carefully debugged the area, the plants survived.

When the plants put out their second set of true leaves, the bottles can be removed and transferred to another seedling.  Or stored for later.  Or recycled.

This tactic seemed to protect the plants from grasshoppers, too, but fared poorly as a defense against mammals.  The bottles also worked as a kind of portable greenhouse, retaining moisture and heat — though I had to be careful with this in San Diego as we had several days of hot weather in March, which these covers amplified.  Additionally, the cut-off bottle bottoms can be filled with a mixture of cheap beer and sugar then set around plants to attract, trap, and kill slugs and snails.  I haven’t tried this yet, but plan to.

I have also been employing the bottles as protection for ripening fruits.  Last season we lost all but six of our strawberries to the birds.  As soon as they’d begin to redden, they’d be pecked to pieces.  While removing bottles from ready seedlings last week, I slid a few of the medium-sized varieties over several bunches of berries.  So far, so good.  We ate the first of the ripe strawberries a few days ago — excellent.  In addition to keeping the birds out, the bottles also keep the developing fruit off the ground, preventing rot.

Yet another upside to this project was my initial inability to execute it.  We have been so effective at reducing our use of plastic that we had no plastic bottles to put to this purpose.  While this proved frustrating in my effort to protect the young garden, upon reflection, I can appreciate the implications.  It’s not always easy to see when something’s working.

A stealthy raid of my parents’ recycle bin while they were out of town provided the bottles for this project.  Thanks, folks.

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.

A primary issue lay in their lack of sturdiness.  I had made something so feckless that it didn’t even take burrowing to get under, just the will to nose-up the netting a little and scurry.  The enclosures were also hard to assemble, made working with the plants they were protecting difficult, and were tough to disassemble and store — a tangled mess, most of which ended up in the garbage.

They were thrown together.  All I’d done was drive a few stakes or bamboo poles into the ground at points around the plants and wrap them in 1″ square plastic netting.  I fastened everything with hemp string.  In the end, I had about as much confidence in the structures as they deserved.

Taking a different path became a chief objective of mine this season.  Before I planted a single seed, back in February I began building fencing that would better serve our effort — at least I hoped so.  I took the left-over materials from last season’s boondoggle (the 3′ stakes, the 1″ netting) and re-purposed them, convinced that the fault of that year’s failing did not lay with the components but the implementation.

What I built this year is as simple in concept as my previous attempt, but more considered.  Using a pair of 3′ stakes joined by two 2′ lengths of 2″ x 2″ (that’s a few too many twos), I constructed a solid frame across which I could stretch the netting.  I attached the netting using a staple gun loaded with .5″ staples, making sure it was taut and the staples spaced every four inches or so to eliminate “air pockets” an animal could exploit.  I then trimmed off the excess netting, leaving about 15″ or so to hang loose off the top so that when the sections of fence are assembled these flaps can be drawn together to protect the crop from birds (this length is for a 2′-wide enclosure; larger spaces should have longer flaps).

I set the lengths of 2″ x 2″ down about three inches from the top of the stakes and up about seven inches from the point at the bottom, allowing space for a prominent place to pound and a good distance to sink them into the ground so the fencing ends up sturdy.

When the stapled side is turned inward, the fencing doesn’t look half bad.  The sections of fencing are light and can be staked in a variety of configurations.  And so far they’ve kept everything out but small bugs.  I put together about two dozen sections this season and have assembled one 2′ x 6′ and two 2′ x 4′ plots — a trial run.

Six weeks in, there has been some digging around the edges, but nothing has burrowed under, and nothing has come in from above.  The seeds I sowed in March seem to be doing well.

Safe, so far.