Year two is off to a promising start.  Already we’ve consumed more calories from the yard in the first week of August than we did during that whole month a year ago.  Beyond the calorie count, just the fact that a variety of edibles are growing, and growing well, marks a vast improvement over the mostly barren landscape of the year past.

As I write this post, several cut sunflower heads hang drying on the back porch, massive and bulging with fat seeds — a fine indicator of the health of our garden.  Our Mammoth Grey Stripes, a North-America native, have produced fuller heads than the Mammoth Russian variety we also tried, and we have a half dozen 10-foot stalks loaded and tipping throughout the yard.  The broad sunflowers have attracted many beneficial insects to pollinate our other edibles also in bloom.  Despite their drought tolerance, they only produce tiny, stunted heads on a water-wise schedule, so we’ll have to consider whether they fit in our landscape as we try to reduce our water use in the coming years.

In addition to our Grey Stripe and Mammoth Russian Sunflowers, we have 10 varieties of squash, eight tomato, three watermelon, two pumpkin, two potato, pickling cucumbers, muskmelons, bell peppers, leeks, and onions growing — and that’s just the annuals.  We also have a smattering of herbs — sage, thyme, basil, chamomile, chocolate mint — and our perennial fruit trees, berries, and grapes.

But we’ve had a lot growing before, typically in various stages of failure, so it is hard at times to see this flourishing as anything but tenuous.  I feel like I’m waiting for the next unmanageable disease, insect, or varmint.  It’s not that we’re operating in some pest-less Eden — we have a little powdery mildew, a little end rot, a little chewing — it’s just that there’s a balance here that’s previously been hard to achieve, one that seems fragile.  It all appears to be thriving, to promise food, with a little bit starting to come ready each day.

Yesterday I harvested two dried sunflower heads; Table King, Yard Long, and Kentucky Wonder beans; Purple Cherokee and Ace tomatoes; a California Wonder bell pepper; and four eggs.

Today, I’ll harvest something else.  And tomorrow.

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.

Today we celebrate having grown, harvested, and eaten 1.009 percent of our annual calories from our suburban, less-than-a-fifth-of-an-acre yard.

To get to one percent (15,000 calories), we grew 33 varieties of 21 different foods.  Among those edibles, we ate 72 Husky cherry tomatoes and 14 heads of Little Gem Romain lettuce; 85 Snow Pea pods and 39 cups of raw Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard (netting just 272 calories — it’s worth more cooked, we’ve found); and four kinds of tomato, three kinds of carrot, and three kinds of potato.  We tried 12 varieties of vegetable we’d never tasted before.

We made jam.

Nearly a third of our overall calories, about 4,000, accumulated in the first half of June, a month in which we consumed bags of potatoes — with more still at the ready.  This month we’ve also eaten carrots (Purple Haze and Pink Dragon), green beans (Contender and Kentucky Wonder), Early Crookneck squash, a few strawberries and Anne berries, Mulberries, and Roma tomatoes.

And it all came without the baggage that trails industrial agriculture, the questions of where from and how dirty and at what cost.  Our property’s better for our sowing and growing, and with any luck our dent in the world’s ecology got a bit shallower.

Perhaps shallower still in these remaining weeks.

Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea.  In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground.  I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched back the surface of the earth to reveal good-sized Purple Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes.  The sets of early March had in 80 days become about 15 pounds of good eats.

And eat them we have.  We pan-fried them in the mornings with butter, onions, and pepper.  We cooked and blended them with leeks for a fine soup.  We dribbled them with olive oil, dashed them with fresh rosemary (from the yard), and baked them.  We boiled them and diced them for crumbled-blue-cheese-prosciutto-dill potato salad, and tossed them in with a roast to soak and simmer all day.

We ate them baked plain because the fresh spuds are so flavorful they need nothing added.

At least as many potatoes still sit in the yard, ready for harvest.

This haul improves greatly on the six small potatoes we pulled last season (see “Small Potatoes” posted on August 20, 2009).  Poor soil and inadequate sunlight were the culprits then — problems that I remedied this spring by working plenty of mulch and compost into a fairly sunny plot before planting.  The 80 or so days they took to mature is about 20 short of expected, but done is done.  A new round of Yukon starters are in the ground for early fall eating, as well as a few rows of a russet-type potato we’ve never tried before called a Carola.

If this good return keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.

The potato-surplus coincides fortuitously with our need to keep my wife off dairy till we can calm our mildly colicky baby girl.  We have plenty of potatoes to go with the meat in the mostly meat and potatoes diet that we’ll be sticking to for a few weeks.

It’s nice to find we have just what the doctor ordered right out the back door.

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.

Last spring I took a chainsaw to it, slicing clean through one of the trunks.  I intended to cut the whole thing down, but stopped short when the pile of trimmings got high and I realized I had no plan for what to do with the space once cleared.  I decided wanting to cut a tree down wasn’t a good enough reason to do so.

And it’s a good thing, too, because it turns out it’s a Mulberry Tree, likely a Riviera or Kaester (M. nigra) variety.

In the past I’d never thought much about the heavy load of long, deep purple-black fruits that weighed the wide canopy down between April and June.  I assumed — for no good reason — that the berries were nothing we’d want to eat and left them to the birds.  Perhaps I didn’t think of homes as coming with something so huge and edible.  My mom, who grew up eating mulberries from the trees in her neighborhood, suggested the type of tree it might be, and with a little research I found her to be right.

That was last year.  This year, we made jam.

Our mulberries are the first crop we’ve had that realistically calls for preserving some portion of the abundant harvest.  The 20-foot-tall and 30-foot-wide tree grows multiple clusters of fruit on every branch, so harvesting takes time and a ladder.  It also takes a gentle touch, since the delicate berries would just as soon squish as be plucked whole.  A better method might be to lay out a clean tarp or expendable sheet and then shake the ripe fruit from the tree, but our space doesn’t allow for this.  I filled a massive bowl in an hour of picking and didn’t even make a dent in the overall yield.

It took two tries to turn it into to jam.

The first batch looked like tar, spread like tar, and chewed like tar.  I ended up stirring the fruit-sugar mix for 45 minutes seeking the illusive “jelly-like” consistency the recipe said would indicate a finished product.  Turns out boiling hot jam doesn’t ever really look like jam in a jar.  Kind of like melted anything looks different than if it wasn’t melted.  “Jelly-like” comes 24 hours later — after the mix has cooled.  I also tried to use the fruit’s natural pectin this time around, rather than an additive, by including 15 – 20 percent unripened berries.

The second effort, after some additional reading, was at a boil for fewer than five minutes, just long enough to dissolve the sugar-pectin mix.  Overall, making jam is relatively easy … when done right.

1. Clean the canning jars with warm soapy water, submerge the jars and lids in boiling water, then turn down the heat and let them stand in the hot water.
2. Mix four cups of de-stemmed (this takes a while) and crushed fruit with 1/4-cup of lemon juice and one teaspoon of calcium water in a large pot.  Bring to a boil.
3. Thoroughly mix two cups of sugar and two teaspoons of pectin and stir it into the boiling fruit mix.  Stir for two minutes then let it return to a boil.  Remove the not-jelly-like liquid from heat.
4. Pour the jam into the hot canning jars up to 1/4 inch from the top, clean rims and threads meticulously, and fasten the lids.
5. Return the filled jars to the boiling water and submerge for 10 minutes.  Turn off the heat and let them stand in warm water for five minutes.  Let them sit for 24 hours out of the water before eating or saving.

We now have two jars of mulberry jam ready for eating — or storing.  Unopened, they should be good for up to a year.  Opened, they should last about three weeks refrigerated.  I tried some on toast today, and it looks, spreads, and tastes like jam.  The mulberry is a surprisingly sweet fruit, and the jam is no different.

We shared some of this second batch with mom, and will make more when the last round of berries come ripe later this month.

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.

The reasons for being up and out were probably the same as those on any farm, though: a whole lot to do in a day.  Sure, I don’t have acres to the horizon to manage, nor any animals bigger than a chicken to keep.  However, my days are occupied by non-farm work — which is how a fraction of an acre crop can call for early rising.

Weekday or weekend, not too much is going on in our neighborhood this early.  For a while the mornings are quiet.  The chickens are up, clucking, and I’ve been mulching and fertilizing in their company, disrupting them once with a cage cleaning.  I planted all the replacements I’d grown (see “The replacements” posted on April 25), putting them to good use where their predecessors had been chewed beyond recovery.  I refilled and re-seeded the newly empty pots with replacements for the replacements (just in case).  I also reigned in grape vines that had gotten all akimbo.

Neglected weeding dominated more than one morning.

It’s not just caught up but ahead I’ve been trying to get, if such a thing is possible.  Classes are heading towards finals, which calls for a burst of grading, but also signals the end of the semester is near.  Soon my attention can turn to my own learning and to making our edibles edible.  There’s also a feverish nesting to this tidying, as we’re a week overdue in the birth of our first, a girl.

Soon a baby, and the plants will need to be able to take better care of themselves for a while.

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.