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.

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.

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.

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.

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 health and social/behavioral problems.  It’s true for people.  It’s true for chickens.

So our chickens are unlikely to suffer from Marek’s Disease (though we got them vaccinated just in case), or any number of other ailments that chickens kept by the thousands in industrial feed houses suffer from and that necessitate their daily doses of medication.  Our chickens are unlikely to cannibalize one another, or gang up on and peck a smaller chicken to death, or isolate a disliked chicken and prevent it from feeding until it starves to death — as happens with chickens that are not provided adequate personal space.  It’s extremely unlikely that they will peck each other till they bleed out of boredom, as birds in featureless environments where they can’t range around and scratch for part of their meal tend to do.

However, one threat we cannot control is the behavior of other predators that like to eat chicken and eggs as much as we do.  Absent an indiscriminate aerial bombardment of our neighborhood with pesticides and herbicides that would make Rachel Carson blanch, there will be predators and they will try to eat our chickens.  The prime candidates in our area are hawks, skunks, opossums, raccoons, and coyotes (though I’m not convinced the latter can get into our yard).

Our chickens will range during the day when the hawks are out, and we have done what we can to give the chickens a fighting chance by ordering breeds that will blend in with our environment and that are fairly alert and self-sufficient.  We are also growing flower beds and other cover that the birds can hide out in when something’s overhead.

The real threat will come at night according to the troubling anecdotes I’ve heard from local keepers and from the warnings I’ve read: raccoons that will pull a chicken’s leg through the chicken wire and bite it off, raccoons that can figure out latches and locks, opossums that dig their way into the coop to eat the abdomen out of a chicken and leave the rest, and skunks that tunnel in, too, and eat the heads.

Such tales have already had me modifying the coop.  I offset a second layer of chicken wire around the entire structure to a height of two feet to prevent reaching in.  I complicated the latches and locks (but I’ll probably test this measure out on my neighbor’s kid, because if a toddler can figure it out, a raccoon can).  I buried layers of dried out, razor sharp bougainvillea stalks to eight inches deep around the coop borders.  And I am planting defensively, installing thorny berry vines and pineapple plants along the exposed lengths of the hen house.

But will it be enough?  There’s really no way to know until it’s not.

Because we’re not varmint exterminators, nor insect or weed eradicators, and because we try to live a more permaculturally-minded existence, we feel we also have to be realistic about our chickens and their survivability.  We have always wanted three chickens.  Two would be too few.  And it seems like a distinct possibility that we’ll lose at least one to the success of some hunting animal that earned it.

So, long story long — we got ourselves another chick.  We bought a week-or-so-old Dominique from Kahoots on Monday, so she’s about the same age as our brood.  We were pleased to see the other birds signal their acceptance of the little Dominique by cleaning her off upon her arrival.  Our birds have grown fast in the last two weeks, sprouting feathers almost immediately, making short flights at 10 days, roosting.  They’re friendly with us at this point, and will sit in our hands or perch on our fingertips without trying to escape.

And they’ve all got names now, too: Bailey (Rhode Island Red, reddish), Justin (Buff Orpington, yellow), Seven (Barred Rock, black and yellow/white), and Kate (Dominique, smallish black).

We’d hate to lose any of them.