Exciting things

Kali:  "There are so many exciting things happening, I didn't even notice the honeysuckle was blooming!"

Indeed!  I, Jason, couldn't have said it better.  As I write this, I'm working on digesting two and a half fine, fine helpings of homemade/homegrown strawberry shortcake generously doused with neighborhood-produced raw milk.

Life, as they say, is good.

Except for the slugs making holes in the strawberries.  They are perhaps the least lovely thing about this spring, which after a dry start is turning out to be exceedingly lush and vibrant!  Plants and animals are growing full tilt; it's about all we can do to keep up with the weeding and mowing.  The bluebirds in the garden-fence bluebird house have fledged, and the phoebes on the downspout return at the back of the garage are filling the nest so completely I fear one will fall out if one of the others sneezes...it won't be too many more days before the parents take them off into the canopies of the trees in our neighbors' woods.

The chickens are growing apace, but they are soon to be outdone by the ducks, who are winning our affections by being not only less pointy than chickens, but also more gregarious, more hardy, faster growing, more interactive with humans, and less prone to feather picking and other crowding-related poultry neuroses.  Also they stay fuzzy longer.  I would assert that a well-managed duck makes a somewhat more likely pet than a chicken.  They are even becoming accustomed to being held, and their obvious joy in water is rather endearing, too.  Let me be clear that these winsome waterfowl will not likely overtake chickens as my top poultry enthusiasm anytime soon...chicken raising is deeply imprinted on me!  But we've always intended to have a diverse home place, including a diversity of animal species, so it's gratifying to feel the ducks making themselves so welcome here.

In other news, the grain/pea polyculture experiment is off and running.  For those who've not seen it, here's the scoop:  last year I noticed some wasted oats left by Kali's late pet chicken, Henny Hen, had sprouted out of the weedy litter I had scratched into windrows for mulching between my double rows of peas.  Lacking time and/or enthusiasm for weeding between two tangled and fragile rows of sugar snaps, I let them grow, assuming I'd just have to catch up on my weeding when the peas were done.  To my surprise, the oats made themselves right at home, and did not seem to compete with the peas, but did seems to out-compete other species, leading to a much less weedy pea patch where the oats had volunteered.  Liking what I saw, this spring I sowed oats and a few kinds of wheat between all my double rows of peas in hopes of solving the perennial annoyance of unreachable weeds and floppy pea vines, since the grains might provide some crude trellising.  Thus far, the jury is still out on whether there is any competition between the peas and grain species, but I don't think it's severe and the weeding job was much easier.  The trellising seems to be working out.  One of my goals is to be developing systems inside our garden fence that might turn out to be "scalable."  That is, they are efficient enough to be convenient to do on a larger scale for potential market garden production, or at least to be able to make a more significant culinary or nutritional contribution.  In this case, growing shelling peas and wheat at five or ten times the current area might result in enough wheat to begin experimenting with sprouted wheat bread or some minor grinding, and enough peas to be able to enjoy them more regularly from the freezer all year!

I hope we also get to do some experimenting this year with moving the "three sisters" crops outside the garden, as well as opening up some spaces in a few of our meadows for trying a little grain amaranth.  I've already tried some potatoes in "the wild," where I had whacked back an autumn olive tree to a four foot stub and took advantage of the nearly plant-free ground under it's former shaded area and worked it with a farmer's hoe sufficiently to plant potatoes there.  At last check, they were doing better than the ones in the garden.  I look forward to a better potato harvest than usual!

That's if the voles don't get them.  I'd been worried about voles last year, but didn't see any problems.  But neighbors were reporting early and severe damage in their gardens, and in the area where we'd spread leaves for mulch, I've been hearing lots of rustling and squeaking sounds.  Ominous, since that's where I intended to put the sweet potatoes!  So when I was recently in the hardware store, I purchased some mouse traps, then placed them inside the garden fence under the leaf mulch in empty peanut butter jars with a good sized hole bored in each lid and baited with chicken feed.  Well, I can't pretend to understand what's exactly going on, but I was nonplussed to remove, in rapid succession, five SHREWS, not voles, from my traps.  I regard shrews as mostly if not wholly favorable in the garden (they are voracious predators of various invertebrates and other small animals...didn't know they liked chicken feed!), so I was dismayed to have killed five of them.  I have removed the traps, and will just have to wait and see if voles give us any trouble before trying anything else.  Could the critters I was hearing in the mulch have all been shrews?  I had no idea they could exist at such a population density.  Could that be related to the high slug population?  Seems possible.

I suppose there could also be some sort of connection to the cicadas.  This seems to be a hatch year for one of the broods of periodic cicada, and they seem to be in the full swing of their emergence.  Many places in our yard and woods have empty cicada husks clinging to the vegetation, and are often speckled with the adult cicadas themselves.  Usually they are motionless and easy to handle, seemingly focused on finding mates and laying eggs, and lacking much wariness regarding predation.  I guess their strategy is to remain in hiding for 13 or 17 years (I don't know which kind this is), then emerge all at once in such bewildering numbers as to overwhelm their predators' appetites.  It must work well, because there are plenty of them!

Well, I've got an eight-year-old waiting for a bedtime story.  Gotta go!

Here's the above mentioned eight-year-old this evening. Tough life she has!