This has truly been the weirdest garden year. We started off with a dry winter, and we are ending with a dry autumn; there’s no rain in the forecast until maybe mid-November. We had shelter-in-place starting in March, which meant our garden was more beautiful then its ever been in the months of April and May. Then we had the hottest summer we’ve ever had, and smoke for over 30 days in a row. The summer garden just couldn’t hack it, so I took it out and planted the fall garden early. But then we got even more extreme heat, more smoke, and relative humidity in the single digits. Plus record-breaking wind! I lost my first autumn plants to squirrels. The replanted seeds barely germinated.
I’ve been so busy with school that I haven’t been in the garden much at all in October, other than to harvest some winter squash and basil and to pick flowers for bouquets. A while ago, I began to see some ominous signs of increased rat pressure. Tunnels started appearing. Deep tunnels. Land bridges formed overnight. I could see a path forming from the neighbor's chickens to our chickens. Fence boards came loose. The compost pile would be upended every morning. I began to see tunnels IN the chicken coop, which was alarming since we surrounded the whole thing 12 inches deep with hardware mesh when we built it. Tom set traps, and was catching a rat or two every couple of days - not stellar, but certainly a help. We started hearing barn owls in our yard at night, a great sign. And then suddenly, no more owls. No more rats in the traps. And the peas were eaten down to nubs. The germinating brassicas disappeared.
Yesterday morning, when I peeked under the row covers to see what was going on, I discovered an underground city. Deep, deep tunnels, within the raised beds. A perfect pathway from other yards into ours. And then from there into the chicken coop to eat the chicken food and drink the chicken water. All covered and protected from flying predators by my innocent white row cover.
I’ve never had this happen. My beds have always stayed perfect, pristine. No animal (other than our dog Joe, all those years ago) ever did much digging in them. I guess I’ve been lucky. All my plants, gone, for the second time. I was furious.
This morning I declared war. Resolved: I will bring in the chicken food and water every night, pain though it may be, so that there is no food source. Resolved: I will stop composting food scraps for a bit. Resolved: I will stop feeding the birds for now. I rolled up the row cover and pinned it, so that there is no protection from owls. I dug up the beds, really dug them, breaking my pitchfork in the process, filling in all the tunnels, and dug out the hill of compost from the chicken coop to add to each bed (no more compost pile as another food source). The beds look great, but we’ll see what happens tonight - it’s possible that I’ll find new destruction tomorrow morning. For this reason, I am not replanting - I will wait a few days before trying again. Tom will re-set the traps in new areas tonight, and we’ll see if we can start to make a dent in the population again.
This has really taught me a lesson. I must be more vigilant. At this point, the winter crops will not get big enough to eat over the cold months, and will not be ready until spring. My inattention means that we won’t have homegrown produce this winter, and that makes me really mad at myself. I have so much more to do in the garden, so much to replant, so much cleaning up to do. I am noticing that I am not as focused as I used to be where the garden is concerned. That’s ok if I plan for it - I mean, no one is putting pressure on me to continue gardening, after all. It’s my own pressure, my own deal. I might need to scale some things down, if my semesters are going to continue to take up more of my time. But having fresh, homegrown food is still a priority for us, and so I need to figure out a more workable schedule.
Anyway, we’ve had two rather more welcome additions to our garden recently. Tom and I celebrated our 20th anniversary in September, and in lieu of a weekend away, we bought a Netatmo Weather Station. We have really been enjoying more accurate weather, with data taken from our own property. Graphs will be made! Data will be analyzed! One thing that’s surprised us is how different the temperatures are from the local weather forecast - not hugely different, but enough to see that we are in a little ‘pocket’ and things are different here than they are wherever the national weather service stations are located. For instance, we’ve had nighttime temps in the high 30’s recently, colder than our local forecast predicted. Also, we have a second weather station inside, and it’s been eye-opening to see the CO2 levels rise to unhealthy levels whenever we use our gas stove. More on that in a future post.
The other addition is a moisture meter, able to detect the water level in our soils, down to a foot and half depth. This has provided us with some interesting information; one side of our garden is basically the desert, while the other side is basically flooded, and both are receiving the same amount of drip irrigation! This could be due to several factors (soil texture, shade, slope) and will require more experimentation.
I hope you’re getting lots of time in your gardens, and that you are able to be out in nature in some form every day. I’ve been hiking a lot more and I forgot how much I love it. Honestly, nature is absolutely saving me. It may be a strange gardening year, but that doesn’t mean that I am not enormously grateful for having a place to go to escape the rest of the world. How about you?