The Bounty!!

It's cool inside, but it sure isn't outside. It was ninety degrees in the shade with 63% humidity, I can't imagine how women survived a hundred or more years ago all bound up tight in multiple layers of clothing.

Baby beach plum (and weeds) in protective custody.

I've been busy trying to reduce the impact the deer have on our trees.  Almost every baby tree has 4' high barrier to keep the deer from browsing.  Some day someone will look at our oddly shaped fruit trees and wonder why we ever pruned them that way and the answer would be, "We didn't, the deer did."

As I was out there cutting fence sections early this morning, the deer were hanging along the edges of the property.  I walked toward them and they did not behave as wild deer should.  They just stood there looking at me.  Some serious deer feeding is going on around here, they are not afraid.  There are two does that we see regularly, the larger buff colored doe and the reddish doe.  We see other deer sometimes, but these two are the regulars. 

One nice flower bud on top, tonight they feast!

They find my Julia Child roses very tasty, which is both amusing and annoying.  Each time the rose gets close to blooming, the buds get nibbled off in the night.  I ran out of fencing. I need to get more.

The critter count for this week is pretty high: bunnies, bunnies and more bunnies, one woodchuck (ground hog), two deer (seen repeatedly), crows (trying to steal eggs, but the girls are laying where they are supposed to and the crows are missing out), blue birds, bluejays, cowbirds, a pileated woodpecker, a snake (in the potato patch), cabbage loopers, harlequin beetles, tomato horn worms, skinks, stink bugs, dog ticks, slugs, deer flies and more.

I haven't seen the box turtle yet, he must be hiding from me.

We have had sugar snap peas for dinner almost every night this week, after having some sort of greens every night for the previous two weeks.  I spent a couple of mornings blanching and freezing greens, now we have ten meals worth of greens ready to go. Now a few days have elapsed, I should get out there to pick some more (when it cools a bit). I'll probably blanch and freeze some of the peas tonight, so we can have more variety later. 

Alpine strawberries

Blueberries, not ready!

The mulberries (no work, and they are one of my favorites!) and strawberries are ripe, the blackberries will be ready shortly.  The raspberries will be ready on about the same time as last year, late next week!

Sorry girls, no cabbage loopers this time.

The girls are laying 3-4 eggs a day.  I have been in a bit of a baking frenzy, so we have been keeping up with them.

The bounty!!

Turtles, Crows and Deer, but not an Aesop's Fable

I've been rather busy, but it's the kind of busy that I have trouble defining what is actually taking all of my time.  Much of it is the garden, I head out there and whoop, two hours--gone!  Not so today.  It is starting to warm up significantly (just checked 86 degrees F, in the shade) and I'm not quite used to it yet.

I'm in the process of mulching the garden with straw, so that the weeding doesn't run my life any longer.  It also cuts down on the watering, which can also be a bit of a time suck.

Baby tomato and watermelon plants, with greens and sunflowers in background.

Three bales down, probably 2-3 to go.  Time to drive the XB over to the nursery to get three more bales.

I bought some blue potatoes at an international grocery a few weeks ago, they were amazing.  Some started to sprout pretty quickly, so I guessed that they hadn't been treated with any anti-sprouting agents that are often on potatoes in the supermarket.  I planted an 18 foot row in the back garden alongside the banana fingerlings and the Yukon golds.  The little blue guys have come up in the past 24 hours!!! 

Banana fingerling (left) and Yukon Gold potatoes

The greens are doing an amazing job in the front garden, we have been having kale and Swiss chard almost every evening, in many different forms.

Lacinato Kale

Swiss Chard

Tonight we start on the collards!  I'll do them up with a cider gastrique sauce that my husband found on the internet a few years back for one of the special meals he prepares for me.  It is brown sugar, half as much water made into a simple syrup (boil it for a couple of minutes) and then add the same amount of cider vinegar as the water, a pinch of hot pepper salt and some sort of allium (garlic, onions, chives, shallots, whatever).  The original recipe called for shallots, but I rarely have any and the markets here often don't carry that sort of stuff, so whatever I have goes in.   The original recipe also called for a bazillion steps, which I refuse to do, and have simplified it to the point where it takes about three minutes from when I pull the ingredients out of the pantry. Beyond this collard dish, I haven't a clue what else I am serving for dinner, last night we had whole wheat rotini pasta tossed with garlic, tuna, olive oil, red pepper, and red Russian kale, with beets on the side.

Red Russian Kale

The strawberries have been doing pretty well, but I've been finding a few with one bite out of them, which means my little friend the box turtle has walked his way back to my garden. I'm going to have to find him and walk him farther away into the woods this time, maybe to the other side of the stream.  Luckily, most of the strawberries are planted in another spot in the west side of the yard.

Tiny Alpine strawberries in the side yard.

The deer have pruned two of the trees that  did not have fences around them, time to get more fencing.  It (probably the doe we have seen a couple of times) ate four of the six medlars on the medlar tree, at least it had the courtesy to leave me a couple to try.

The wild raspberries are flowering, the mulberries should be ripe in about a week, one variety of blackberry (Apache) has developed a fair amount of berries that should be ripe in about a week and the other variety is just flowering. There are just a few blueberries this year, next year they should be mature enough to produce some more fruit.

My mother would be proud, I have been practicing my pie crust and have had two decent ones in a row.  I will have plenty of things to bake in pastry soon!

In another battle with wildlife, the crows have been stealing the chicken's eggs and eating them.  Luckily, the girls have finally started laying under a dome that has been out there for a while and the crows can't see into it.  We placed a plastic egg underneath to help encourage them to lay there.  It usually works.  We were able to retrieve three eggs yesterday, for the first time a in a couple of weeks.

So much to do still!

Connecting the Dots and Deer

I re-read my previous post and realized that it was extremely choppy.  I had too much to say in one post and just kept cutting it down until it was horrible,  Sorry.

When writing about Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds, my point is that many people see things in isolation and don't connect all of the events preceding it to the result.  The fact that my neighborhood has an over population of deer is connected to the entire history of Europe and the Americas.  The land under my house was once a farm, it can be seen today in the exact way the soil in the yard had eroded, it can also be seen in the soil profile when I dig a hole for a tree.  The top layers of soil have been mixed, something that I  would not see if I were to dig a hole on the side of the ravine, because no sane person would plow the steep angles of that hill without terracing.

 

It is likely that my yard once was loaded with tobacco plants, the county flag has a tobacco leaf on it.  I know of only one tobacco farm left in the area. Most of the tobacco land in the area has either been converted to corn and sorghum, pasture, woods or giganti-homes (due to a Federal buyout of tobacco farms on which I am having difficulty locating information on the internet--I've met many people locally who tell the story of how an area used to be a huge farm, but the farmer took the Federal money offered and headed for a less expensive place to retire.  Some how the land gets sold to developers, who probably lobbied for the bill to fund the buyout.). Around here there is talk of houses being the best cash crop for farmers to raise.  There are a few exceptions  some local farms are now agricultural trusts and will remain farmland.

 

My neighborhood has been shaped by health policy and American smoking trends, agricultural price supports  that ended in 2005 and more. During the time period when this area was farmed from the late 1600's to late 20th century, it is unlikely that there were many deer after the first few years due to the forest being converted to fields, removing the edge habitat for the deer and over-hunting by the residents.  I doubt the people who built the 1920's era house next door ever saw deer in their yard.

 

There certainly is no lack of deer now, every day last fall I would see a minimum of four deer together in the yard at some point in the day. They weren't always the same deer either, their sizes, shapes, coloring, and antlers varied.  Now, I see a couple in the area every few days.  

 

I know that at least two neighbors have been feeding the deer, one as entertainment (much like I feed the birds) and the other has a deer stand (a hunting chair mounted in a tree with a deer decoy and food items to lure deer into the area below--as if he really needs to lure them. (I understand that there are frequent ER visits made by adult males in the area due to "falling out of trees"  Also, my daughter is not allowed in the woods in December or January because of hunting season gunfire.). I doubt either neighbor gardens or has a dog who goes into a frenzy over the sight of deer.

 

Going back further in time,  before European style farming, it is likely that there were some deer in the area.  Nearby there is a site that was used for tool and weapon making with artifacts that are up to 4000 years old,  The people making those weapons probably saw deer regularly, but it is unlikely that they found four deer hanging around their camp every time they returned.  The people, wolves and cougars would have kept the population in check.

 

Today, it seems the only things that keep the deer population in check are Fords, Toyotas and Mecedes (especially white SUV's, a favorite of the giganti-home dwellers).  The deer population also helps provide business for many medical facilities and body shops...and the omnipresent vultures.  (The only vultures I remember in my childhood were the ones that showed up in the Road Runner cartoons, but that's another story.)

 

The point of all of this is that the ecosystem is out of whack.  We've created a situation where the niche of predator has been removed from the food web and unless we think of a solution the predators that we can't remove from the food web, viruses and bacteria, will eventually take their toll.  In the meantime, we have budgeted money for putting circles of fencing around each of our newly planted trees to prevent defoliation by hungry deer, which they did to one of the apple trees last year.  It survived this time, but two years in a row for a new tree would be too much.

 

The book provides some ideas, not all of them palatable to everyone on how to resolve this issue, but, venison stew may be back on the Eastern American table for the first time in nearly three hundred years.