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.

The Wildlife Refuge

We had our first frost last night, so we fired up the pellet stove. It was nice to wake up in a house that wasn't chilly.  Those in-between days when it is pretty cold at night but hit mid-sixties in the day are challenging, too warm for the pellet stove and too cold to be comfortable.

I did my final harvest of warm season veggies last night in anticipation of the frost.

There are enough peppers to make a new batch of (mostly) jalapeno pepper jelly. With my canning frenzy, I have come to the realization that I need more shelves in my pantry, yet another project to conquer.  The chill has also reminded me that I haven't found the right fabric for curtains in the kitchen/dining area.  I've been carrying around my yardage calculations for a few weeks  since I'm trying to pair it with another errand into the areas. The fabric shops seem to claim a certain radius around themselves, I can drive west 45 minutes to one (Hancock), northeast about 55 minutes to another (Hobby Lobby) and due south for 55 minutes to another (Jo Ann).  Many of the fabric sellers on-line do not seem the have the yardage required to cover four 62 inch long windows, which comes to 10-12 yards.  Gotta drive!


I'm looking out those exposed windows to the bird feeder, which I just filled for the first time this season about two days ago.  The chickens love whatever the squirrels spill, but the wild birds have not yet discovered it. I hope we have the variety that we had in the past year the usual chickadees, robins, sparrows, blue jays, titmice, nuthatches, cardinals, juncos, wrens, then there are (spring and summer) bluebirds (they like the posts we put in for the blackberries), blue gray gnat catchers (had to look them up, again spring/summer), Baltimore orioles, flickers, red bellied woodpeckers, pileated  woodpeckers, mockingbirds, catbirds, brown thrashers, and when a deer gets hit on the road (they have a crossing nearby) the black and turkey vultures (nasty, stinky things), oh yeah, wild turkeys (mom and five babies).  Then, of course, we have mammals deer, bunnies, a big possum, saw a fox once, a bazillion moles that make the lawn squishy. The moles are the reason some of the hawks (red tailed and red shouldered) come--they sit on the "lawn" and wait--then pounce on a mole when it comes up).  Nasty little moles ate the roots of my parsley!  Go Hawks!

The other day in the back yard we had two deer, a  crow and a bunny all just sitting on the lawn near each other, my husband said that it looked like it was an idyllic scene straight out of an old Disney movie and that we should hear perky music in the background.  Much of the land around us platted for development and now the recession is easing the 500K houses are going in, so our wildlife refuge of a backyard will probably be short lived.

Time to fill the feeder, I hope the squirrels will save a little for the birds today.