Starting Over

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?

Help Me Out

I’m hoping you can help me out with one of my class projects. We are repeating a study done by the National Academy of Sciences regarding racial attitudes and the environment. The more data we collect, the more interesting the results will be. So I’m looking for a range of ages, attitudes, and ethnicities to help give me a more complete picture. THIS IS AN ANONYMOUS SURVEY. It will take you about one minute. This survey is just for those that live in the United States.

If you’d like to take the survey, click HERE.

Hope you can access it ok. And thanks very much for your help!

Several Items of Interest

Our weather has finally turned, if only temporarily, and the smoke in the sky has (blessedly) lessened. It is such a treat to get outdoors, to hike and to garden! I will never be complacent about clear air again. Today I plan to get the winter garlic and spinach seeds in the ground. I am woefully behind in these tasks. I must admit that the school workload this fall is much heavier than it ever has been before and I am struggling to get through it all! Meanwhile, I am in the process of rethinking my entire garden space, which is a huge project to contemplate and will have to be done in fits and starts. I very much feel an urgency to plant for the future, which will likely be as hot and as smoky as it has been this summer, and at least as dry. This will require me to rethink my plant choices and, in fact, the entire layout of my garden.

I’ve been interested to read several good articles about plant life and fire. The first is from the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley.

Here’s the relevant info, though I think it’s worth reading the entire article: “While there are much data pointing to the beneficial effects of fires on plants, especially in regard to acting as an environmental cue for seed germination and in seed dispersal, in general, as for humans, smoke and ash are detrimental to plants. Chemically, more than 100 different compounds have been identified in smoke, including toxic levels of nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide and ozone. Short-term exposure to smoke (as little as 20 minutes) has been reported to reduce photosynthesis by as much as 50%, as a consequence of both the destruction of chlorophyll, the light-capturing green pigment, and in impeding the movement of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the plant through leaf pores (stomata)” (Dr. Lew Feldman, garden director, UC Berkeley Botanical Garden). He goes on to say that ash may have a beneficial impact on our soil, at least in small quantities, but that it might acidify it slightly. This made me think of how people used to spread their fireplace ashes over the garden to enrich the soil. That usually happened in the fallow season to prepare for the next crop, though. I’m sure we’ll begin to see some studies that help us understand how smoke and ash affect our gardens in the coming years.

image credit: UCANR

The Master Gardeners (also a UC program around here) sent out an interesting email which said, “In our summer issue, featuring Firescaping, we emphasized how ALL plants can burn under the right conditions. California natives are no exception. As a matter of fact some of them are quite flammable. Proper selection and maintenance are key! Considering the current devastating wildfires and extremely unhealthy air stretching over our western states, we'd like to revisit some important features of fire-resistant plants. Look for the following characteristics:

• store water in leaves or stems

• produce very little dead or fine material

• possess extensive, deep root systems for controlling erosion

• maintain high moisture content with limited watering

• grow slowly and need little maintenance

• low growing in form

• contain low levels of volatile oils or resins

• open & loose branching habit with a low volume of total vegetation.”

This also helps me with my plan as I move forward with new garden design. Many home owners around here have basically given up on their gardens, and either “landscape” with rocks or mulch, or just leave dead grass in their expansive front yards. I think we can figure something better out. I have always had multiple goals for our garden: it must feed us, feed the ecosystem, regenerate the soil, conserve resources, and look pretty. The list hasn’t changed, but I now want to add “future climate friendly” as well.

While working on a paper a couple of days ago, my attention wandered to a squirrel in our front garden. The squirrels (mostly fox squirrels) are very active this time of year, collecting the enormous acorns from our valley oak tree, and burying them mostly in my pots of bulbs, which is very annoying. One particular squirrel has figured out a path from our fence to our gate to our roof, and s/he goes back and forth constantly. I was watching her when suddenly she dropped down flat onto her belly on the fence. I was worried that she was sick or dying, but when I looked it up, it turns out this is a defensive posture. According to Geography Realm, “the act of lying flat hides the lighter colored belly of a squirrel. The fur color on the outer side of a squirrel evolved to help the squirrel blend in with its environment…  the posture of lying flat on a surface also helps to protect the vital organs of a squirrel should it be attacked.” We have several kinds of flying predators around here, day and night, so I wonder if the squirrel saw a hawk and immediately dropped? She stayed there for about ten minutes, and then went back to her usual pattern of roof-gate-fence. There is another squirrel who tends to hang out in the back garden, who is missing a foot. I’m hoping these are all signs that the predators are becoming more numerous in our yard. We often hear owls at night, quite close, and since we have a perennial family of rats living in the compost, we are hoping that their numbers are being thinned by them. We can use all the help we can get!

I heard a sparrow in the garden yesterday, which made me realize that I hadn’t heard one in quite a while. That led me to wonder if sparrows migrate.

image credit: UC Santa Cruz

Well, it turns out, they do. Here in central/northern California, the year-round temperature is fairly mild, so we don’t often think about things migrating. It doesn’t seem as neccessary as it would from say, Michigan to Florida. But there are lots of things that migrate to escape colder temperatures, or to find food, or to breed in different places. It turns out that golden-crowned sparrows (like the one pictured above) spend winters in the Bay Area, and head north to Alaska to breed in the spring and summer. According to study published by PRBO, “Each bird, which weighs approximately 30 grams, migrated from 1600 to 2400 miles one-way to their breeding grounds. Their individual breeding locations spanned approximately 750 miles along the coast of Alaska, and their north migration averaged only 29 days while southbound migration averaged nearly twice that (53 days).” This kind of distance blows my mind. White-crowned sparrows (also commonly seen and heard in my garden in the wintertime) also make this kind of migration each year. “Breeders in mountains mostly migrate to wintering grounds in lowland southern California and south into Mexico, departing in September and returning in April and May. Coastal breeders mostly present year-round; not migratory (Mewaldt et al. 1968). Other individuals winter elsewhere in California lowlands and foothills and migrate to Canada and Alaska in April and May; often return to same wintering sites the following September or October (Mewaldt 1976). In montane habitats, fairly widespread in fall, but descend below heavy snows for winter and spring (Grinnell and Miller 1944)” (CA Dep’t of Fish and Wildlife). So do song sparrows. “Song Sparrows are resident throughout much of their range, although the northernmost populations are migratory. Resident populations extend as far north as coastal Alaska. The wintering range stretches across the southern United States and dips into northern Mexico. Birds at high altitudes may also descend into the lowlands during the winter” (Birdweb).

I’m glad to have the sparrows back in residence! They contribute beautiful songs during the dawn chorus, and I enjoy the music.

Lastly, have you seen the new David Attenborough documentary? I found it very compelling. What a career this man has had, and what amazing things he has seen! I love that he considers this documentary his “witness statement.” It is not an easy thing to watch, as he lays both history and the future of the environment out in plain language. But I believe that we, too, are witnesses. And as such, we cannot turn away from this. It enrages me that the political debates include few questions about climate, and are often phrased “do you believe?” or “what will you eliminate?” Let’s get past all that. Let’s start asking, “what is your plan to DO? how will that look? how will we all be included?“ Let’s be honest about what it will cost. The truth is, it will cost us everything; it will be enormously expensive, far more than Covid has been. But it must be done. I would encourage everyone to start accepting and facing what’s to come, and vote accordingly (though I will readily concede that from a climate perspective, there is no perfect candidate; so ask yourself, which candidate will get us further faster?).

On that note, I’m off to plant garlic. What’s happening in your garden this weekend?

Reader Question - Vermicomposting

A reader named Jen writes, “I am considering getting a vermicomposter, and the options range from high end to low cost: https://www.epicgardening.com/best-worm-composter/ The Worm Factory starts at $146 and others are more moderately priced, in the $100 range. The Hungry Bin is a whopping $346! Here are my questions: Should I invest in a more expensive worm bin and if so, why? Should I release some worms into my garden so that the birds have more to eat over the winter? Am I really doing anything about the impending doom of climate change by vermicomposting?”

Full disclosure, Jen is a close friend of mine from childhood. She lives in NC, in Chapel Hill, which is USDA Zone 7b. She lives in a forested area and has a lovely Japanese style garden, as well as some meadow plantings.

We all know the benefits of composting, so I don’t need to go through those again. Our awareness of food waste has been growing lately, and it’s good to figure out some sort of system for dealing with that (besides re-thinking your shopping and cooking habits, which I’ve had to do myself with our teenage son away at college). Chickens or pigs is ideal for this - nothing gets wasted if you have livestock to eat your leftovers. But worms are another livestock option that are ideal for those of us who don’t have the property allowance for larger animals.

I’ve used worms in various ways for years.

I’ve had an official worm bin, which was used by and then given to me by a neighbor, and it was an interesting experience.

These are usually a set of stacked bins. The top few have a perforated bottom, to let worms and leachate move between them, and the bottom one has a solid bottom to keep everything inside. There is also usually a spigot of some kind which allows you to drain off the leachate (basically worm pee). You then dilute this liquid and use it as a fertilizer. Additionally, the castings (poop) are removed periodically and added to your pots or beds.

I found this sort of system high-maintenance. It needs to be in an area that is protected from rain (there are openings in the top to allow air circulation); the top is easily removed by predators who eat all the worms (hence my putting rocks on top); you need to have a lot of leaves or newspaper or some other carbon source available to soak up all the nitrogen that is being produced (poop); and, when it’s time to empty the bins of worm castings, you have to somehow “sift” out the worms, which is supposed to happen naturally with the perforated bottoms but, in my experience, doesn’t work. I used it for about a year and then put it in the recycle bin (after removing all the worms and stuff and putting them in my regular compost).

I can see that this sort of system would be perfect for someone who doesn’t have any outdoor space - a balcony, or a garage, or even a laundry room could host a stack like this. But the mess you make when you remove the compost would make it less than ideal for indoor spaces. If you have very harsh winters, this system could also be good, but again, not easy to maintain indoors. Some people make their own worm bins which is far cheaper than buying something pre-made.

Something I have found far more sustainable is to have an enclosed outdoor compost bin of smaller stature, one made of natural materials that is open to the ground below. My dad made me one like this years ago, a two-compartment bin of old redwood decking, with a hinged lid and removable front panels. Because the bin is so small (3’x3’x3’), it doesn’t hold enough material to get hot enough to break down easily. My way around this is to buy worms every other year, and add them to the bin.

There is likely a worm farmer near you, wherever you live, where you can buy a couple of pounds of red wigglers for about $20 a pound (which you’ll need to do for a worm bin, as well). They will mate and produce more worms, but they also crawl out of the bin and into the surrounding garden, get eaten by birds, etc. So that’s why I buy them every couple of years. They really speed up the composting of my smaller bin.

I don’t bother to add any worms to the big compost pile that resides in the chicken run. First of all, they’d just get eaten by the chickens. Secondly, that pile breaks down faster anyway for many reasons - it’s bigger (more volume), it has its own dedicated sprinkler, and it gets turned by the chickens every single day. There are definitely worms in it - I see them every time I go to collect the finished stuff at the bottom - which have arrived from the surrounding garden.

And that brings me to something else you need to consider - there are already a ton of worms in your existing landscape. They are there even if the soil has been neglected for years. They reside deep inside the moist layers of soil. Rain brings them closer to the surface, as does organic matter. If you have a woodsy area, worms are part of the great soil ecosystem that breaks down all that organic matter - only a small part, to be sure, as bacteria and fungi do most of the work of decomposing the litter that lies on our soil surfaces. The very best way to ensure that you have an active and healthy soil ecosystem is to provide it plenty of organic matter. Don’t remove leaves. Add mulch to bare ground. And you may even want to bury your food scraps out in the landscape - just dig a hole next to a bush or a tree, put your scraps in, and cover them with soil. This is called “composting in place” and many people swear by it. There is a permaculture method called a “keyhole” planting bed, which is a raised bed shaped like a circle, with one path in to the center of the circle so you can reach everything. In that center, you place a wire basket (open to the bottom and the top). In that, you layer leaves and grass and food scraps, and it breaks down right into your bed.

I even had a horticulture professor who basically laid his food scraps down around his fruit trees, not even bothering to bury them! This looks unattractive but is effective. In my neighborhood that would attract even more nighttime creatures, so I need a more organized way to deal with scraps.

As for the birds, something like 98% of bird species feed insects to their young, even if they are seed eaters normally. The young need protein, and the best source of that is insects. Birds need a variety and abundance of insects, and so if you appreciate birds, the best thing you can do for them is to provide insects. Worms that live in the ground are good for some bird species, but worms that live on leaves are much better for a vast number of bird species. Worms that live on leaves, also called caterpillars, are usually a larval stage of many insects. So, as we’ve discussed before, there are many things you can do to increase insects in the garden: stop using pesticides; plant a variety of flowering trees, perennials, annuals, vegetables, and herbs; provide water in shallow dishes; and allow for different habitats - some mulched spaces, some bare dirt spaces, tree snags, piles of logs, etc. Be a slightly messy gardener! Don’t clean up too much. For more on this subject. you would do well to read “Bringing Nature Home” by Doug Tallamy.

And as for climate change and the state of our planet, any action we take as individuals can only help the situation, so I encourage you to compost in any way you can. If a worm bin is going to be the thing that gets you there, then do it. Individual actions allow us to feel as though we are part of the solution and give us hope, so they are important from a mental health standpoint as well. But we also need to realize that it’s going to take global action and policy to really shift the world towards a completely different thinking about climate change. I’m not saying that your individual actions don’t matter. They do. But as individuals, we really don’t have the power necessary to make a significant change. That’s why we need to be proactive about voting for people and policies that support making these big changes.

I hope this helps you to make a decision about whether or not to get a worm bin, Jen! Thank you so much for your question. I’ll be interested to see if anyone else has some other advice for you, perhaps a system that worked particularly well for them, or ideas for making your own bin.