Wire cages and tales of caution

Fruit Guantanamo

A couple of years ago, when we put in our 30 berry plants and 15 fruit trees, we decided to construct chicken-wire cages to go into the ground around the plants to protect the roots from gophers.  It made planting a lot more difficult (especially making sure the dirt was packed firmly with no air pockets as we filled in our holes) but seemed a prudent insurance policy against vermin.

One of our original raspberry cuttings never sprouted, so last year I pulled it out (along with its wire cage) and re-planted the hole with a new raspberry bush -- no wire cage this time.  Since gophers had left all the plants alone for a year, I figured we'd been too paranoid about the whole wire cages thing.

And then two days ago I spotted gopher mounds in the pasture.  All the plants were fine -- except -- you guessed it, that one raspberry bush which did not have a cage around it.  It was dead and withered. When I dug about a foot away from it, I clearly found the underground gopher hole that had allowed the little critter to tunnel in and eat the root system of the bush -- enough to kill it from the ground up.

This is a common theme of farming, where you begin cautiously, have success, and let down your guard a little, or sometimes a lot.  It happens with livestock, it happens with canning, and it happens with vegetable growing.  Oh, you're supposed to rotate your crops every year?  But you've grown tomatoes in the same spot for three years with no problems!  So you plant in the same spot, one more year, and find you're devastated with soil-borne disease this time around.  Sterilizing the Mason jars before canning?  Well, you used to, but over the years you kind of stopped doing it....and then one of your jars pops open in your pantry because it's become so ripe with bacteria it de-pressurizes itself.

It's an almost-guaranteed human behavior.  We get away with letting our guard down until one day, it finally catches up with us. 

The best farmers only have to learn the hard lessons once, or not at all.  The truly excellent ones can learn from others' bad and good experiences without having to experience things for themselves.  You know, kind of like the hot stove analogy.  They see someone else get burned and don't touch the thing.

Terrible farmers have to learn their lessons again and again as each season presents its classic difficulties:  the fox in the henhouse, the grubs in the planter beds, or the gophers in the raspberries.  It's Groundhog Day, and sometimes with actual groundhogs. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome.  But perhaps another definition is when you tamper with proven success by slacking off and expecting all will be well.

Next spring we will be expanding our berry bushes and you can bet there will be wire cages around everything -- maybe double wire cages, and perhaps even sentries with shotguns in perimeter towers.  (OK probably not that last one.) 

The point is, while I can't always help when mistakes get made, I sure as hell can make sure they don't happen twice.

Life and Death on the Homestead

Every human has a sliding scale of mercy when it comes to what we are willing to kill and what we are not.  Most humans will kill ants in and around their food.  House flies also die with great regularity in people's homes. Some people refuse to kill meat to eat, but will eat soy products, meaning they are indirectly responsible for thousands of rabbits and birds dying when harvest comes around and the big combines take to the fields, cutting down everything in their path. 

It seems that death is impossible to avoid.  Even plants have been shown to react when they are pulled out of the ground.

I cannot, as yet, shoot squirrels or anything larger, because their mammalian family hierarchy and tendency to frolic and play touches me, so I will relocate them instead of killing them whenever possible.  Squirrels also have the distinction of learning where I do not want them to go.  When I fill in a squirrel hole on our property, the squirrels do not come back.  So I let them have the lower 1/5 of our property, and patrol the rest to gently turn them away. So far its working, but I make no promises as to the future.  But I will, in general relocate before I kill, if I can.  I even catch house flies and turn them back outside, when possible.

I hated killing mice until they became a serious issue around the coops, and then I did so with a very grim efficiency, using a humane electrical trap that killed instantly. With country property comes a greater necessity to (and therefore exposure to) killing vermin.  I don't like it, but some creatures cannot be easily trapped and relocated. And if you have to kill, I think you owe it to whatever you're killing to dispatch it as humanely as possible.

This morning I shot a gopher in the chicken coop.  I went out and noticed the large hole and a small head popping in and out of it, and knew immediately what it was.  Gophers are vermin, carrying fleas, worms, mites, and disease with them, so allowing them near our live food source was not an option, both for the hens health as well as ours.  I stepped inside, loaded Big Ag's .22 with hollow-point rounds, and took it back outside to the coop, standing silently over the hole until the gopher appeared again.  And then I shot.

 The one I shot did not look like this.

It was a clean, quick kill, and I'm pretty sure there was not more than a second that elapsed between the gopher closing his eyes in this world and opening them up in Gopher Valhalla, or wherever gophers go in the afterlife.  I'd love to tell you that I felt regret, or sadness, but as I've done it more and more, I feel those things less.  

I did have the satisfaction of doing it in a way that was quick and humane, but to me there was no question that it had to be done. You cannot relocate a gopher or even trap them humanely.  It's impossible.

Even so, I'm kind of amazed that this city-born and bred girl is able to do something like this.  In the city parks where I grew up, a gopher would have been a curiosity, a creature we would have sat on the grass and observed, talking about how cute he was.  To go from that to being willing to stand over a gopher hole with a shotgun is coming a long way.  I'm not sure if its spiritual progress or not, however. But when your food sources are in danger, you do what you have to do, whether it's black ants in the sugar or a gopher in the chicken coop.

Life and death go hand in hand with growing or even just storing food, and I'm proud that even if I cannot avoid causing death, I can at least bring it to pass in a swift fashion.  Sometimes that's the best you can do, and it has to be enough.

Natural Born (Gopher) Killer

Maccabee gopher trap

Some people who move to rural environments find they enjoy hunting game and vermin, and even killing livestock for their personal consumption.  I am not one of them. 

Yet when the gopher population began to creep up in numbers here at the homestead, I went through a gradual process that, yes, has finally turned me into an unapologetic killer at times.  Sure, I may still save flies and put glass cups over moths and spiders who make it into the house, returning them all outside to live another day. But gophers have become to me what red fire ants have always been:  Something that doesn't need to be living anywhere close to where I work, walk or grow my food.

Yesterday, I successfully trapped and killed the gopher that had been making inroads into my potato, onion and pumpkin patch down in the field. It was a double victory for me, because I used a Maccabee trap to kill the gopher, which is the same gopher control method used at the winery we belong to.  That means no poison is used, which means the hawks, lizards, coyotes and other wildlife are safe from either finding the poison pellets or the poisoned gopher corpse and dying from ingesting either.  It also means that the same poison will not be working its way down through the dirt into the aquifer, as strychnine does .  A trap may be primitive and violent, but at least it only kills once, when it catches its intended victim.  You can't say the same thing about poison.

But it also occurred to me that if the winery uses these traps to keep their vineyards pest-free, vermin killings occur everywhere, whether it's in our food, the cotton that makes our clothes, or even the grapes that produce the wine we drink. There is, truly, no food we eat where something has not probably died in order that it could be brought to us.

I was a vegetarian for years and never thought of things this way.  Sure, I did not consume animal flesh, but that doesn't mean animals didn't die to bring me my grains and vegetables.

There is no getting away from this anywhere on Planet Earth, sadly.  If you eat food, mammals have been killed so that it can grow, be harvested, and brought to you.

So while I hate to think of myself as being a responsible party in all this, I am, whether I am the one placing the trap or not.  I eat food, I wear clothes, I drink wine. To believe I have no culpability in it all would be magical thinking.  

Perhaps in the next world killing will be a thing of the past, but in this one, it seems unescapable. Yet I have to say I never really realized it until I picked up that trap and held that lifeless gopher in my hands.  It's not the first gopher I've killed.  After all, I've eaten commercial food that was probably protected with traps just like this one.  But this was the first time I've actually realized my role in it all.  Natural-born killer.  Me.

Gophers, Squirrels and Insects. Oh my.

Those are the three things we're dealing with right now here at the homestead.  Some of my crops, namely my eggplant and basil, are under siege from a mystery bug that is chewing holes in their leaves.  Later in the growing season, a bit of munching won't hurt much, as the plants are bigger, but while they are small, being significantly defoliated will kill them.  So tonight I will head outside with a sprayer full of Bt (a natural insecticide) and see if I can bring things on that end to a halt.

I am also dealing with a significant gopher explosion, which is making holes everywhere, which are dangerous should you accidentally step in one and break an ankle.  And while they have not yet found the juicy potato crop I have planted, if I leave them be, they surely will. So Big Ag is bringing home some aluminum phosphide, an extremely lethal gas which you put down and gopher hole and which does the trick, quickly.  It has the advantage of killing the pest while NOT making its carcass poisonous, so if any gophers do make it above ground before dying and are eaten by something, the chemical will NOT harm the second animal.  That's important here, because we not only have dogs and cats, but also see turkey vultures, coyotes, crows and eagles regularly, which feed on carrion.

The squirrels are another story.  They don't hurt much, but will be a nuisance once our trees are fruiting, possibly ruining a fair portion of our crop by tasting a bite here and another there...on every single piece of fruit as it ripens! At least that's what happened last year. They will be humanely trapped using a Havahart trap and relocated in a wilderness section of Big Ag's ranch.  

Different pests, different solutions.  I hate the killing solutions, but sometimes that's all that's available and all that works.  This is one aspect of farming where growing in a suburban back yard is much easier than on acreage...it is always possible to discourage and redirect pests from a small area. I've used ultrasonic devices with great success, and of course trapping and relocating as well.

But down the hill, it's a different story.  A country story, which seems, by nature to be tougher and harder all the way around.  But these are the issues you deal with when you choose acreage I guess.