Dying Nicely

Our summer project of killing half our lawn is already off to a good start. As you can see, much of it is brown and the good news is, everything that is brown is what we WANT to get rid of. In other words, the lawn we are keeping is staying green and the lawn we're removing is dying nicely. Some more will die as the summer wears on, but we're off to a really good start.

In a way it bothers me to kill a healthy lawn; that is the farmer in me whose job it is to keep things green and growing whenever possible. But sometimes having to kill something is inevitable.  I do not smile when I see my dead lawn, instead I tend to look down at those moments and remember why it is that I have to kill it: It's so we can plant some appropriate plants in the space, or add additional patio area.  It's also so I'm not throwing good drinking water on a crop that provides nothing for us but something to look at and walk on. And most importantly, it's because if everyone is cutting back -- and even if they are not -- using less water during a drought is the right thing to do.

A time to die.

Any good farmer or homesteader should have trouble with killing living things; the day it doesn't bother you is the day you need to pack it in, buy a condo in the city, and seek the services of a professional therapist, because taking pleasure or just not caring about the times when you have to be a participant in the taking of any life is just, well, creepy.  

I find when I have to kill something, whether it's a plant or a creature, I go down  little checklist in my mind.  Question One: Is the killing necessary so that something else may live or so that something does not suffer? Question Two: Is there a better way to accomplish this rather than taking said life?  If the answer to #1 is yes, or the answer to #2 is no, then I know what I have to do.  But truthfully, there isn't a spider, ant trail, chicken or patch of grass I don't run through the aforementioned checklist with before commencing with killing it. 

Thankfully today it is only part of a lawn that has to die here, and I can honestly look forward to the things that are going to take its place.  But no matter what, I am cognizant of the fact that as the homesteader here on this particular patch of land, part of my job is deciding what lives and what dies. It's a responsibility I hope I never take lightly.

Bounty

This is the height of our farm's growing season, and I have a full refrigerator and freezer because of it.  So far, I've harvested approximately eight pounds (yes, pounds!) of berries, more salads than we can eat, lots of snap peas, and my first spinach crop since moving here is just about ready to blanche and freeze.  If posting is a little light right now, that is the reason.  When crops are heavy, posting is sparse ... just like spare time.  Makes sense, right?

I've also been dealing with the usual varieties of pests.  I've had birds in the berries, earwigs and a few aphids on the lettuce, and I believe the squirrels ate most of my ripening blueberries.  But with such a great harvest, I'm not all that upset about sharing some of the excess with the creatures who live here. None of the pest problems have overwhelmed the abundant harvest, which I think is a combination of learning the land and getting lucky with the weather.  We had no late-season frost, and no winds that I was not prepared for.

Speaking of the creatures who live here, I was pouring wine at the winery yesterday when a gopher snake came slithering up onto the patio.  Before any customers noticed, I went in and got one of the owners, who quickly caught it and placed it back out in the vineyard, where it could live another day to do some useful gopher control.  

Everything's showing up in robust abundance right now. Hope it's the same wherever you are!

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.