Insects in the Orchard – Friend or Foe?

Posted by Mom on August 14, 2017

After beginning our orchard, we’ve become more aware of the insects that co-exist with us at Harrold Country Home. In terms of our trees’ health and resilience, the insects can be lumped into two general categories: the good or the bad.

First, the good insects, which can be further divided into predators or pollinators. The majority of people find the pollinators easier to like; the beautiful butterflies and moths, the bees busily working away. Pollinators not only endear themselves to us with their brilliant colours and fanciful life cycles, they also serve an invaluable role in our food systems. Simply put, without pollinators, our food options would drop by 75%, at least*. Just imagine a world with no more chocolate, coffee or fruit. Inconceivable!


When we picked up our 36 trees from Wiffletree Farm, we also picked up two Bee Kits. Each kit includes 10 mason bees, 25 leafcutter bees, 25 nesting reeds and a bee house. We set up the bee houses within the orchard when the weather conditions were favourable (average temperature about 10℃). Now, in the middle of summer, our waiting is over and the bees are using the nesting reeds. Although our fruit trees did not blooming this year, the bees are finding plenty of pollen from our flower gardens.

Our native bees, unlike the Old World honey bees that were introduced to North America during European colonization, are the better pollinators. Honey bees prefer nectar, which they take back to the hive to be transformed into honey. Our native bees prefer pollen; and it’s pollen, after all, that needs to travel between blossoms in order to pollinate a flower and produce fruits and seeds. The female bees fly from flower to flower and collect pollen with their fuzzy bodies. The bees then comb the pollen off themselves, stuff it into a chamber along with an egg, and close off the chamber (the larva feeds upon the pollen when it hatches from the egg). Mason bees close off the nest chambers with mud and leafcutter bees with (did you guess?) pieces of leaves.

Unlike the loveable pollinators, predators tend to give people the willies: spiders, wasps, hoverflies and dragonflies. But these maligned insects are priceless. They are responsible for keeping the bad insects under control and preventing them from eating their way through our fruit trees. When we walk through the orchard on a search for the bad, we try not to disturb the spider webs. If we spot a wasp, we seek to identify it and discover which bad insect it preys upon (unlike the bees that leave pollen to feed their larvae, wasps leave a paralyzed caterpillar, insect or spider to feed theirs). When we see hoverflies (flies that mimic bees to avoid predators), we give a “yahoo” because their larvae voraciously eat pests, such as aphids, thrips, scales and caterpillars. When we see dragonflies, we grab our field guide to learn its name so we can know it next time we see it patrolling the orchard.

And now for the bad insects…

For the most part, the bad insects are those that harm our fruit trees. I’m referring to the leaf-munching caterpillars and beetles. With our trees so newly planted, they are not setting any fruit; and fortunately, we are not pestered by the flies and moths that lay their eggs in the developing fruits. The easiest to spot leaf-muncher in the orchard is the Japanese Beetle. These iridescent copper and emerald beetles like to eat the softer parts of the leaves and, if left to themselves, will skeletonize the leaves of a small tree from the top down. In an effort to reduce their numbers, we walk the orchard and scan the trees for beetles. If we spot one, we pluck it and plop it into a bucket filled with soapy water. The soap prevents them from breaking the surface tension and they drown.

We also keep a look out for caterpillars as we walk along. In the spring, a gentle shake of a tree would yield a few caterpillars dangling from silken threads to be collected and tossed to the chickens. Lately, we find the caterpillars hiding in brown, rolled-up leaves. We either unroll the leaves and clean out the caterpillars or pull off the leaves and squish the caterpillars inside.

As our trees mature, the bad insects that visit our orchard will change too. When the trees are bigger, the Japanese Beetles won’t be such a problem. But we can expect the arrival of apple maggot flies and yet-to-be-learned flies that will look to infest our pear, peach, plum or apricot trees. To combat these pests we are looking to install a pond that will provide habitat for dragonflies and encourage more of these beneficial predators to patrol the orchard for invaders. The pond will also provide the necessary water that ducks require. And ducks are fantastic at foraging for grubs, slugs and other arthropods that live under the orchard. I think it’s time to investigate duck-keeping…

* http://pollinator.org/pollinators (accessed August 8, 2017).

From Free Range to Pasture

Posted by Mom on July 24, 2017

We are converts from free-ranging chickens to pastured chickens.

When we started keeping laying hens two years ago, we had at most 16 birds at a time and they wandered about our property at will. Besides the scratching in mulch and digging up of some seedlings, we had little to complain about. We felt the nutrition of our eggs and the insect control offered by the hens were balanced by the digging, uprooting and occasional messing on the deck, and were satisfied with the arrangement.

This spring we sold the last of these chickens and started anew with 30 laying hens and a rooster. Like their predecessors, these birds we free to range far and wide, which they most certainly did. However, unlike the birds before them, our new flock had a taste for hostas. In an attempt to co-exist with free-ranging chickens that ravaged the hostas and scratched about in the gardens, we purchased roles of plastic poultry fencing and set them up around the gardens to keep the birds out. Eventually we came to see the ridiculousness of the arrangement when we ran out of poultry fencing… after erecting over 850 ft of fencing. And then the lightbulb moment came: why not fence the chickens rather than our gardens!

Other factors came into our decision to pen and pasture the chickens. For one, the birds did leave a lot of droppings strewn about the yard and walking in flip flops was risky and bare feet was insane. And then the birds, even though they had their wings clipped, were still getting enough lift to get over the permanent cedar fence around our raised beds and into the vegetable gardens. They also wandered into our neighbours yard and scratched about in her flower gardens. And the last straw was the rooster beginning to show aggressiveness and charging Dad, Grandpa and some little Harrolds.

From the door of the run we’ve stretched out electric poultry netting (we’ve yet to turn it on) that allows the birds access to the yard, field, and a hedgerow. To make sure the chickens are still eating lots of forage, we also toss in any weeds pulled from the gardens or around the yard. Roughly every one to two weeks we will re-arrange the perimeter of the pasture to give the birds new forage, especially access to the Lamb’s Quarters that they favour.



On the plus side, the hostas are re-growing their leaves now that the chickens can no longer access their salad bar. We’re also finding more toads hopping around our yard. The little ones can run around in barefeet again and have the freedom to play without having to look out for the rooster, Sir John.

In the evenings we will sometimes let the birds out to forage in the fading daylight. With dimming light they do not range as far, yet still manage to find plenty of tasty morsels. As twilight sets in they make their way back to the safety of the coop for the night. This arrangement is working for now but Dad and I are looking to create a mobile chicken coop and put the chickens to work preparing or cleaning out gardens.

An Orchard is Born

Posted by Mom on May 9, 2017

This past autumn and winter saw Dad and I researching, planning and dreaming about increasing our self-sufficiency. Our ultimate goal is to decrease our consumerism and increase our ability to live off our land and enjoy the fruits of our own labours. We immersed ourselves in permaculture* literature and videos and came away inspired to try new techniques for resilient living.

As noted in our last post, we have a flock of laying hens producing over two dozen eggs every day. These hens provide us with an exceptional source of protein and we consider our eggs to be over-achievers in health department because we know the hens who lay these eggs and the conditions in which they live. The hens are free to behave the way God designed them to behave and forage all over our yards and pastures for any creep-crawly dainties they can find. The result is a deep yellow-orange yolk, not the pale variety of grocery store eggs. We also supplement their foraging with an organic feed.

Dad Harrold is keen to expand our chicken husbandry and wishes to raise some meat birds. Doing so requires a bit more preparation and infrastructure before we’re ready to take it on.

Something much smaller scale than meat chickens that we’ve already accomplished is moving our raspberry patch. We dug up the roots from an old patch that was becoming shadier and shadier each year and consequently producing less and less fruit, and added them to a new patch in a much sunnier location.

But we have made progress in another area: our orchard! The past weekend we made a trip to Wiffletree Farm to pick up our order of 36 trees and shrubs. We brought home both fruit trees (10 apple, three plum, four pear, three peach, three apricots) and nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs (six sea buckthorns, two honey locusts, two autumn olives and three Siberian peashrub). If you’ve ever planted a tree, you’ll know how much work planting 36 trees can be. Fortunately, a helpful neighbour came over with his “mighty machine” and dug the 36 holes for us in less than an hour. If only planting could have been so quick…

Dad and Mom managed to get the 36 trees and shrubs planted over two days with some assistance from the little Harrolds. Their involvement on day one was primarily finding worms, grubs, and beetles in the upturned dirt and feeding them to the chickens. They were more involved on day two, as we rewarded their efforts with hot cocoa (after a cold, drizzly morning) and popsicles (after the sun broke out and the humidity ratcheted up).  I’m writing this post a full four days after we finished planting and my body still aches from all the shovelling. But it’s not my back or legs that hurt, it’s my pectoral muscles?!?! I didn’t know that shovelling used those muscles so much.

The very day we finished planting a week of cool, wet weather set in; providential for newly planted trees.

From the fruit trees we’ve planted, we hope to expand our orchard through rootstock propagation and grafting. If it all works, we can plant the orchard in the field currently used for cash crops. A future with a permaculture apple orchard next to our home is a much rosier future than one with a field of soy/corn as a close neighbour.

Breaking ground…

Following are some photos of the progression of our new orchard.

First tree planted and the smiles are big…
Can you tell who has been doing the most work?
36 trees and shrubs in the ground all ready to grow!

*permaculture – the development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient.

Welcome Chickens!

Posted by Mom on April 25, 2017

We have ourselves a new group of chickens. After selling our old flock to new homes, cleaning and renovating the coop and enduring over a month of buying eggs, we brought home 31 new chickens; that’s 30 pullets and 1 rooster to keep them all in line. That’s also 31 new names the girls are choosing. The rooster was easy: Sir John, named after a character from a book we’re reading, Men of Iron by Richard Pyle. I believe the hen names include Mary, Esther, Elsa, Friend, Feisty and Penny.

Our birds came from Frey’s Hatchery and were delivered to our local feed store where we found them clucking away in crates waiting to be picked up. The excitement of 30 new chickens motivated the Little Harrolds to be especially cooperative and efficient during morning lessons. They finished their work and piano practice before lunch with time to spare. If only every day could be so smooth!

From the feed store three crates of chickens were crammed into the minivan to the delight of the Little Harrolds who reached out and stroked their feathers through the crates. They spied three eggs within the crates and even witnessed a hen laying an egg while travelling in the van. Once unloaded from the crates the birds familiarized themselves with the run and quickly found the water and set to scratching about. Before they arrived, we filled the run with leaves that we had raked last fall and set aside in a pile to rot away. Into these leaves we tossed in some barely composted fruits and veggies. The chickens seemed quite pleased with their new surroundings.

Come nightfall the chickens did not know to go into the coop and up onto the roost. We found them as a huddled mass in a corner of the run and picked them up one at a time and pushed them through the run door into the coop. From there we picked them up one-by-one and placed them on the roost. It took a few more nights before they all learned to file into the coop and up onto the roost for the night.

The pullets quickly found the nest boxes and began to use them. We have ten boxes they can choose from but they favour the bottom row of boxes. A handful of hens prefer to lay their eggs outside in the run nestled among some dry leaves. We expected the hens to begin laying within a few weeks of their arrival, but the girls came with eggs in the crate and haven’t let up. We’re collecting around two dozen eggs a day. 

Ahhh… fresh eggs from the henhouse – can’t beat it.

Growing Organically – Crop Rotation

Posted by Mom on March 30, 2017

Crop rotation is an essential strategy for organic gardeners. By alternating the crops planted at a particular site, a gardener can avoid soil-borne pathogens and pests, replenish nutrients in the soil and take advantage of symbiotic relationships.

After we’ve taken stock of our seed supply and ordered new seeds, it’s time for us to decide what real estate each crop will have in the garden. We begin by pulling out the garden plan from the previous year to refresh ourselves as to where each crop had grown the previous season. This plan is a simple map sketched on paper and is invaluable because it is amazing how poor our memory is from one year to the next!

We adopted our system of crop rotation from an article by Carol Hall in the book Living the Country Dream, in which a simple, four-year rotation is presented. Hall recommends dividing your garden into four quadrants and rotating those quadrants each year. The first quadrant contains the cabbage family (brassicas); the second root crops; the third legumes, cool-weather crops and salad crops; the fourth warm-weather crops (see table below). The rotation ensures that vegetables that are compatible with one another stay together and that nutrient recycling within the soil operates optimally. This system works well for us and we use it in our four raised gardens.

We also grow veggies in a reclaimed strip of a former hay field. The field had grown hay for over a decade before we arrived on the property. The hay, however, was losing ground to grasses and weeds and would be turned over by the renters for soybean and corn (we hope to reclaim the remainder of this 7 acre field in time and are currently hatching up a scheme). We wanted to expand our gardening space and knew the soil beneath the hay crop was well over the minimum 3 years without the application of non-organic materials that is necessary for organic certification. It was now or never if we wished to make use of the soil for our gardens. We chose the ‘now’ option and rototilled two 15ft x 30ft rectangles. That was in 2013.

Vegetable Garden and Chicken Picture

In the past, the crops we grew in the field were those that garden-raiding-herbivores found less palatable. Their favourite delicacies we planted in our raised beds – too high for them to jump/climb into and protected by a fence. Fortunately, we don’t have to contend with deer raiding our garden.

It’s in the field where we grew our squashes, corn, melons and potatoes; crops that needed lots of room to sprawl of that we wanted to produce a larger harvest than a raised bed would accommodate.This year we will use a fence around the garden to keep out our foraging chickens and (hopefully) the rabbits and groundhogs too. The fence will allow us to try to grow the rabbits’ favourites (peas, beans, cabbages, lettuces and beets) and permit us to grow something from each quadrant that Ms. Hall identifies in her article. If the fence works, we can take full advantage of crop rotation in the field garden as well.

The second plot in the field is the site of our permanent crops: asparagus, strawberries and rhubarb. These three perennial crops are traditional plants for a northern homesteader. Once established, and with a little bit of maintenance, they will continue to produce for decades.

Quadrant 1: BrassicasQuadrant 2:Root CropsQuadrant 3:
Legumes, Cool-weather crops, Salad crops
Quadrant 4:
Warm-weather crops
Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, cabbage, Chinese cabbage, kale, cauliflower, kohlrabi.Carrots, salsify, parsnips, potatoes, rutabagas, winter beets, winter radishes.Swiss chard, turnips, beans, peas celery, onions, leeks, lettuce/salad greens, spinach, summer beets, summer radishes, summer turnips.Cucumbers, corn, melons, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, melons, squashes, zucchini.

Hal, C. (2007). Plotting With Nature. In Cruickshank, T. (Ed.), Living The Country Dream (pp. 61-66). Richmond Hill, Ontario: Firefly Books Ltd.

Our Seed Story

Posted by Mom on February 14, 2017

If you want to be a purist when it comes to organic gardening, it will take more than following a few principles surrounding composting and mulching; you need to consider the plants themselves and the seeds from which they came. Here is some information on the seeds that we grow at Harrold Country Home.

First off, gardening is a lot of work. Organic gardening is even more work, but the rewards are sweeter. And, f you want a truly organic garden, you need to populate it with seeds or seedlings that originated from an organic plant. At Harrold County Home, we plant our vegetable gardens with either seeds purchased from certified organic growers or from seeds we’ve saved ourselves from previous years. This past year we also bought organic seedlings.

Purchased Organic Seeds

To be certified organic, a seed must be grown by a certified organic grower. Certified growers do not expose their seeds to any chemicals during the growth of the parent plant, the harvest of its seeds, or the post-harvest processing. We purchase our seeds from two Ontario suppliers of organic seeds: William Dam Seeds and Terra Edibles. These suppliers sell organic seeds in addition to conventional seeds.  We are especially fond of Terra Edibles because they sell primarily heirloom varieties, some of which are hard to find elsewhere.

We like to search out organic and heirloom seeds for our gardens because, well, we enjoy eating the produce, but also because we like to perpetuate seeds with a history. Our ancestors grew these seeds for two main reasons. First, because the plants were so well-suited to the local growing conditions that they could complete their life cycle and leave seeds to propagate the next generation. Second, these seeds are dependable, and when growing food for a family, you want to save and plant the seeds you can depend on.

The seeds our ancestors grew were also tasty! Unlike conventional agriculture, where seeds are treated and bred to produce an easy-to-grow and easy-to-ship commodity, heirloom varieties taste better and are infinitely fresher. I think the best example of this is the tomato. Typical tomatoes – red, glossy orbs – bought at a grocery store are not picked at their ripest (nor tastiest). Instead, the harvest is timed to ensure the fruits remain aesthetically pleasing upon their arrival at the store and while sitting upon the shelf. This means harvest occurs before the fruit is fully ripe. If the tomatoes are too green, a shot of ethylene gas will quickly redden their skins to give the appearance of ripeness while keeping the tomatoes firm enough to withstand the rigors of transportation. In contrast, heirloom tomatoes show greater variety in shape, size, and colour than those bright red spheres we’ve come to think of as tomatoes. And all that variety in appearance coincides with a variety in tastes and uses. The organic heirloom tomatoes that we grow are picked when they are ripe and flavourful and transportation consists of walking from the garden to the kitchen.

Saved Organic Seeds

Purchasing seeds that are certified organic is a good start. Going forward, you can save seeds from your favourite plants and try to sprout them again the following year. We’ve not been too adventurous with seed saving yet; so far we’ve stuck to the easy-to-save seeds from melons and squashes. We simply lay the seeds out on a paper towel to air-dry completely. Then fold them up within the paper towel and put the towel into a small paper envelope, label it and file it away in our seed box.

The pumpkin, butternut and acorn squash seeds I saved from last year did sprout and grow this year. Our daughter was also keen to save and plant some seeds from a grocery store cantaloupe (cantaloupe being her favourite fruit). For the learning opportunity, we grew what is definitely not an organic plant. She helped to plant, nurture, transplant and weed  her plant until she was able to pick her very own cantaloupe. The melon was much smaller than its grocery store prodigy, but it definitely looked and tasted like a cantaloupe.

Purchased Organic Seedlings

Where growing from seed is not an option, or very difficult (i.e., herbs), gardeners can plant certified organic seedlings. My basil seeds did not sprout this year. I was anxious to find some organic basil for our garden. Dad found some at Sheridan Nurseries and brought them home as a pleasant surprise for me. I like to grow basil next to the tomatoes to repel some of the tomatoes’ insect pests. We also like to eat the basil as pesto, in a fresh tomato salad or with pasta. Needless to say, I really wanted to find some organic basil plants to compensate for my failure.

Finding organic seedlings can take more searching out than finding organic seeds. The vast majority of seedlings bought from a nursery, unless labelled organic, are sure to have been treated with some form of synthetic pesticides, fungicides, herbicides or fertilizers. Among these treatments are the neonicotinoids; a persistent insecticide that inhibits the ability of bees and other pollinators to navigate, feed or reproduce and increases their susceptibility to diseases. We do not want to grow such plants in our garden and will forgo planting a vegetable, choosing instead to purchase from a local market, if we cannot find an organic source to plant.

If you are what you eat, then we want to feed our family the freshest, healthiest, and most ecologically viable food. The best way to ensure that is to grow it organically ourselves.  

Growing Organically – The Seeds

Posted by Mom on November 22, 2016

If you want to be a purist when it comes to organic gardening, it will take more than following a few principles surrounding composting and mulching; you need to consider the plants themselves and the seeds from which they came. Here is some information on the seeds that we grow.

First off, gardening is a lot of work. Organic gardening is even more work, but the rewards are sweeter. However, if you want a truly organic garden, you need to populate it with seeds or seedlings that did originate from an organic plant. At Harrold County Home, we plant our vegetable gardens with either seeds purchased from certified organic growers or from seeds we’ve saved ourselves from previous years. This past year we also bought organic herbs.

Purchased Organic Seeds

We purchase our organic seeds from Terra Edibles, an organic seed producer here in Ontario. To be a certified organic seed, the seed must be grown by a certified organic grower; these are growers who do not expose their plants to any chemicals during the growth of the parent plant, harvest of its seeds, or post-harvest processing. We are especially fond of Terra Edibles because they sell primarily heirloom varieties, some of which are hard to find elsewhere.

We like to search out organic and heirloom seeds for our gardens because, well, we enjoy eating the produce, but also because we like to perpetuate seeds with a history. Our ancestors grew these seeds for two main reasons. First, because the plants were so well-suited to the local growing conditions that they could complete their life cycle, thereby leaving seeds for the next generation. Second, these seeds are dependable, and when growing food for a family, you want to save and plant the seeds you can depend on.

The seeds our ancestors grew were also tasty! Unlike conventional agriculture, where seeds are treated and bred to produce an easy-to-grow and easy-to-ship commodity, heirloom varieties taste better and are infinitely fresher. I think the best example of this is the tomato. Typical tomatoes – red, glossy orbs – bought at a grocery store are not picked at their ripest (nor tastiest). Instead, the harvest is timed to ensure the fruits remain aesthetically pleasing upon their arrival at the store. This means harvest occurs before the fruit is fully ripe. If the tomatoes are too green, a shot of ethylene gas will quickly redden their skins to give the appearance of ripeness while keeping the tomatoes firm enough to withstand the rigors of transportation. In contrast, heirloom tomatoes show greater variety in shape, size, and colour than those bright red spheres we’ve come to think of as tomatoes. And all that variety in appearance coincides with a variety in tastes and uses. The heirloom tomatoes that we grow are picked when they are ripe and flavourful and transportation consists of walking from the garden to the back door.

Saved Organic Seeds

Purchasing seeds that are certified organic is a good start. Going forward, you can save seeds from your favourite plants and plant them again the following year. We’ve not been too adventurous with seed saving yet; sticking to the easy-to-save seeds from melons and squashes. We simply lay the seeds out on a paper towel to dry completely. Then fold them up within the paper towel and put the towel into a small paper envelope and file it away in the seed box.

The pumpkin, butternut and acorn squash seeds I saved from last year did sprout and grow this year. Our daughter was also keen to save and plant some seeds from a grocery store cantaloupe (cantaloupe being her favourite fruit). For the learning opportunity, we grew what is definitely not an organic plant. She helped to plant, tend, transplant and tend some more until she was able to pick her very own cantaloupe. The melon was much smaller than its grocery store prodigy, but it definitely looked and tasted like a cantaloupe.

Purchased Organic Seedlings 

Where growing from seed is not an option, or very difficult (i.e., herbs), gardeners can plant certified organic seedlings. My basil seeds did not sprout this year. I was anxious to find some organic basil for our garden. Dad Harrold found some at Sheridan Nurseries and brought them home as a pleasant surprise for me. I like to grow basil next to the tomatoes to repel some of the tomatoes’ insect pests. We also like to eat the basil as pesto, in a fresh tomato salad or with pasta. Needless to say, I really wanted to find some organic basil plants to compensate my seedling failure.

Finding organic seedlings can take more searching out than finding organic seeds. The vast majority of seedlings bought from a nursery, unless labelled organic, are sure to have been treated with some form of synthetic pesticides, fungicides, herbicides or fertilizers. Among these treatments are the neonicotinoids; a persistent insecticide that inhibits the ability of bees and other pollinators to navigate, feed or reproduce and increases their susceptibility to diseases. We do not want to grow such plants in our garden and will forgo planting a vegetable, choosing instead to purchase from a local market, if we cannot find an organic source to plant.

If you are what you eat, then we want to feed our family the freshest, healthiest, and most ecologically viable food. The best way to ensure that is to grow it ourselves.  

Mites, Weevils and Flies, Oh My!

Posted by Mom on October 11, 2016

You can’t live in the country without getting acquainted with bugs. They really do pop up everywhere. And unless you have a sense of humour about it, these invasions can be quite off-putting.

Now some creepy crawlers I can easily live with. And for the record, these creepy crawlers are lumped together and classified as arthropods – organisms with jointed legs. In our home, we leave the jumping spiders alone because the pros outweigh the cons: the spiders give us pest control without the webs. Ants, on the other hand, have to go! As do mosquitos and flies.

This fall I’ve become engaged in a battle, of sorts, with mites, weevils and flies. Not all at the same time, but on three different fronts.

We’ve realized that our poor little backyard flock of chickens live in a coop infested with mites. The mites are nasty little creatures that like to hideout in the woodwork during the day and crawl out at night to feed on the chicken’s blood. I get shivers up my spine whenever I see one. Unfortunately, our coop is made from wood paneling and plywood and once the mites arrive, they are pernicious little beasts and quite difficult to get rid of. They are definitely a small but mighty foe.

These mites are super pests; they are capable of surviving for 34 weeks without food and won’t die in the cold weather, as lice and fleas do. The best defence against these little nasties is, of course, a good offence; and that means keeping the coop clean. We have sand on the floor of our coop and clean-up the mess beneath the roost at least every two days. But as we let our hens free-range, the doorway to the run is open and House Sparrows fly in and help themselves to the chicken’s feed. I’ve found them inside the coop itself and suspect that they introduced the mites.

Now that our coop has been invaded, the battle is on to rid the coop of the mites. Our best weapon is diatomaceous earth. I sprinkled some of this powder all over the horizontal surfaces, on as many vertical surfaces as I could and into all the cracks I could see. I also mixed some into the bedding of the next boxes. The diatomaceous earth works because it is composed of silica, which absorbs the oil and fats from the exoskeleton of the mites while slicing their little bodies. Rather cruel when you think about it, but it’s the mites or my hens. And since I’m the one making the decisions, the war is on!

Another front on the arthropod battle, and one that I’ve been waging for months now, is the Fruit Fly Battle. It has been complicated by three little people who do not realize the importance of properly disposing of snack leftovers. Two little ones in particular are guilty of stashing apple cores wherever is most convenient at the time. And of course, the fruit flies find them long before me. I’ve found cores stuffed in bedroom garbage cans, toy bins and behind shelves.

I have several weapons for my defence. First, I try to keep fruits, veggies, and compost inaccessible to the flies. Second, every few days I make a trap, catch a cluster, and get rid of them. These traps consist of a bit of wine or vinegar at the base of a glass. I make a paper funnel and seal any gaps with tape. The traps always work, but are at their best within the first few hours. Third, I try to squish a fly between my hands by clapping wildly into the air and looking like I’m a few donuts shy of a full dozen. But lately, I’ve gotten desperate and have hung fly tape above some fruity bait – disgusting, yet effective.

The final front in my arthropod battle is with weevils and this came about because of hollyhock seeds. I had saved some seeds from our hollyhocks and was looking to label and put them away until spring. I found little gray weevils crawling about within the container. I started to sort through the seeds and pick out the little insects. The larva had fed on the embryonic seeds, and having matured, burrowed out, hoping to drop to the ground and overwinter in the soil before re-emerging in the spring to lay eggs within the flowers of next year’s plants.


Emily Jones (http://naturalcurrentevents.blogspot.ca/)

If left unattended, my hollyhock patch will eventually become unable to reproduce since the weevils will destroy the seeds. This battlefront will have to go on hold over the winter and resume again in the spring. At that time I have three options at my disposal; handpicking, spraying insecticidal soap, and removing seed pods. I envision some of these tedious tasks being a chance for my little ones to earn some extra money. The more help in the arthropod wars the better!

Where We Grow Our Veggies

Posted by Mom on August 30, 2016

Here at our country home we have two garden areas where we grow our organic vegetables; one is a group of four raised beds and the other is a pair of ground plots.

I grew up with gardeners; my parents had a garden plot where they grew fresh vegetables for their family of 6. My dream was to one day own enough land to also grow vegetables for my family. When Dad and I took ownership of our first inner-city home, I tried to grow some vegetables and herbs in containers, but didn’t grow much beyond a few cherry tomatoes and some mint leaves. To compensate for our lack of home-grown harvest, we joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) food co-op and enjoyed fresh, local produce from June to October. We enjoyed eating our CSA-grown food for three years before moving to our country home and having an opportunity to see just how green our own thumbs really were.

We took up residence in November and through that first winter Dad and I were scheming about vegetable gardens. Our visions kept circling back to raised garden beds. In the end, we built four raised beds using lumber from the Western Red Cedar. This wood is naturally resistant to decay and does not require chemical treatments that could leach into our garden soil, and later, into our food.

Each raised bed is a rectangle 18 feet long, five feet wide and two feet tall. Before we filled the beds with soil, we lined the insides with landscape fabric and tossed in some logs, branches and leaves that would slowly decompose and replenish the soil over time. This organic matter also reduced the amount of topsoil for delivery. We oriented the beds east to west, giving the full 18 feet direct sunlight from dawn until mid afternoon. On the western end of each bed we erected a trellis to reduce the effect of the prevailing winds that blow in from the neighbouring field.

Within the raised beds we grow root crops and crops that are favoured by rabbits and groundhogs (i.e., peas, beans, lettuces, and cabbages) or that need to be supported (i.e., peas and tomatoes). I found that planting the veggies across the beds in five foot rows is easier to weed than rows running the 18 foot length. I can simply push a hoe away from me and then pull it back toward me and I don’t have to perform any contortions.

We’re now in the fourth year of using our raised beds and they are working very well for us. Just this spring we ordered four yards of triple mix soil to top them up; those leaves and branches are decomposing and nourishing the soil, but their decomposition is also slowly lowering the soil surface. We also placed a fence around the beds to demarcate them from the surrounding lawn and to protect the seeds and tender transplants during the early growing season from our free-ranging chickens.

Our second location for growing vegetables is a rectangular plot tilled up in an old hay field. For over a decade the field produced hay, but when our renters determined the hay-worthy plants were being out-competed, they planned to switch to growing corn and soy. We did not want to have those crops growing so close to our home and, having read a little about permaculture, wished to make use of the rich soil beneath the old hay field rather than having it disturbed annually by tilling. We re-claimed two acres of the field and, while pondering how to use these two acres, rototilled two rectangular plots. One plot is devoted to perennial crops, such as asparagus, rhubarb, garlic and strawberries. In the other we grow crops that either need plenty of space or are unappetizing to rabbits and groundhogs; these include potatoes, pumpkins, summer and winter squashes, and melons.

The challenge with the field plots are the grasses and weeds that sprout from all the seeds trapped in the soil that we’ve exposed by our rototilling. The little ones and I have spent a few sessions hoeing and pulling weeds but these times just make the harvest taste all the better. So far, we’ve enjoyed eating the zucchinis, watermelons, cantaloupes, potatoes and strawberries while watching in anticipation while our pumpkins and butternut and acorn squashes continue to ripen.

Population Fluxes Within Backyard Flock

Posted by Mom on August 13, 2016

Grandpa and I went on a vacation this past spring. We were gone seven weeks. During these seven weeks we have a fine example of how unpredictable our spring weather can be. One of our hens died during a heat wave. These chickens are bred to withstand our colder winters but we didn’t know they were extra sensitive to the heat. We do have a cold mist of water spraying just outside the henhouse in the coop but that was not enough. My son said after she died they kept watch for signs of overheating. If their beaks were open and their wings were puffed out they would dunk them in a container of water. That did the trick. So now we have eight.

Here is where we see the unpredictability of our spring weather. A cold front came through just before the heat wave and Henry, a rooster, froze to death. I know I said these guys can take the cold but at night they all roost together in the henhouse to keep warm. Well one night Gordon, the alpha male, decided not to let Henry into the house before the automatic door closed. Henry froze to death. You ask, why two roosters? When we got the chickens they were too young to tell the sex. And it didn’t seem to be a problem until it was. So now we have seven.

We also have Rhode Island Reds. These are all hens as we purchased them when they were old enough to tell what sex they were. Now the white Chanteclers feel territorial and dislike the reds. When we first got them we had to go into the henhouse for several nights and physically put the reds onto the roost with the whites. Now they roost together but the whites still rule the roost.

Okay, so this spring the weather was a bit extreme. Usually when we go on our annual spring vacation it’s rainy with the sun getting warmer. Planting can begin end of April but mainly early May. We miss this part of country living as grandpa and I go to the Gulf of Mexico where we honeymooned forty three years ago. You can read how I feel in what I call ‘my happy place’ in our Poetry Corner.