Fun Farm Games: Guess-A-Critter

My fellow farmer has been very excited about our new livestock this year. Though the stock numbers in the hundreds, it's not the many mice, rats, voles, chipmunks, squirrels, and woodchucks. It's not the thousands of honeybees that a friend tends on our farm.

Nor have we gotten hundreds more draft horses, or cats or dogs, though I occasionally express a wish for another kitty to join Cricket, our present cat, and my fellow farmer longs for a dog. (He also longs for chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, and cows, and then I remind him of the hundreds of vegetables that would be neglected should we have hundreds of animals.)

Depending on your age and patience, my fellow will string you along for a good long while, trying to get you to guess our new critters. Then he'll say, “Do you want to see? Do you want to see?”

He'll bring you to the front porch, and you might look around a bit, wondering about the farmer's sanity. But he'll eagerly point out a squat black plastic bin on legs.

“Do you want to see?” By now, you might have guessed the riddle. Or maybe not, until my fellow opens up the lid … and there you see … hundreds of compost worms!

Yes, worms, happy little red wigglers, and my fellow takes great pleasure in showing them to those people who are willing to look, as well as feeding them table scraps and eggshells and coffee grounds.

“You want to help feed the worms?” he asks our daughter and me frequently. His enthusiasm is irresistible, and we troop out to the porch. He opens up the lid, and the the little red worms squirm away from the sudden light.

“They love this,” he says, “Watch this.” He dumps the scraps on top, and spreads them around. We watch. Nothing happens.

“Nice, huh?” he says gleefully. “These are plump worms. These are happy worms!”

Not only has my fellow made his worm bin dream come true, but he did it very efficiently. A retired man over Concord way was selling the worms he'd had for ten years. The man was travelling some, and it had gotten to the point where he had to buy lettuce to feed the worms while he was away. The bin, named Can-O-Worms, is made of 100% recycled plastic, and it came with the worms, the original manual, a compost spreading-spoon, two worm articles printed from the Internet, and lots of well-worm-wishes, all for much less than buying it new.

Of course, here at the farm we have lots of vegetable scraps, and soon we had lots of overfed worms, as my fellow discovered after a few weeks of zealous feedings. He slowed down on the scraps, but kept up the worm tours.

The worms provide farm entertainment, and they also provide castings, in solid and liquid form, which are excellent compost. Our houseplants have never been happier, and our spinach never germinated better in the flats, and the experimental ginger we grew at the end of the greenhouse bed looked great.

It took a while to figure out where to keep the worm bin, handy for feeding, and out of the rain, but not so prominent on the front porch that a person feels as if her lovely outdoor suppers are entirely dominated by plastic bins of worms. Then came the next stage of the worm project, the stage my fellow neglected to mention in his planning.

“So . . .” he said, in the autumn, “the worms can't get too cold, or they'll die.”

“Yeah?” I said, perhaps a trifle suspiciously.

“So . . . we'd have to keep them in the house.”

“What? I didn't know that.”

“They're such nice worms,” he said. “Do you want to see them?”

I shook my head. “Remember when we got the cider press, and the man said it was so good-looking he kept it in his living room all winter?”

“Yeah . . . "

“This worm bin is nowhere near that good-looking, and the cider press is in the storage area, not in the living room!”

“We could put the worms in the kitchen?”

I shook my head, hard.

“How about the downstairs bedroom?”

The downstairs bedroom is a guest room/pantry/laundry room/cat litter pan/general junk room. What could be nicer for a guest than being joined there by hundreds of worms in a plastic bin?

“We can try it,” I said reluctantly. I didn't want to be responsible for the death of all these beloved worms.

We shifted the bin back and forth, all over the bedroom, and finally found a place that worked, more or less. We could get to the washer, and the bed, and close the bathroom door. And it sure was handy to the kitchen scraps.

“Nice!” said my fellow farmer. “These are happy worms! Hey, do you want to see?”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Feb 13 - Feb 19, 2019

The Woodchuck World

Here on our New Hampshire vegetable farm, we expect to lose a little produce every year to woodchucks. We did not know, however, that this was the year of the rodent, from mice and voles and squirrels and chipmunks all the way to rabbits and woodchucks. Wow, there were a lot of them around, and wow, were we farmers discouraged when we went out to harvest kale and found over ¾ of the kale crop eaten. That was just the beginning.

Next were the carrots, and the chard, and the broccoli, and the peas. Plus there was something mysterious happening in the greenhouse. We've always grown our first planting of lettuce in the heated greenhouse, so that we have early lettuce. But this year, the lettuce looked kind of funny. Kind of nibbled actually. Kind of like something was eating the heads, night after night, and day after day.

It took us a while to comprehend what was happening, as we have two inch thick baseboards and chicken wire around the greenhouse. In fact, we didn't actually realize the problem until we saw an injudicious woodchuck munching the lettuce in broad daylight.

The woodchuck had sidestepped the baseboards and chicken wire entirely, handily digging under the back wall, behind the propane tanks, which gave plenty of cover from the unobservant farmers. At last we farmers got wise, and started filling in the holes, layering on the chicken wire and heavy rocks. We also covered the kale and carrots and chard and broccoli in the garden with row cover. Then we found the woodchuck den right under the barn, conveniently located next to the greenhouse. There were millions of little woodchucks coming out day and night to eat our yummy produce.

In June, we sent out a desperate call for Havahart-type live traps to our CSA members, and added four more to our one. We researched favorite baits of woodchucks: carrots, peanut butter, and crackers were popular. The favorite was melon. Melon! Who would have thought? We bought ourselves an out-of-season cantaloupe at the co-op, which we never do. It didn't seem fair to feed all that nice melon to the woodchucks. We ate half of it ourselves, and grudgingly chunked up the rest for the traps.

We set our traps faithfully, wearing gloves to keep the human scent off the traps. But no one except the ants and the farmers seemed to like the melon. As we lost crops daily, we got more and more discouraged.

One day, as we inspected yet another empty trap, I said to my fellow farmer, “You're supposed to rub melon all over it.”

“All over what?” our daughter asked.

My fellow farmer, quick-thinking and funny even in despair, answered, “All over the woodchuck. You're supposed to rub melon all over the woodchuck.”

This may be the only time we laughed during the entire woodchuck affair.

Next we tried peanut butter on crackers. In three weeks, in the garden, we caught a rabbit, a rat, a grey squirrel, two possums, and a racoon. (Other years, we've also caught a catbird, and a skunk.) But not a single woodchuck.

We let all of those other critters go, and, then tried concentrating our traps: we put all five in and around the greenhouse and barn. Someone told us that woodchucks love grape jelly, and we made a grape jelly on bread trail right to the trap. We caught our first woodchuck!

But we did not feel triumphant. We felt sad. It was a little woodchuck, and it was in a trap, and now we would take it away from the woodchuck family to some strange area of the world. (Another year, I saw a small woodchuck in our trap, and its mother scrabbling outside the cage, trying to help her little one. It was painful to witness.)

Over the next three days, we caught six little woodchucks. We quit baiting the traps, thinking the critters were all gone, and we still caught three more chucks, two little and one big, in the next week. This made an immediate difference on harvest days: we actually had lettuce and kale and carrots and chard to harvest.

But it's not clear how many woodchucks actually survive when they are caught and released. There are the live traps, and there are also kill traps and guns and dogs and poisons, and all of them seem terrible. We do not want to kill woodchucks or split up families, and we do not want to live in a world where we think there isn't enough for everybody. As I sob this out to my kind fellow farmer, he says, “I released them all in the same place. Maybe they found each other, and they're figuring things out?”

It is a slim hope, but we don't know what else to do. Catching woodchucks is one of the unhappy compromises we make to keep farming.

We can also hope, in our sustainable farming sort of way, that maybe we have improved the genetics of woodchucks: we transport family members across the river, probably at the very same time the folks across the river are transporting other families of woodchucks to us. We'd like to be helping the woodchuck world somehow.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 16 – Jan 22, 2019

A Long Winter's Nap

Ah, December . . . that delightful month on our New Hampshire vegetable farm. The garden-free vistas are glorious, the haying-free horizons are endless, the worry-free couch and the bed are sumptuous. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours of sleep? It feels so good.

By now, we have finished our CSA produce distribution for the year, and we are nearly done with our Farmers' Market sales for the year. We've got little projects to do outside, from feeding the draft horses three times a day to clearing out all the frosted tomato, pepper, and basil plants from the greenhouses, from rolling up irrigation to reorganizing the tool area. But none of these are desperately urgent. (Well, feeding the horses is pretty important. They do like a timely meal.)

And, of course, there is letting our kitty in and out the front door. This is an important job, as is cleaning up the dead mice from our kitty's work in the night. In fact, the other night, there was a dead mouse on the bedroom floor, along with a dead mouse in a trap in the kitchen, and a dead rat in the trap in the living room.

Happily, my nice fellow farmer generally does the cleaning up of dead animals duty, by tossing them outside for some clever larger animal to discover. We think it might be a fox on her rounds, but it could be any number of critters looking for a nice meal. At least it feels like we are contributing to the cycle of sustenance and sustainability on the farm.

Occasionally, I pitch in to the dead rodent clean-up. For example, not long ago, I was taking wet laundry out of the washing machine, and felt something squishier than a sock. But soft and soggy, like a wet sock. I pulled it out. I looked at it, uncomprehending, for rather a long time. Yes, it was a dead mouse, in the washing machine.

“Oh!” I said. “Oh, oh, oh! I am sorry, mouse, that you had to die by washing machine! I can not imagine how this happened!”

Of course, dying by washing machine is probably not that much worse than dying by trap or by cat. Best for the humans in the household is when the cat eats the entire mouse, rather than leaving it whole and dead on the bedroom rug. But even that is better than leaving it dead in pieces on the bedroom rug. Especially when it is in the middle of the night, and it is dark, and a person is stumbling to the bathroom, and has forgotten the cat-mouse episode earlier in the night. It is rather daunting to step on a dead mouse, in one's bare feet, in the night. But it is even more daunting to step on the sticky intestines of a dead mouse.

It turns out that there is an enormous number of small critters about this year, from mice and rats and voles to squirrels and chipmunks. Apparently this is due to the heavy acorn drop last year, which prompts lots of begetting in the small animal world, and then a lot of chewing on tomatoes, zucchini, and sweet peppers in the garden. Even the hot peppers were not immune to nibbling. The chipmunks had several nice dens right in our greenhouses, and the voles simply sucked our greenhouse eggplant under the earth. The plants and fruit just disappeared.

Our kitty caught a fair number of voles and chipmunks and mice outside too, but it has all been more than a one-cat rodent control program can manage. Cats and traps and washing machines have not been enough in the house this season, either. We already have a rodent-proof storage area in our basement for potatoes, carrots, and other root crops. (Sometimes we tell our visitors that if they misbehave we'll put them in the cage in the basement. So far no one has done anything bad enough.) 

But this year, for our winter squash, which doesn't like the damp conditions of the basement for storage, we had to build another cage, out of two by fours and hardware cloth. This fine cage stands in our living room, full of wooden crates of winter squash, and a few last tomatoes on trays. As you can imagine, this is not the most beauteous element of our living room. But at least it appears to be working, especially since farmers all over the region are reporting heavy damage to winter squash, both before harvest and after harvest, in storage.

Now, you might be wondering how this all leads to the wonderful times of December on the farm. Well. Outside, and in the house, there are many creatures stirring, including the cat and the rats and the mice. But still, we rest easy, with our squash and our root crops gathered in, and nestled all snug in their cages. Why, now we have visions of feasts, rather than rages! And my fellow farmer in his kerchief, and I in my cap, can settle our brains for a long winter's nap.

 Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 19 - Dec 25, 2018

Farmers Helping Farmers

Recently, in a meeting with our farmer-friend-colleagues, my fellow and I were asked how our 2018 garden season shaped up. We instantly launched into a detailed description of weather, equipment, and crop woes, simultaneously shaking our heads and making feeble jokes about it all.

“This has been one of our toughest years farming,” we finished up, and our farmer friends all nodded sympathetically. They had such looks of tender concern that I turned to my fellow and said, “Let's see, can we think of anything cheerful to tell these people?”

The nice bunch of people chuckled, and my fellow farmer said, “Well . . .” he looked at me. Neither of us wanted to discourage the other farmers with our sad stories.

“We have every intention of doing it again next year?” he said, the question mark strong in his voice, looking at me and laughing. I laughed too, and one of our colleagues said, “At least you're laughing!”

We are still laughing, and we are also glad to say goodbye to the end of this tough gardening season. One of the bright spots has certainly been joining this group of  farmer-friend-colleagues. The group began meeting monthly for an hour or two last winter, with the idea of helping increase support for local farmers from our communities, as well increasing access to high-quality, local produce for all income levels. Early on, the conversation turned to more ways we farmers could support each other, and thus “Farmers Helping Farmers” was born.

“Farmers Helping Farmers” is a practical group. Sometimes we have a written agenda for our meetings, and sometimes we don't, because we're all scrambling around in our fields with no time to write agendas. There is a mission statement, however, which was written during the slower winter months: “Farmers Helping Farmers is a group of Monadnock Region small farmers who choose to recognize each other as allies and friends rather than competitors. We would like farming to be a viable and valued vocation, and for the high quality food we grow to be accessible to more people in our communities. While the group is intentionally led by farmers, we welcome support from other individuals and organizations. ”

For the past several months, our practical support of one another has manifested in working parties at each other's farms. We have weeded carrots on two farms, weeded lettuce and salad greens on another, dug heirloom dahlia tubers on a fourth, and had potlucks at most every farm. Our potlucks tend to feature the fast and fresh crop of the week: a bowl of sugar snap peas and a basket of husk cherries, grated carrots with dressing, lettuce greens, watermelon. Luckily there also seems to be at least one farmer who's not having a farm crisis on meeting day, and comes with an actual cooked dish: pasta and beef and greens, zucchini bread, apple crisp. Once we even hand-cranked vanilla ice cream together, in a devil-may-care flourish of worn-out, mid-season farmers.

The food is good, and the company is good, and the ideas are good. We exchange tips on planting and harvesting, on CSA membership and produce sales, on keeping records and keeping sane. Speaking of farmer sanity, it's also been mighty fine to see how big the weeds are in each other's gardens.

“We totally lost this section,” said one farmer, as we waded through waist-high weeds at his farm.

“This looks just like our carrot patch!” said another. 

“Yeah, I sent my apprentice into a section with the weed-whacker the other day, to see if she could find any crops under there!” added a third.

We all laughed then, a little giddily. It sure is nice to know that other farmers have the same troubles we do: huge weeds, too much work, too little time, and, of course, painfully tight budgets. We are all working towards environmental sustainability, physical sustainability (as in, can our farmer muscles hold up the enterprise, or will we gimp over to the compost pile, settle down right on the black, rich, warm, sweet-smelling stuff, and then gaze at the blue sky, to seriously contemplate another career? Or perhaps we should lie down in the unfinished part of the compost, the raw horse manure and the rotting vegetable scraps, in the pouring rain. Then we might really be serious about another career), and the ever-pressing financial sustainability.

In any case, anything we famers can do to help each other makes it more possible that we will all keep farming, even after a tough season, for another year.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Nov 21-Nov 27, 2018