Category Archives: Gardening

The Squirrel War

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We have a bird feeder in the back yard so we can watch birds from our sun room.  When we started there was trouble.  Squirrels.  They are fun to watch in their own right, but they are voracious little creatures.  In addition, they seem to do fine without being fed.  On the other hand, we have noticed an increase in the bird population when we feed them in winter.

I should say we feed finches and sparrows.  At first we inadvertently fed pigeons, but many modifications to our feeder we got them to stay away.  I tried shooting the pigeons with a pellet gun, but it is illegal in Denver.  As a kid I shot lots of pigeons in Fruita, but Fruita was not a city.  It is now. After several years and many squirrel proofing modifications the feeder finally wore out.

The new feeder is not squirrel proof, even though it was billed as such.  The little vandals leapt from the tree.  We moved the feeder.  They now shinny up the pole and jump over to the feeder.  I think our resident female squirrel also leaps up from the ground, but we have yet to see her in the act.  I can raise the feeder if she is jumping up.

To stop the pole shinnying I put a slick pvc pipe over the one inch steel pole. It didn’t work, it makes shinnying easier.  The old feeder had a woven wire cage around it the birds could pass through but kept squirrels out.  This one has the perches in the open air.  I have thought about electrifying the pole, but it seems extreme.

I have also considered some kind of barrier between the pole and feeder, but it would be ugly.  I could also install a motion activated noise cannon.  No, the neighbors would disapprove.  How about some kind of moat?  No, it would freeze in winter.  A dog or cat?  Yes, they would do the job when outside, but not all the time.  They would also be hard on the garden.  The rabbits are enough critters in the yard.

Some kind of trip wire apparatus would work, but is too complex.  Besides, what would they fall into?  I think my next try is a ½ inch spaces woven wire disk on the pole, suggested by a guest at Thanksgiving.   They would try to climb around the ends but if the disk is secured so it will tilt with weight on it, it might throw the squirrel off.  if you have any ideas, let me know.  Just remember our adversaries are clever, athletic, and persistent.

Is resistance futile?

Posted in Bird Feeder, Current Activities, Gardening, My Story, Squirrel War, Stories

Spring

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It’s Spring and the miracles are happening once again.  The grass is growing, the trees have leaves, the flowers are out, and the sprinkling system is all goofed up.

Carol started seedlings months ago and now they are going in the ground.  She asks me to put more water on the chard.  I can’t tell chard from kale.  She rolls her eyes and shows me where.

Winter is hard on sprinkler systems, especially the drip systems supposed to save water.  They get stepped on, kicked, blow apart, and just break.  I get soaked hunting down leaks and missing fittings.  I just discovered a new type of stake with sprinklers built in that may help.  We’ll see.

It’s getting harder to do all the fixing.  Sprinklers don’t work, but some of my parts aren’t in very good shape as well.  I have trouble getting up and down.  My knees hurt.  My back hurts.  I have trouble pressing tubing on fittings with my arthritic wrists.  I am getting lots of practice groaning.  Every year I have to splice the underground hoses because I chop into them with the shovel or axe.

Pulaski

Yes, the axe.  We have trees and shrubs and they have roots.  Right now I am in the process of replacing rock edging with bricks to make mowing easier.  Problem is, it is right next to a maple tree.  Did you know maples have shallow root systems?  I chop the roots with a Pulaski, a wildland firefighting tool with an axe on one side and a grubbing hoe on the other side.  It works well, but that big head is heavy.  I chop for a short time, stop to catch my breath, and chop again.  Carol has suggested I mark where the brick line is to go because my line wavers trying to miss the big roots.  What I have finished looks a lot better than rocks, however.

It’s worth it.  The yard and garden are beautiful, I get exercise, Lowe’s makes money selling me parts, and we will get lots of good stuff to eat.  The spring produce is mostly leafy greens, so I have to eat salads.  The evil woman even sneaks kale into the salads.

The Japanese Beetle War continues.  We applied milky spore to the lawn which is supposed to infect the grubs and kill them.  There is also a chemical grub product that’s only mildly poisonous.  The grubs eat the grass roots, killing it, then pupate and hatch the beetles when hot weather arrives.  The bare spots in the lawn are recovering and we may have a few less Beetles.  If only all the neighbors would do the same thing.

We also have a new rechargeable hand vacuum to suck the little demons off the leaves.  Leaves.  The creatures eat some leaves and ignore others.  They love many roses, ignore others, and love grape leaves.  They like linden tree leaves, but our tree is big and robust.  So much for our grape arbor over the patio.   We are investigating alternatives.  It’s good they don’t eat everything, or we would have to eat them.

In the meantime, beauty reigns.  The raspberry bushes are springing up, flowers are out, and the veggies are growing away.  We also are going to have peaches.  We had three frosts when the tree was blooming, but the frost mostly did a good job of thinning the fruit.

Posted in Gardening, Japanese Beetles, My Story, Spring, Spring Flowers, Stories

More on Japanese Beetles

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It is early to discuss Japanese Beetles, the grubs are still lurking amid the grass roots in your lawn.  Here in South Denver we will be heading into our fourth season of the attacks.  They eat roses, grape leaves, linden, peach leaves, buckthorn, Virginia creeper, and raspberry bushes, to list our victims.  The beetles emerge with the hot weather and stick around until sometime in August.  Then the battle begins.

There are limited methods of control, but our grape arbor is doomed.  I conduct a summer long counterattack, using neem oil, soap spray, and physical removal.  I grab the little bastards and drown them in soapy water.  I am supposed to be practicing the Buddhist principle of not harming living beings, but watching the evil bugs struggling in the water is satisfying.

Last evening we went to a meeting organized by the Colorado State University Extension service on the scourge.  It was held in one of the old boathouses in Washington Park, now occupied by Outdoor Colorado.  There is a nice conference room which easily accommodates a couple of dozen people.  About 100 people showed up.  There were people sitting on the floor and standing along the walls.  Overflow went out the door.  It got hot and stuffy.

When the beetles first showed up, we went to CSU Extension, not far away.  Back then we mostly got unknowing shrugs.  Last season, the presenter said almost every call was about beetles.  They had to do some fast learning.  Another impetus for them was watching their flower garden be almost wiped out.

Our own research covered most of the information given in the meeting, there were a few new things and more information about what does not work.  For grapes and most of the vulnerable annuals, resistance is futile.  Grapes and Virginia Creepers are over.  Our linden tree gets lots of destroyed leaves, but it is robust enough to take the damage in stride.

Hand Held Vacuum

With the other stuff, it’s a fight.  Going around with a bowl and stick knocking them into the water is tedious, but works.  The best suggestion we got is to use a cordless dust buster.  Expanding on that, I will try the leaf gathering function on the leaf blower.  The collection bag might get nasty, but they say crushing the beetles doesn’t attract others.

The most important takeaway from the meeting is how many other people are just as angry and obsessed as I am.  I guess Japanese Beetles have become my teachers.  I get the chance to work on obsession, resentment, and hate.

Posted in Beetles, Buddhism, Gardening, Japanese Beetles, My Story, Obsession, Pestilence, Stories

Japanese Beetles

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We are being attacked.  When the weather gets hot, Japanese Beetles come out and eat roses, hollyhocks, buckthorn, linden trees, and grape leaves.  The poor roses hardly have a chance.  The new flowers are ragged by noon.  All that is left on some of the grape leaves are the veins.  The hollyhocks lose their flowers as well.   

Japanese Beetle

Japanese Beetle

It’s war!  They are relatively new arrivals here in our neighborhood.  They showed up last year and this year they are all over our plants.  The evil little beetles come out and eat during the hot weather, lay their eggs in the lawn, the grubs hatch and eat the grass roots.  Next spring, the grubs become beetles, and the horrible thing starts all over again.   

When they hit the peach and vineyard area around Palisade, the chemicals came out and the infestation was stopped.  They don’t talk about the harm done to beneficial insects.  We try to be organic, so the poisons are out.   

The first tactic we adopted is to go out with a small pitcher with some dish soap laden water, find the bugs, and flick the bugs into the water with a table knife.  It goes on all day.  The grape arbor is high, and I am banned from going up more than two steps on the ladder, so some escape.  I am not big on killing living beings, but here is an exception.

They are fairly round with an iridescent shell.  Ugly little beasts.  At the end of the day we have dozens floating in the water.  With a lot of research, mostly on University Extension Service websites, we discovered neem oil with a tiny amount of azadirachtin kills and repels the little beasts. 

As the grubs get active in the turf, we are going to introduce some nematodes that attack the grubs.  With luck, we won’t have those dead spots in the lawn.  The nematodes stay around, so one time for them.  

On my bug hunt one morning, I didn’t find one beetle.  The fortified neem oil is working.  After a couple of days they are back and it’s back to work. The neighbors won’t be killing the grubs, so we will have an annual battle.   

If you have Japanese Beetles, neem oil with azadirachtin works.  Straight neem oil works on lots of harmful insects, but not without some azadirachtin for our little buddies.  If you need neem oil and don’t have Japanese Beetles, we have a couple of bottles we will give you.  Good hunting!

Posted in Beetles, Gardening, My Story, Spring Flowers, Stories

The Garden

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Raspberries planterI am married to an artist.  She paints, she writes (lately, haiku), is doing lots of cooking with our new kitchen, and she gardens.  It’s spring, so a lot of our effort is going into the garden. I willingly garden, but it is mostly the labor part. I dig, I built a cold frame and re-glazed it, I water and help plant.  I do not, however decide what to plant or where.  I am getting better at pruning with my left-handed Felco Pruner.  I mow, compost, rake, clean up, water, and haul.

We are landscaping in back, so lots of things are changing.  We have a nice new patio with a pergola.  The iris are already in along the fence and in the alley just outside.

The project this week is raspberries.  We had a 15 foot long cedar planter built just in front of the big blank slab of a garage wall that is YELLOW.  I prepared the planter soil with compost made from last falls leaves and a lot of coffee grounds from the coffee shops.  The raspberries will get fairly high and will break up that expanse of garage.  We were planning to have the raspberries planted by the pros but Carol got a call from a woman she met at a class offering free raspberries.

Raspberries

Raspberries

We jumped in my pickup and went over to their garden in what used to be a run-down neighborhood between I-25 and Highlands.  It is being transformed with new construction, but still retains some of the flavor of what it used to be.  We dug up about fifteen plants, brought them home and planted them. They were bare root, so some of them are looking pretty droopy, but I think they will make it.  My job is to set some eight foot cedar posts and run wires between them to support the raspberry canes.  The bushes can get about six to eight feet tall.  I can’t wait to have fresh raspberries in my muffins.

Our perennials are doing fine.  We were a bit worried after that early hard freeze we had last fall.  Even Carol’s attempt to clone the Pacific Northwest with a salal plant and some azaleas survived.  There is a deciduous bush next to the front door that is supposed to be evergreen that lost all its leaves.    It has lots of little buds and a few leaves, so I think it will be all right.

One of the things we are getting done in front is putting big rocks and some perennials on the slope from the lawn down to the sidewalk.  I am not getting any stronger, and that slope is hard to mow.  It also gets dry in summer, as it faces west.

Our Little Free Library is up and running. It is one of the features on the slope.  It is so much fun going out to check the books.  We get quite a bit of business, but no problem, because people keep bringing us books.  It’s painful, but I am culling some of my books.  It seems like some of my soul goes with them.  I hope they will enrich the soul of their next owner. It is good, life as a householder.

Posted in Current Activities, Gardening, Haiku, Home Improvement, Little Free Library, My Story, Planting Raspberries, Stories