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| Little Adri, picking dandelion heads. |
When I was a little girl, walking the few, quiet,
tree-lined blocks to school, I used to pretend I was a benevolent queen
for the critters and plants along the way. When I saw a plant who's stem
had broken, I'd lean it on its neighbors and instruct them to take care
of their wounded comrade till strength and vigor returned. A pair of
doves lived in the neighborhood and I enjoyed their crooning as if they
were calling out to me personally as I passed. I imagined that when I
was "grown up" I'd like to have a house that was so full of plants and
critters
inside that you couldn't quite tell when you left
outside.
Sometimes it seems I got my wish (though I'm not sure I ever
did grow up
)! I have to admit, now that it's up to me and Chris to do
the housekeeping (thanks, Mom for all those years that it was mainly
your
job!) that I've had to reconsider just how much of the house I want to
share with the 'creepy-crawlies' and the 'skitterers'.
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| House-plants on the porch, in summer... |
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| ...become part of winter's interior decor. |
We don't really enjoy
clouds of fruit-flies. House-flies can be awfully annoying as they
buzz about or land on my nose when I'm trying to catch a little
afternoon nap. Enter: Homer. Homer is the name we give to all the
spiders that have colonized the many window-corners in our house. The
bedroom window is home to multiple generations of ambush-hunters. They
don't build webs but lurk out of site and
rush in to gobble up the gnats and fruit-flies that are drawn to
window-light.
Some big, brown spiders are the masters of the web. In the
Fall, when the flies get lazy and repeatedly bap their heads against the
windows trying to get out, inevitably a few of them stray into web-land
only to be wrapped in silk and saved for later times when food is scarce
and Mama Spider needs extra sustenance to lay her clutch of eggs thus
beginning the cycle anew.
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| This isn't the kind of spiders we have in our house but, you've got to admit he's cute! |
Though we meant to seal all the nooks and crannies that a Mouse might
enter, in a 141 year-old house, it's nearly impossible to find every one!
During the summer months the pickin's are always better
outside so we
don't see much evidence of the little squeekers. But as nights get cold
and the gardens are put to bed, the farmhouse gains in appeal. We have a
few live-traps that we bait with peanut butter and cereal. A dish of water and some bedding adds to the appeal. Each morning,
part of our winter routine is to see if anyone has checked into the Deluxe
Mouse-Shuttle.
At first, before the winter rains started in earnest, the
Mice received a one-way ticket to the compost bins. This gave them a
ready food source while they established winter living quarters. But as
winter wore on, we began to feel concern that, without shelter nearby,
the mice would likely perish slowly from the cold/wet conditions so we
began releasing them into one of the greenhouses. This worked fine...for
awhile. Everyone was happy and the stream of House-Mice dwindled.
But
then came pea-planting time. We like to start peas in the greenhouses
so we have an earlier harvest.
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| Sara picking greenhouse peas. |
Guess who has a taste for baby pea
shoots...ah, yes, the Greenhouse-Mouse-Family. So, what to do? Have you ever
put too much cayenne powder on something you were cooking? Did its heat bite your tongue? Did it make
you sneeze? Well, it turns out it has the same effect on Mice! A few
applications of the hot-powder sprinkled on the seedlings cured the Mice
of their culinary habits! Problem solved.
Now that it's warm again, the
compost piles are back to being the home of choice. Plenty of food to
go around there!
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| Summer-time, and there's lots to eat, outside! |
We have a family of ground squirrels living in our
walls. We began noticing the mama squirrel a year ago, sunning herself
atop our wood-pile and making furtive visits to our bird-feeders to fill
her cheeks with sunflower seeds and millet. We'd heard her scrabbling
in our walls and were amazed at her capacity for digging by burrowing
under a 6-foot wide cement pad to have her exit hole from the house be
as close as possible to this free and easy food source. We didn't
realize she was "with-child" though until one day she appeared at our
dining-room window to let us know that, "The bird-feeder is empty and
I'm hungry!".
As she sat on the window-sill, we could
see that she'd been nursing her babies. Once she knew she had our
attention she hopped down to the porch and put her paws on the container
of bird-seed, looking over her shoulder at us. She then hopped back up
on the sill and peered through the glass as if to underline her
point..."Where's my supper?!". Needless to say, we fed her right away
and kept it up till we knew she'd weaned the babes and so could forage
wider-afield.
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| Mama Squirrel and Chris eyeing each other. |
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| Adri cleaning the bird-bath |
Chris and I feel happy knowing that our home and
gardens provide shelter and food for so much wildlife. Each year we add a
few more birdhouses, plant more bird and butterfly-food among the
peppers and squash, peas and beans. The brush-pile has become a small
hill full of nooks and crannies -- home to many critters. The clusters
of un-mowed berry-bushes and grass-lands grow in size. Bunnies, snakes
and birds increasingly call
our home,
their home.
It
is a
"sharing" garden, after all!
Update:
Lest you think we're living in some sort of Utopia, in perfect balance
with the wild critters around us...Just hours after I first published
this post, I went walking in the gardens and discovered a big ol' bunny
happily making its way down a row of cabbage and lettuce and helping
himself to every third or fourth plant. Arrrgh! Guess who's going to be
surprised when he comes back tonight and finds a dusting of cayenne has
been added to the buffet!?
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Our neighbors Donna and John Dillard have been very generous this year donating apples
and pears, metal roofing, welded-wire fencing and all the firewood we
could handle off a huge oak tree cut down in their yard. That will keep
us warm for several winters!
John Kinsey (left) has a backyard worm farm. He feeds his worms food scraps and coffee grounds. The worm-poo (castings) provides excellent soil-fertility. John donates worm castings and surplus coffee-grounds he collects weekly from a local coffee-shop. (Pictured with garlic seeds).
Steve Rose (right) has made many generous donations over the years --tomato starts, hundreds of gallon pots, bamboo, and more. This year he's provided us with spores from the Wine Red Stropharia mushrooms with which we have successfully inoculated a wood-chip pile. Delicious! Here he is giving a lesson in grafting fruit-trees. Steve is a fountain of knowledge and a real local treasure.
This year we extended our wire fence to encompass almost the full three acres of the property. We ran into some problems in late winter because the ground was too wet to pour cement for wooden corner posts. The gardens were open to local deer and we suffered some significant damage to our fruit-tree saplings and new spring crops. Our dear friend Rob (left) came to the rescue. He put in several long sessions with Chris, pounding metal posts and hanging the fence once we got the corner posts in. It was a huge help!
