The Rat Problem

Before I get into the disgusting subject of rats, I wanted you to see this gorgeous new sign my dad made for us. He hand-carved this lovely design into a plank of basswood, and highlighted the carvings with lamp black. I have it inside now to stay, but if you subscribe to the blog, when it arrives in your inbox you will now see this lovely plaque instead of the basket of tomatoes. Thank you Dad!

Now, on to the considerably less-pleasurable topic of our rat problem.

We have a serious issue this year with roof rats. Rats have always lived in and around our garden; I've often found them nesting in the compost bin, and last summer we would see them running on our fenceline. We've always been able to keep things under control, but this year nothing we have done has put a dent in the problem. We know these are roof rats because we hear them in the attic in in the walls of our home. We have tried trapping, with minimal success, and have even resorted to poisons, though those have been even less effective. We practice severe cultural control, with all of our home-grains in the freezer and all of the chicken grains in gnaw-proof bins. These rats are active at night, and every morning we evidence of their nocturnal carousing in our garden. Roof rats love garden vegetables and are likely what has been eating our tomatoes and peaches every year (even though the squirrels also take their share, it's not all their fault). 

Every neighbor has complained about the rat problem this year, and Tom and Adam have had some serious skin problems recently that we thought might be bites from tropical rat mites, which can travel pretty far from a rat to find another host. My gross-out meter had the needle pinging on 'high' and no one was sleeping because of all the scratching we heard in the walls. Time to figure something else out.

I talked to several neighbors about their methods, which was enlightening. One of them has a pest company come out every three months and spray her home and yard. She brought me the list of pesticides the company was using and I was literally gobsmacked - there were several poisons on that list that have been banned in the UK. Another of our neighbors had a quote from a rat control company of $9k. !!!! Our next door neighbor had simply sealed off every single hole from his crawl space (we don't have basements here) to his attic, from the outside. And he hasn't had any problem since. 

I decided to call Vector Control. Recently they came out to talk to my beekeeping association about yellow jackets, and they mentioned that rats were also part of their purview. A really nice man from Vector Control came out a few days after I left a desperate message. And he was a font of information! It was a very interesting hour I spent with him, and completely free by the way (our tax dollars at work), and I learned a lot.

Dave went through our entire house, from attic to crawl space, and all around the foundation and roofline. He also spent a good deal of time in our messy garage, and also went around with me looking at compost piles and food sources. Dave also used to be a bee-and-chicken-keeper, so he had a good idea of what to expect here. He also used to be a roofer so I got some side advice about the roof! Anyway, no surprise, but it turns out that there are many many ways the rats are getting into our attic and Dave found every one. He advises closing these up using 1/4" hardware mesh at the very minimum; he would prefer we follow that up with galvanized steel sheeting on top of the mesh. Where our roof lines overlap there were clear holes going into the house. And where our air conditioning lines go in, there is also a clear path. In our garage, there were holes we didn't notice near our fireplace. 

Dave also showed me the way to tell if my peaches have been eaten by rats or squirrels. If they are on the ground, and all that's left is the pit and some shreds of flesh, that's a rat. If there are a couple bites out of the fruit but the rest is intact, that's a squirrel. He said tomatoes are a rat's favorite food. 

He does not advocate poison and gave me zero recommendations about it because they don't want us to use it (and, in fact, he found the poison chunks we had put out completely intact and told me to throw them out as they were useless). He advocates trapping, and wanted us to buy the old-fashioned Victor rat traps with the copper hook (the newer ones have a yellow plastic plate). He impaled a whole, unshelled peanut on that hook, and said we could use those or chunks of dried apricot - something the rat would have to spend some time working off the hook.

Dave told us to bait 10 traps and to put three in the garage, three in the attic, and three in the crawl space, as well as one under our sink (where we keep a covered compost bucket). He said to check them every day. He recommended that we give them one free feeding so they get used to eating on the traps, but we're so desperate for relief that we just went ahead and spring-loaded all of them. Nothing would give us more pleasure than hearing 10 large SNAPS tonight.

Unfortunately two of the traps snapped Tom and he has a very sore (but not broken!) thumb right now. These traps really work. 

Dave also liked my cultural controls and approved of the way I composted, but said it was likely all the produce that was attracting the rats to our house. Free shelter, free food, and free water (from the back fountain) - it's like a neon sign pointing "COME HERE!" Since I'm not going to stop growing food, we have to just constantly be vigilant about this issue. Trapping is going to have to be a daily thing around here. And once Tom and I have a handle on it, we're going to have to spend a day sealing up every crevice and crack so that they don't come back.

Have you had roof rat problems? How did you handle them?

Dramatic Flowers

The artichokes are blooming, and they always attract a lot of attention, from both humans and pollinators. It's impossible to take a photo of them without a bee of some sort, dusted in pollen. These neon purple blooms cause our local walkers to stop and take a second look. I love these dramatic blooms.

But they aren't the only showstoppers in the garden right now. The hollyhocks have been amazing, with bright pink and coral hues, but one just opened that takes the prize.

This is the variety 'Black Watchman,' which was also grown at Monticello.  The bees like it as much as I do.

Another new plant for me is a dahlia that was an impulse purchase, because its dark foliage just called to me. It's a variety called 'Mystic Fantasy.'

I just love the color of those flowers against the nearly-black foliage.

I had another impulse purchase (sensing a theme?) and ended up bringing home some liatris for a difficult part of my garden. This prairie native loves full hot sun and can take a drier soil. The plants are rewarding me with some fabulous blooms. This is Liatris spicata.

And I know I've shown this sunflower before (Chocolate Cherry), but it's just so dark and lovely, I need to show it again. Here it is silhouetted against a clear blue sky.

And the chicory that I seeded two years ago is finally up and blooming, in a difficult strip of dry soil next to the mailbox. I love this true-blue flower, and hope it reseeds abundantly.

I'm really enjoying these flowers in my garden. I tend toward the cottage-y things normally, but these dramatic options really add some flair and attract a lot of attention. They are also bridging the gap between spring and summer annuals - I pulled out all the spring annuals a while ago, and while the summer annuals have germinated, they are nowhere near blooming yet.

Plums, Peaches, and Potatoes

The plums are beginning to ripen. I pruned this tree a little severely this past winter, probably too severely for a youngish tree, but I wanted to get started early on good structure. And the tree has rewarded us with some lovely-looking fruit. I've started picking them when they reach this color, and bringing them inside to soften. The squirrels are diabolical this year.

I'm doing the same with the peaches, because I'm finding several half-eaten ones every morning at the base of the tree (they go to the chickens). The fruit this year is on the small side, but a good volume. I haven't sprayed it for peach leaf curl now in two years - there is a little bit of the disease on some of the leaves, but so far it's not terrible, and we still have a good harvest. I don't want to use that copper spray any more, so if this tree begins to suffer badly, we'll just remove it and try again with a resistant tree. The tree is at least 20 years old, maybe more, so it's a miracle it's still producing this well.

'Yukon Gold'

I finished harvesting all the potatoes. The fingerlings were ready first, and we had such a good harvest that we could share extras with family. Today I got the Yukon Golds and Pioneer Russets out of the ground. We had a decent harvest on the golds but not the russets. Several of the russets had a sort of watery, disgusting, smelly rot (fermenting?):

Anybody else have this? I think it's a disease called 'Leak,' caused by a pathogen that likes saturated soil and warm temperatures. The three potatoes I found with this rot were in very saturated places in the raised bed. I'm not sure if there is a leak in the drip line, or it it's just naturally wetter on that side, but we certainly have had some very warm temperatures at times, so this could be it. The trick is not to plant potatoes in this same place next year, to avoid this pathogen. I've had potatoes in this particular bed every year for a while now, so I need to change locations. I'm not sure if I should go ahead with a pea crop in that bed, or put in a summer cover crop to heal the soil. When I was digging out the potatoes, the soil was really compacted, though absolutely full of worms. I mixed in the coffee chaff that I used as a mulch, and I'll probably cover it with a couple inches of compost, and let the bed sit for a couple of weeks. Then I'll decide what's next.

Meanwhile, I'll fix roasted potato salad for a pot luck tomorrow night, and we can enjoy the rest however we like (hash browns! roasted with olive oil and salt! mashed with butter!). It's fun to have our own organic potatoes. They taste so much better than store-bought.

Scratch That

After I was finished picking blueberries in my pj's this morning, I ambled over to the tomato patch and saw this. 

Sigh.

So much for my new routine, spelled out for you in the last post, of adding cal-mag to the leaves and soil.

The good news: it's just on one plant. The bad news: I had forgotten everything I wrote last year in the blog post "My plan for blossom end rot in next year's garden." I mean, I'm kind of an idiot. I stepped into the shower with my glasses on this morning (not for the first time), so the fact that I forgot about what I learned just last year is not terribly surprising. 

It has helped to re-read that fabulous article by the University of California Ag extension, "Managing Blossom End Rot in Tomatoes and Peppers."  I needed a reminder about how calcium moves through the plant, and how transpiration is the biggest driver of that process. I learned last year that the tomatoes I planted on the other side of my garden, which only got morning and late afternoon sun, not mid-day blazing sun, had zero BER. I planted all my tomatoes, this year, on the blazing midday sun side. So naturally I am going to be dealing with some BER.

This is the beautiful, meaty 'Opalka' variety, a reliable producer of paste tomatoes, and a variety I have planted every year. I cannot explain how miserable it is to take five gorgeous, fat tomatoes off the vine and put them in the compost.

In happier news, I thought you'd like to see a new table we've acquired from my Dad. It's made in the Hepplewhite Pembroke style (late 1700's) and consists of mahogany with holly inlay. It lives indoors but I photographed it outdoors because I thought it complimented my garden.

The drop-leaf sides come up to form an oval, so this style of table was often used for tea or for bedside breakfasts, but it is also perfect as a sofa end-table which is how we are using it. For more information about my dad's furniture making, you can check out his videos on YouTube or his website, Killenwood. 

The Last Jar of Tomato Sauce

The last jar of canned tomato sauce will be used in tonight's dinner of chicken tamale pie. Sigh.

Instead of being sad, I should be happy - we really made progress on our goal of canning enough tomatoes to last us through the off-season. And we've almost made it to this season's ripe tomatoes. As you can see from the header picture, the tomato crop is really looking good this year.

'Green Vernissage'

I'm really pleased with my system of eight plants per bed, staking and hard pruning. The plants are responding well. I have had one or two mishaps; I mistakenly pruned the growing tips off 2-3 plants. But tomatoes are forgiving in that regard, they send out a side shoot readily which I then train to be the new main shoot. Those couple of plants are a little behind the others in growth, but they'll catch up. The season is long. I just needed to have a little lesson taught to me about being over-zealous. 

'Gezahnte'

Since a classmate reported success in an experiment using cal-mag on his tomatoes, I immediately started to use it on mine. When the plants were small, I used it as a foliar spray. Now that they are bigger, I've been adding cal-mag to the soil once a week along with a very low-nutrient fish-based fertilizer (Neptune's Harvest Tomato Veg 2-4-2). It has a bit more phosphorus than nitrogen, to encourage nice flower and fruit production. 

I know I shared the results from my lab experiment in foliar feeding chard with an all-purpose fertilizer; those plants really did miserably, and I swore I'd never do any kind of foliar feeding again. But when new information comes along from a trusted source (in this case, my classmate), with data and photos to back it up, you gotta give it a try.

Also, I have shared in the past that I really don't believe we need fertilizer. I stand by that. As long as your soil is rich in microbes (bacteria, fungi, protozoa, etc), that should provide your plants all they need. Soil health absolutely comes first. You can't expect a crop to do well on fertilizer alone. (And for heaven's sake, don't use chemical fertilizers - they destroy soil life.) But, tomatoes need a lot of nutrients to feed all that biomass during their growing season. They suffer from fluctuating temperatures here, as well as getting a lot less water than they'd like. They're an important crop for us and we rely on them. So to me it seems like a good investment to make sure they are well-fed. And I'm tired of losing a quarter of my crop to blossom-end rot.

Since peppers also suffer from BER, I've given them the same regimen with the cal mag. And they are responding beautifully.

As for the rest of the garden, the pole beans (two successions) are doing quite well, we had our first pesto from our basil crop, collards are being harvested every day, cucumbers are starting to climb the trellis, the pumpkins and butternuts have started flowering, the melons look like they've finally got a hold, cilantro and dill progressing nicely, and the last of the artichokes have been harvested. We had our first crop of fingerling potatoes, with plenty more on the horizon; when those are finished, I'll plant peas in that spot. I've figured out a place to start a new asparagus bed (my older asparagus just slowly faded away, I think they needed more sun) and will do that this winter. I'm contemplating removing a couple of trees from around our water feature. Summer flower seeds are germinating and starting to grow tall, spring wildflowers are finishing up, with the stalwart Clarkia 'Farewell-to-Spring' announcing the end of that season. Sunflowers are blooming mightily all over the garden, as well as dahlias, poppies, lupines, hollyhocks, and fennel. It's a good time to be making bouquets.

And the bees, both honey and native, are very busy in our blooming Catalpa bignoniodes tree. I enjoy standing under the tree and just listening to the very loud humming coming from the high branches. I've also been watching a pair of Nuttall's woodpeckers forage for insects in this tree, for many days now. It feels like summer!