We finally managed to spray our supply of predatory nematodes in the garden. We were going to use the garden sprayer we already owned, but after several tanks of water it still smelled of the insecticides we used in a past life. We’ll keep it around for other purposes, but it was clear we needed a new sprayer for organic controls. The one pictured on the right is by Stanley and I hate it. Why is it that product quality goes down every year? Having recently failed in a mission to find a decent gas can (turns out Oregon made usable gas cans illegal), I find myself staring at a selection of poorly made garden sprayers at the home improvement store. Joy.

Anyway, we sprayed the dilution of nematodes onto every garden bed, especially those hardest hit by the cucumber beetle infestation. They are a natural part of the food web, but at this concentration they should make a sudden and significant dent in the population of soil dwelling insect larva.

I woke up this morning with a sprained ankle, which is odd because although I remember twisting my ankle last night while walking the dog, it didn’t hurt at the time. Well, it hurts today and I’m limping everywhere and cursing my lack of productivity over this holiday weekend. Tonight I limped out to the garden to water my buckwheat patch, and upon looking up into the sky I saw this:

“Really guys, it’s not serious! I’m sure I’ll be walking fine in a day or two!”

Those are turkey vultures if you can’t tell from the grainy picture. We have a small flock of them living in the trees by our house, but I’ve never seen 15 at once before. Obviously there was something delicious nearby. I just hope they didn’t think it was me.

Our blueberry plants are doing pretty well, considering how rarely we remember to water them (and the deer munching they endured). You’re supposed to pick the berry buds off the first year to encourage plant growth, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. There might only be a few, but they are delicious!

Finally, I planted buckwheat a couple weeks ago and it has been growing. Gardeners often use buckwheat as a green manure / cover crop. I’d like to actually try harvesting it. I had visions of a glorious thick stand of buckwheat, but instead I have patches of plants and patches of dirt and grass. Admittedly the seed was a couple years old, but my imprecise planting and spacing didn’t help. I’m going to have to figure out a better solution before I start trying to raise any grains in earnest.

When Lee and I bought this house it came with a ball graveyard. An odd thing to have but kind of funny. The owner said he tried to pile them all in one spot because of them being all over the place. After we started cleaning up the property we added a few more to the pile that we found, threw a few away, and Edgar has recycled a few.

Lee wanted to start clearing out a spot for a compost pile so the ball graveyard got displaced. We will save the ones in the best condition for Edgar to play with and just throw the other ones away. Edgar was a little overwhelmed with so many balls to choose from. Or maybe he was just a little nervous about it since they all seemed to come flying out at him as Lee was moving them.

Lee made the chickens a roost today. He screwed in two 2×4’s  with notches to  support the roosts. The roosts are 12 inches apart vertically and horizontally. After this picture was taken we moved the light so it wouldn’t hang between the roost.

Lee dropped in 3″ bolts to hold the roosts in place. This makes it so the roosts can be taken out easily when you want to clean.

Lee got around to mowing down our fields with his tractor today. If we didn’t have rampant brambles trying to take over we probably would have just let it be. Before he went and mowed down the field he took some shots of the different flowers growing in it.

Sweet Pea

Queen Anne’s Lace or wild carrot

Wild daisys

Hawksbeard (the false dandelion)

Not sure what this flower is.

Not a flower but this lovely little bush is poison oak.

Tonight we set up the fence charger temporarily using a 1″ galvanized pipe as the ground rod and a really long extension cord. I added apple-scented baits to the hot wire, and connected it all up. On dry earth at the far corner, the meter reads 10,000V and makes a pop sound on each pulse.

Bring on the deer.

I couldn’t help myself and pulled a turnip today. I kept seeing these big bulb bases on them when I was weeding around the row. It made me desperate to pull one. So I did. Then I admired it lovingly. Yes very bizarre I know. But in my defense I have never grown one before. It tasted very nice and mild by the way.

Our chickens have a roosting habit.  Unfortunately, their only “roost” is the top of our mason jar feeders.

When you combine 8-week-old chicken fatties and feeders designed for baby chicks, you end up with this:

We go out at least twice a day to right all the overturned feeders and fill any that are empty.  Otherwise, the chickens stand around hungry.  Actually, a lot of things around a homestead are like this.  You have to just dive in to buying chickens because if you read everything in the book you’ll go crazy.  But then you never seem to have the right gear on hand and it makes your life harder.  The baby chick waterers took a lot of time to clean every day because they kept pooping in their water.  I baulked at spending $40 for a waterer at the farm store, but found a nice one at Premier for a fraction of that.  Since then we only have to deal with chicken watering once a week!

With watering out of the way, fixing overturned feeders became the sore spot.  I had been talking about building one out of scrap wood for a while, but our fencing project has been in the way.  Then, tonight we came up with a quick solution.  When Premier sent us the chicken waterer, they inadvertently sent the top from a discontinued model.  They FedEx’ed us the right one soon after, but we still had this waterer top sitting around.  Take one watering top, drill a large hole to fill with feed, add a cake pan connected by copper wire and you get:

We took it out to the coop and hung it onto a new hook using some scrap chain from the property cleanup.  As always, the chickens were first leary of the new presence:

So we added a little “crack” corn to the tray and they forgot their worries:

After we installed the polycord the next day we started to install some of the hot wires. Yes those lovely wires that will keep the deer out and future livestock away from going through the garden.

Lee got to use more new fencing gear so he was excited. I never knew that putting a fence together would require so many different parts. That’s one benefit of doing just high tensile New Zealand type of fencing.  It would go together faster. The down side of New Zealand style fencing is that you can loose livestock though it and it lets predators come in. This was the main reason that we chose the high tensile woven fencing.

First new part Lee got to use is…..the tube insulator. The tube insulator is stapled to the wooden post with the hot wire running though it.

The wraparound insulators are used to tie off the hot wire at the post.

Bull nose insulators are used on the interior corners.

A four and a half foot high H-brace was connected to the gardens seven foot H-brace earlier. This was done because there is going to be a entry gate right off of it. It was put up so we wouldn’t have to stretch woven wire for a few feet off the garden end post. This corner was where the two bull nose insulators were used.

We put two hot wires running down the fence at 16 inches and 47 inches. 16 inches is low enough to prevent sheep from rubbing on the fence but high enough that they could eat the grass below it. 47 inches is below the top of the woven fence but high enough to prevent livestock from climbing or leaning on the fence.

The hot wires are here for livestock but they are also the first line of defense against deer. Scent caps are placed on the highest hot wire to encourage deer to take a sniff and zap themselves. Once they experience that  hopefully they will cease trying to siege the garden.

After we put in the hot wires, we then went about constructing a temporary gate. This gate is ten feet wide, big enough for a truck or tractor to go though. We used two cattle panels and trimmed the ends to size. Right now we just used some wire and hemp rope to tie it to the wood posts. Later on we will make a more permanent gate.

Lee wired the two cattle panels together with wire and let them overlap.

After the gate was up Lee made a temporary connection to run the hot wires together through the fence. Later on he plans on running the hot wire under the fence using double insulated cable though a plastic pipe. He made the connection using split bolts and an insulated wire.

Once we completed this we discovered we couldn’t hook up the electric charger because we didn’t have a long enough extention cord. So the fence is still not hot. One of these days though….

In addition to the woven wire and smooth wire protecting our garden, Lee decided that we needed polycord offset by two and a half inches at the top of our fence. Visually when the deer will walk up to the fence it will look higher because it will lean out over their heads. Not to mention that the black and white stripes will make it very easy for them to see. Polycord actually has tiny metal filaments and is designed to be electrified. We’re thinking about using it for movable pasture subdivide fences at some point in the future, but in this application we’re just using it as a highly visible and durable rope.  There’s no point in electrifying something 7′ off the ground.

First Lee went around and measured where to drill all the holes. After drilling holes,  TuffRing and SplitBall insulators were added.

At the corners a combination of both types were used to form the curve.

Once all the insulators were up then the stringing of the polycord commenced with the polycord spinning jenny Skipper paying out the cord and Lee following hooking it into the insulators.

Next up came using a polycord rope link to tie off along with a rope link attached to a tension spring.  You could just tie a knot, but the rope link acts like Chinese handcuffs and makes a cleaner (and easier to change) connection.

To keep the polycord from fraying a blow torch was used on the cut off ends. For some reason men always seem to like using this tool.

Some of my radishes were starting to bolt so I pulled them up.

This was the Red Meat variety from Territorial Seed that I planted. They are rather pretty when sliced.

We obviously had some root maggot problems. (This is a common pest in the Cascadia region.)  I just cut out the bad spots. Next year when I plant I think I will look further  into a way of controling them.