Challenges for Brain and Brawn

This farming enterprise is nearly as much a philosophical and intellectual undertaking as a practical one.

To wit, is this cottontail rabbit a varmint? Yes, when it's in the garden, eating the little shoots and sprouts before the plants can establish, long before they produce any food for our household. This is not a hobby – we intend to support ourselves on this bit of land to the extent possible. Fences are expensive, .22 shells are not. So far we are trying to talk the rabbits out of eating from the gardens. Blood meal spread around the perimeter is sometimes effective, so perhaps we'll try that. (Ah, but where did the blood meal come from? It's a fractal pattern of consequences and responsibilities.)

The professional advice is unambiguous and unsentimental – the most effective control of rabbits is by hunting and trapping. Alan's research indicates that cottontails live only about a year before succumbing to the many diseases and predators that threaten them, so is being shot any different from an adult rabbit's perspective than being eaten by a coyote or owl? But there are lots of them. Say we determined the rabbits in the gardens had to be killed. If we talk ourselves into eating those varmints with food value, we might be eating rabbit every fortnight, maybe every week. Only one way to find out...

Update from BenSyl via Facebook: "Maybe the rabbits in your area are smarter, stronger or more persistent than those here, but we find that a simple, cheap fence of 12" chicken wire suffices to keep them out almost entirely. Of course, it does nothing to discourage the deer!"

Yes, the deer may be facing electricity.

Soil erosion has been a serious problem on this farm historically, and some major civil engineering works have been installed across the decades to control it, but there are still some significant problem areas. This photo shows the head of a gully that has advanced right up to the property line, and the overgrazed cattle pasture on the other side that is contributing to the problem. Water exerts an inexorable force and about the only way to deal with it in a situation like this is to spread it, infiltrate it, expend its energy, or install very expensive hardened structures. It's a difficult, long-term situation.

After many hours of shoveling over several days, we've moved those 16 tons of beach sand down the slope. The algae shown here is far less evident this morning after spraying yesterday.

The west vegetable garden consisted of garden rows between wide strips of turf, but the turf spreads, requires mowing, and consumes a lot of water. We have a large supply of moving boxes that I'm recycling as mulch to kill the grass. The cardboard is weighted with compost and this fall or next spring when it's all sufficiently disintegrated we'll till it under. The garden soil has been neglected in recent years, is heavy with clay, and needs a lot of help to improve its tilth.

An old concord grape vine frames cattle grazing in a neighbor's wooded pasture just across the north fence line.

Derith visited last evening and on our walk after dinner we surprised a coyote as it emerged from the woods onto the lane about a hundred feet ahead of us. It looked sleek and well-fed.

Flickers and woodpeckers! Fireflies! Strawberries! Bats!

Savagery

After several days of no sightings, this morning Otto the muskrat is again swimming back and forth across the pond, conveying small branches of green leaves to his den. Or maybe this is Otterlee – I suppose we have to assume there is at least a pair. A week ago or so Alan saw one jump ten feet into the pond from on shore when an ermine snuck up on it, so I was beginning to think the muskrat were goners.

Something met its end on the lane last night, nothing left but a mess of feathers. To hazard a guess, a young turkey or pheasant. Perhaps the responsible party is one of the coyotes that regularly leave their, um, calling cards in the center of the lane.

I saw a baby rabbit in the yard and wondered, "Am I going to eat you when you grow up?"

• • •

Looking up the terraces toward the west fenceline, with a red wing blackbird on the wire:

This morning we got 16 tons of sand to augment the beach. Some assembly required.

Tuesday Morning Walk

This first is the Year of Observation as we plan for good development and management of the farm by paying attention as best we can to the succession of seasons across the various landscapes and biomes, and learn what we can of the plants' and animals' habits of growth and behavior, the energy fluxes of sun, wind, and rain. We're guided in our thinking by the principles of permaculture, which include minimizing external inputs, exploiting self-managing biological systems, and designing for the waste of one process to be the input of another process. It's a fantastically creative opportunity, with no one set of right answers.

We're similarly guided by good humor, and it's been great fun to discover the acts of whimsy perpetrated by previous residents here, for instance the Eye Chair in the woods.

Also deep in the woods, this unexpected sight.

The raspberries have set lots of fruit, and the several patches around the place are much more lush than anything I've grown in gardens.

My walk eventually took me down to the ruined bridge near the culvert where Kincaid Creek leaves the property. The county road we're on is relatively new and this bridge and its predecessors used to be the only way to get from the west to the east side of the farm. The planks and perhaps the rails are salvageable and it will be a good project to eventually build a new bridge.

Tempered Romance

Alan & Donna, from their experiences in the semi-rural suburbs of Minneapolis, know the destructive and disruptive potential of white tail deer and Canada geese. I come to the farm with rather less prejudice for these species, but I take their concerns seriously. Giant rats and flying pigs. The prior owners' attempt to enlarge the orchard just provided food for the deer to browse upon, and a row of larger ornamental maples along the lane show a lot of damage from "buck rubs" – the males rub their heads against the trunk so violently that the bark comes off and the tree can be girdled and killed. A part of the antlering process, I suppose.

A pair of geese (or several, but we only see two at a time) have persistently tried to make a home on the pond, but A&D are quick to discourage them, and serious enough to employ weapons. We've a powerful slingshot that uses large steel ball bearings. A near miss and the goose doesn't even startle, but a direct hit gets it moving. "So, then," I ask, "what happens when we break a goose's wing and it can't fly away?" "We get the .22." And then what? Do we eat the goose? Can we legally take a goose that way? None of us has ever dressed a game bird, but we're prepared to give it a go when the time comes. A range and weapons expert on one of Alan's work teams suggested a type of plastic pellet ballistically similar to the ball bearing but which will float and can be retrieved, and which won't break a goose's wing.

I was in the machine shed when a mouse appeared. I spoke to it and it approached and kind of hung out while I was preparing to use the tractor. "Have you met the friendly mouse in the machine shed?" I asked Alan. "Friendly mouse?" he replied. "Bunny frolics and now a friendly mouse – are we living in a frickin' Disney movie?"

Beatrix Potter's locution is rather interesting: Peter Rabbit's mother tells him his father had an accident in Mr. MacGregor's vegetable garden.

A weed is a plant out of place, and a varmint an animal out of place. Ok, so then what? I have no qualms about destroying every thistle I see, and even find myself thinking about where are the thistles I haven't found yet. There are no half-measures with thistles. But what about animals? The ones with faces?

At the time I began studying agricultural engineering, Iowa State's program required farm experience, so I spent the summer after high school working on the farm of family friends south of Ames. As I was learning the routine early on, one morning the farmer's son and I were slopping the hogs when a large rat scurried out from under the feeder. I was shocked at the sight, but my mentor didn't hesitate a moment before chasing down the thing and stomping it to death, further shocking me. There were no half-measures with rats on that farm.

Of course it's not just us. A great blue heron circled the pond this morning and prepared to land but was harassed by a pair of blue jays, and once they were satisfied a pair of red wing blackbirds took up the  chase.

Ultimately it's a working out of biologist Lewis Thomas' dictum: life is a game of 'now I eat you'.