Resuming the Battle

I am not talking about farming in general, even though farming could be considered a big fight with Mother Nature.  She is always on the side of the weeds. She is whimsical and wild when it comes to weather.  She has no interest in farmers, really.  She has her own agenda and we continually try to trick her into letting us grow some vegetables, giving her all sorts of treats and trying to keep her bazillions of microbes happy and alive.

Nope, I am back to the same old topic about fighting the critters who mistakenly believe that we are planting these nice straight rows of kohlrabi so they can eat them in an organized fashion.  There is nothing new under the sun here -- but we are back to battling creatures who are hungry and determined.

Today when I saw how far they had eaten down the field -- every single plant, methodically eaten to the ground, about 75 feet into the field -- I decided to take matters into my own hands. (Jon had set some Havahart traps last week but no one had paid any attention.)  I went to see where the holes were and I found a whole condo.  There were three giant holes close to each other, at the bases of trees, and there were about four more holes just over the hill.  Big ones.  Even though it makes no real sense, I decided those groundhogs would have to spend their day either digging in or digging out, instead of eating our plants.  I stuffed each hole with rocks and big sticks, stuck in vertically as far down the hole as I could.  Then I got some buckets of garbage and dumped them over the piles of sticks. Then I peed in one of the holes, just for good measure.  When I went back up with more garbage, I saw one chubby groundhog running away from the hole, so I figure it had come home and found the door locked.

So tonight I went back up to see if anything has changed yet. Not yet.  They are trying to figure out what just happened. My friend Laura is visiting and she calls me an eco-terrorist.

You bet. In the greenhouse something is climbing up onto the tables and eating lettuce and tomato plants. Some amoral rodent ate 250 Happy Rich plants (in one night) that were stashed under a roof to keep the mythical snow from smashing them last weekend. In Loudoun there are voles pulling the lettuce down through the plastic and eating dozens of plants a night. One of our workers, a reasonable and humane person, has started to stomp the voles when she sees them. She says it hurts her soul but she is not going to stand by and let them eat up all our plants. We are still chasing geese off the fields at Parents every day.  I don't need to kill these animals, I just want them to move away because there is a crazy person making their life a misery. I think it can work. A few years ago I am sure I forced some groundhogs to move away by dumping five gallon buckets of rotten tomatoes into their holes for many days in a row.  At first they dug their way out but after a while they just moved.

The thing is, groundhogs move into holes that are already established.  Apparently the biggest and most aggressive ones get the best real estate. One year we paid the professional exterminator to fill in all the holes and spread a special smelling concoction, and he said he was sure they would not come back. He was wrong.  We know where most of the holes are and we have relocated dozens of groundhogs over the years, even though it is illegal. You are supposed to kill them, not move them. That makes no sense to me.  Jon caught about 24 raccoons and groundhogs in one year and moved them all to a nice wooded area on the other side of the Dulles Toll Road. Every time, he shows them to me to make sure they aren't just the same ones coming back again. They aren't. They all have different faces.

Food safety laws prohibit using dogs or cats to control these varmints in areas where we have food growing or getting washed.  I'm pretty sure a good cat would make a big dent in the rodent population. My dad used to fantasize about breeding a giant house cat so we could have a hunter to keep the rats down.  He said a 30 pound cat would be optimal.

Anyway, there is no guarantee that my eco-terrorism will really convince this group of groundhogs to move, but I am quite sure they will stop eating the plants for a while.  I saw one going down into the hole just before I jammed it all up, so that one is busy for a few days.

Meanwhile, we are feeding the foxes our leftovers.  There is a beautiful mother fox with a den of cute little kits behind Anna's house. Even though we know they eat chickens if they can get in, we also know they eat rabbits, and that is just fine with us.

Raccoons are not cute, they are amoral (they kill chickens for sport).. Rabbits are voracious and they poop all over the greenhouse.  Groundhogs have unlimited capacity to eat.  Rats are vile. Deer are rats with long legs.  Squirrels are rats with bushy tails. Geese are disgusting.  I know coyotes are undesirable but I would not mind if they came and cleaned up some of these pests. Food safety laws do not prohibit natural predators.

And so the battle continues.