I’ll admit that whenever I first encounter any kind of garden pest I go into a kind of anxiety paralysis. I think that I want so much for things to go well, and as I’m still fairly new at all of this gardening stuff, I tend to drift towards seeing everything as success or failure in the moment, rather than everything just being part of the process; as if by the very fact that I have garden pests I am a failure as a gardener.

Of course this could not be further from the truth.

Some weeks ago I found these pretty harlequin beetles on my broccoli. I looked them up. I was hoping they were beneficial bugs and not pests, because they seemed too pretty to kill.

But it turns out they had to go. I think I killed about 5, and then I never saw another one. I was feeling pretty doggone proud of myself for nipping that in the bud. Too proud, I think; since I started to let my daily inspections kind of slide.

Consequently, when I discovered this (quite beautiful, I think) creature on a broccoli leaf, the problem was already getting out of hand. Something was most definitely eating my broccoli leaves, and from the looks of some of the holes, it looked like something that was really, really hungry.

Had the Harlequin bugs left behind progeny? I think that I was stupid enough to actually not pluck him off and kill him right away – and stupid enough not to look for more. I mean, he was beautiful, and I didn’t know what he was … I grew broccoli last year and I didn’t have any significant problems with pests. But then again, I grew half a dozen plants last year. I have twice that this year, along with brussels sprouts and collards and kale and various other things. This year I’m using more garden space, I have more plants, and I’m attracting more pests. Also, I suspect that since things went so well last year, and I didn’t really have to deal with fall garden pests, that in a sense this fall I’m operating in even more ignorance than I did last year, in having the audacity to think that pests wouldn’t be a problem. Well, let me tell you something. At this point I’m pretty sure that there is no caterpillar-looking thing on earth that should be left to mind its business on any of your crops. They will eat you out of house and home.

Largely because of my blogging activities – I feel a responsibility to present as much and as accurate information as I can – I overcame my essential laissez faire attitude about the whole thing (translation: laziness) and went on an Internet hunt to find out just what this pretty boy was. Turns out he’s a cross-striped cabbage moth larvae. And these – which I discovered in several places on the underside of broccoli leaves – are the cabbage moth’s eggs.

The cross-striped cabbage moth larvae is not the first visitor against whom I’ve had to wage war this year. Back in June I started noticing these very beautiful beetles on my potato plants.

They turned out to be the (again beautiful) dreaded Colorado potato beetle (brown and yellow) and their slightly less attractive larvae (red and black). I am anti-pesticide, so after learning what they were from the Internet, I started picking them off and smashing them by hand. This is an activity that really gets you in touch with your primal side; it’s a gross task that requires a certain amount of “live and let die” determination. It also requires a certain amount of technique. My approach was to fold over the leaf they were on and to pinch them inside of it. For the most part this kept the goo off of my hands. Quite honestly, the indiscriminate massacre of insects in the garden is something that I can hardly bring myself to do without a twinge of conscience. But I want to grow my own food, so I do what I have to do. Understanding what providing for yourself really means is kind of what this whole endeavor is really all about. And even now, in my pre-chicken days, I can see that what it's all about is life and death – at every level.

For days this summer I went outside and inspected my twelve banana fingerling potato plants, and picked off every beetle and beetle larvae that I saw. And amazingly, once I took this action, the situation was corrected in a relatively short amount of time. I had read that the Colorado potato beetle can damage up to 30% of the foliage of a potato plant before it actually begins to effect the yield of the plant, and my beetle damage never approached anywhere near that amount of green. I’m hoping that I can exert some similar control in the great cross-striped cabbage moth everlasting broccoli brunch that’s going on outside in my garden right now. And so far over the course of three days I bet I’ve killed hundreds of those larvae, of varying sizes, and destroyed a couple clutches of eggs – every day there are drastically fewer of them, so I suspect this approach is working.

Expanding my knowledge of the insect world is another unexpected and useful result of my gardening efforts, but garden pests are not what this post is about – unless you count ignorance as a “garden pest” – because I’m coming to understand that what really causes me transient anxiety about any problem is not knowing exactly what the problem is, and therefore not knowing what I can do about it.

The current issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine has an article titled, “Homesteading Lessons Learned, If I Could Do It All Over Again…” In it, 20-year veteran homesteader Steve Maxwell offers his advice to anyone starting out on a homesteading adventure. Interestingly enough, one of his recommendations is to “get high speed Internet right away” – for the wealth of information that will then be at your fingertips, of course.

I haven’t been in the “homesteading” business for very long, but nonetheless I’m going to offer my first lesson learned here:

Don’t panic or get discouraged until you know exactly what your problem is and what actions you might be able to take to mitigate it. Chances are, once you have that information, you’ll be too busy solving your problem to panic about it anyway.

There is a happy ending here, too. Check it out. It looks like I’m going to have some broccoli this year after all.

Compost Problem Solving Day – Before 9 a.m.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

I would like to go on record here as saying that I wholeheartedly believe that this is true. I have multiple reasons, but the one that comes to mind at the moment is that if you’re going to garden with any kind of seriousness, you’re going to need the information in that library to figure what the heck to do with the garden – every step of the way. Cicero’s sentiment has particular resonance for me this morning because I also believe that the following (from Mike and Nancy Bubel) is true – that experience can be translated to mean “doing it wrong the first time”.

How do I know? Check it out. Does this look like compost to you?

My two favorite books right now are the Bubels' Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables, and Steve Soloman’s Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times. I pulled out Gardening When It Counts this morning because I woke with a feeling of restless agitation, an inability to concentrate, and an un-assuageable drive to DO something. So … today is the day I solve the composting problem – hopefully without too much flexing of the checkbook.

Quite a few years of studying philosophy has shown me that you can’t solve a problem (in the real world OR in the metaphysical one) unless you can define that problem, so here goes.

Essentially, there are two problems. Make that two “problem areas.” There is The Inside Problem, and The Outside Problem. The Inside Problem deals with how to handle the food scraps before they ever make it outside, and I’m going to save discussion of The Inside Problem for another post. Today we’re heading outside.

The Outside Problem is the mess that I’ve already shown you. It contains the season’s worth of food scraps, dead vegetable plants (with and without vine borers, seeds, and who knows what else), gigantic weeds pulled haphazardly and far too infrequently from the summer garden, at least one dead snake, at least one cardboard box, and a very flimsy and unsatisfactory tomato cage. Oh, and at this point, LOTS of yucky grub-like organisms that have sprung into existence there and are quite obviously having the time of their lives.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that we have a pack of dogs, so whatever we do has to be appropriately fenced off so that the scraps are unavailable to them. They don’t look too intimidating, but believe me, they’re crafty when it comes to snatching scraps out of the “compost” pile, and my raw-foodie cocker would rather eat melon than meat.

We have an out of the way spot picked out for this new pile, but it’s currently full of grass clippings … this I believe is known as putting the cart before the horse. 

Still, as my husband quite rightly pointed out, this most recent massive grass cutting will probably be our last big one of the year, and if we want to do something useful with the grass clippings then we needed to rake them up and pile them somewhere (we don’t have a bagger).

So … my idea was to use the same materials that I did for our un-composting disaster pile – cheap fence posts and rabbit guard – and to close off a much larger space this time, enough space that I can make a pile on one side and then move that pile to the other side. But I feel like I don’t have a whole lot of room here to work. I SO wish I could just go buy one of those big composting turning barrel thingies. But that’s not what we’re (trying to be) about here, so out comes Steve Solomon, the “gardening grandfather that I never had.” Except that I DID have a gardening grandfather of my own.

But he’s been deceased for some years now. I think about him often and really miss him these days. But I didn’t see him all that often before he passed away, since he lived a thousand miles away from me; and quite frankly, I’m ashamed to say, when it came to gardening know-how back then I was happy to pick and eat the produce, but I wasn’t exactly paying rapt attention to the know-how. Enter Steve Solomon.

Anyway … It’s a cool September morning and I’m out here on the deck eating my breakfast and waiting for my daughter to wake up, and now I pause to read.

Compost Problem Solving Day – Noon

Well, after reading enough of Mr. Solomon’s compost chapter to feel thoroughly intimidated, I’ve come up with a plan. This rabbit guard and flimsy fence post thing just isn’t going to cut it. I don’t have enough materials on hand to make an enclosure big enough for me to make what should be an effective compost heap, to be able to move around it, and to keep my dogs the heck away from it. I have no problem going and getting more materials if that’s what it takes the get the job done – except that it doesn’t. I have a better idea. It’s this.

Nope, not the rabbit guard in the foreground…the 6 foot tall chain link fence in the background, that’s standing in front of the privacy fence.

I bought this kennel earlier this year in yet another attempt to solve The Dog Problem. They quite refused to be kenneled quietly in it, and its use as a kennel was short-lived. So then I moved it to the side of the yard as you see above to distance my four dogs from our neighbor’s four (or five?) dogs. The neighbors keep their dogs out all the time, and the whole crew tends to get into an insane barking frenzy the moment my dogs step out the door. (I’m going to resist the opportunity to enlarge upon how unbelievably annoying this is. Moving on.)

This fence is an eyesore here anyway, and even though it DID cut down enormously on the fence-barking frenzy, it’s no longer doing any good, because the whole area has been reconfigured because of our immanent construction and now the dogs can get behind it, so Voila! I’m going to go with this as a compost enclosure.

I’ve eaten lunch, fed the kid, and bathed the muddy, groundhog-obsessed cocker spaniel, and I’m heading outside now with a craftsman wrench.

Compost Problem Solving Day – 1:38 p.m.

Well, once I decided what to do, doing it was pretty short work. It’s still an expensive solution to the problem, but it’s hundreds of bucks I wasted months ago, and not hundreds of bucks I’m wasting today; and if it works well then the money I spent on this thing won’t have been wasted at all, and that’ll be a good thing.

So, Phase 1 of The Great Compost Project is complete, and it looks like this.

It’ll keep the dogs out, keep the decomposing stuff contained, and give me some room to work so that maybe I can actually do something useful with all of our scraps.

What's to come? Well, phases 2, 3 and 4 are as follows:

Phase 2: Organize what’s in this cage so that I can collect stuff through the rest of the fall, and then build the compost heap. That’s going to involve moving all of these already nicely-rotting grass clippings up into one corner so that I can put them on as I build the pile at the end of the fall. I think I’m going to need a pitchfork for that. I can’t WAIT to get my pitchfork!

Phase 3: Develop a new in-house system for collecting food scraps. I think I need something bigger than the bowl that I’ve been using, so that the project requires less-frequent trips out to the heap.

Phase 4: Actually build the compost heap so that I will have compost for the spring. I’m still a little fuzzy on this step, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out, if I keep reading Steve Solomon and apply myself to it.

So, there you go: a problem-solving project well begun. I feel better already.

Last night, our modest quest for self-sufficiency took a drastic turn.

I mean, gardening – fine. Making bread from whole grain? Great. I’ve even got my own recipe for homemade dog treats. I almost have to. When you have a pack of dogs and you care as much about what goes into their body as you do about what goes into your own, that can get real expensive, real quick. And OK, I’ll admit it; awhile back I was telling my husband that I thought we should get some chickens for eggs. I was extolling the virtues of chickens. Our neighbor behind us, Mr. F, keeps chickens, I told him. They don’t smell if you take care of them. Mr. F showed me his chickens, and they don’t smell! I’m talking about just three or four chickens!

Repeatedly, he laughed at me, and told me there was no WAY that we were getting chickens. He drew the line at chickens.

And yet, I cannot PRY the Northern Tool and Equipment Catalogue out of his hands. What does that have to do with anything, you wonder? Well, nothing actually, but when you still have one foot in suburbia, and homesteading is something new to you, a mere couple of chickens don’t seem to be such a tremendous leap from wanting to buy a tractor.

That Mom might want chickens (and a goat for milk) has become something of a family joke. When I ordered six chickens from a local farmer, I can’t tell you how many times my husband said, “These chickens will be dead, right? These are dead chickens that you’re getting, right?” Honestly, I wanted to thump him on the head with one of those dead chickens by the time I got them home.

The farmer offered to bring me over a few in a cage in the bed of his pickup truck just to mess with him.

But I declined.

I mean, I wanted to convert my husband. Not antagonize him.

And then last night, he threw the gauntlet down.

He said, and I quote, “If you want to get chickens, that’s O.K. Go ahead and order them.”

Gulp.

The last time my husband came to me with this kind of life-altering pronouncement, eleven months later we were bringing home a baby.

Um…WHAT?

I mean, I’ve thought about it. I’ve talked about it. It seems perfect IN THE ABSTRACT. Philosophically speaking. But to actually do it?

Okay. It’s confession time. It may be – I’m not positive, but it MAY be – that that one foot of mine that’s still in suburbia is stuck fast in some recently poured concrete.

Still. Suddenly chickens are on the table (no pun intended).

So I pulled out my copy of The Backyard Homestead, a book that I love, and turned to the section on raising chickens; a section that I had given only a cursory reading up till now. And I know I have a GRIT issue around here somewhere that talks about chicken coops or raising chickens, or something about chickens … and I’m going to read every blog post about raising chickens because I know there’s a wealth of demystifying information right here at my fingertips and because quite frankly – I’m a little bit scared.

But I’m also kind of excited.

It seems that on the ladder of self-sufficiency, “Can you feed yourself?” may be the first rung. I mean, I’m sure it’s cheaper to poke seeds in the dirt and raise chickens than it is to install windmills or solar panels or to build your own home from the lumber on your property (if you even have any).

So. What the heck. I’m game.

I shared with him what little I did know about raising chickens for eggs – and the part that most concerns me about the prospect. It’s not the poop. Are you kidding me? We’ll have our own fertilizer! It’s not that I might occasionally get my hand pecked. It’s not that having chickens requires a twice a day commitment between the cleaning, the feeding and the gathering of eggs. It’s that they really only lay well for a year and two, and that after that, apparently, the best place for them is in the stew pot.

And around here, we tend to get attached to things. How else would I have ended up with four dogs? Quite frankly, having had a few litters of puppies around here over the years, it’s a wonder we don’t have twenty.

But the fact remains that we do eat meat; that the chickens we bought from the local farmer lived for about six or seven weeks before their trip to the butcher; and that they almost certainly had a better six or seven weeks of life than anything I might pick up out of most grocery store coolers.

And then my husband said something both surprising and interesting to me, something along the lines of how having to raise and care for and eventually eat our chickens was likely to reawaken our spiritual sides.

I couldn’t agree more.

I began gardening with gusto because of a perpetual concern about what I’m putting in my family’s bodies, and because of a distrust of the gargantuan pharma-medica-food monster that otherwise runs every aspect of our modern lives. What I didn’t expect from the experience was to be thinking about faith; about what it means to believe in something that you cannot see – like that little seed unfolding some fraction of an inch below the soil line – and upon which you are dependent. I didn’t expect that I would feel so closely dependent both on the earth and on my own efforts, and that this dependency would become tinged with reverence. I didn’t expect to feel a responsibility for every seedling I started, and for every transplant I purchased. And I sure didn’t expect to feel guilt and shame over all of the ones that I allowed – through neglect, or ignorance, and sometimes I suspect through no fault of my own – to die. That is, the ones that died for no good reason; the ones that were not able to fulfill their natural life cycle and end up on my table. I didn’t expect to have an increased awareness of and respect for nature; or a heightened awareness of the cycle of life, and the fact that we, too, are in that cycle, and that life doesn’t last forever, and isn’t supposed to.

So if we do this chicken thing, we’re not going to do it in ignorance. Because one day we’re going to have to look a living creature in the eye, and say, “Thank you” for an upcoming meal. And when we do have that last conversation, I’d like to think that they might also be thinking, “Thank you” to me.

That is both a radical and a sobering thought.

And one we ought to be having more often, I suspect.

So, chickens are on the table, and we have a lot of learning to do. We also have a lot of other, more pressing things to do in the meantime, like solve my compost problem that I just keep putting off, and reading the Root Cellaring book that arrived yesterday, and finding the right storage place for my eight million sweet potatoes. Oh, and finishing the addition we’re putting on the house. Hopefully by Christmas. So, if we can do all of that, and educate ourselves, and my husband builds the coop (no problem there), we may try a few hens this coming spring. So stay tuned.

Oh, and by the way. He’s also on board about the goat. But we’re going to have to work our way up to that.