C.S.A. Week 4

The life of a small farmer always includes the time-consuming attempts to keep other creatures out. We have learned over the years what works and what doesn’t. Our electric fencing system, knock on wood, has been extremely effective at keeping the deer out. We did learn a few years back that deer can swim. I had decided it would be nice if we didn’t have to fence the pond-side of the garden and instead fenced directly into the water on both ends. After several weeks of seeing deer tracks appear in the garden, and a nagging feeling they were not jumping in, I finally set up a game camera facing the water. On the camera feed we watched a doe easily swim out beyond the fence, around, and into the garden, then swim out again to leave a few hours later. We quickly went back to our old set up. There was a year when the squirrel population exploded in New England and without enough nuts to go around, we had desperate squirrels stealing large amounts of beets. As there is no good way to fence out a squirrel, I ended up trapping over 50 of them in a matter of a few weeks. Last year a family of geese walked out of the pond and into our field soon after we had planted our fall cabbage. They quickly ate about 100ft of new cabbage plants, leaving muddy incriminating goose footprints all over our beds. This spring when the geese came again, I did some reading and learned they like to walk from a water source to food in the evenings. We added non electrified flexi-net along the pond side, and in addition to some close encounters with our dogs I am pleased to report the geese moved on from our pond before deciding to settle in, permanently nesting and hatching their young. Our latest creature has been a porcupine visiting and eating the Swiss Chard. It has been coming off and on for several summers, always favoring the chard, or when not available, the beet greens. It doesn’t do a whole lot of damage, so our efforts to trap it have been minimal. Our fencing does not seem to deter it, and it has ignored the “have a heart” trap baited with everything tasty I could think of: corn, chard, strawberries, apples, peanut butter, and salt. We did set up a camera that sends alerts to our phones, but the porcupine seems to time its garden visits for nights we decide to turn off cell notifications. The nights when we are extra tired or have a very early morning preparing for markets. So we get regular photos of the porcupine in the night, sometimes really close up shots of its quills, and I continue to hope one of these nights we will be able to rush out there and stuff it into a trash can and take it to a new home.

In the share: Please take 8 items

• Squash/Zucchini

• Beets

• Carrots

• Scallions

• Kale

• Cabbage

• Fennel

• Radishes

• Green Beans

• Sungold Tomatoes

• Eggplant

• Sweet Green Peppers

• Fennel

• Parsley

• Chard

• Kohlrabi