A Bug's Life (In Heels): One Girlie-Girl's Shuddering Road to Acceptance

Bugs are so gross. You know what's gross? Bugs. You know what's grosser than gross? Probably a bigger bug. You know what's the worst? I don't know, probably a huge freaking insect that just feels entitled to come out and like, check items off its gross little bucket list by dive-bombing a human's face (mine) or crawling up a human's glove (also mine) or just sit there being obscenely huge and gross and scuttling tiny gross legs within reach of a human's patent leather stiletto (also, alas, mine).

I'm sorry, I'm going to need a moment to go and wash out the inside of my brain so I can never remember this shoe. 

I am at odds with bugs.

I was excited to put out cauliflower this year since I'd never tried such an ambitious vegetable. (I'd like to take credit for success with my tomatoes but last year one literally grew in the dirt next to the pot without every having been planted. And produced. So.) I wondered how long it would take for the florets to form from the big healthy green cabbage-looking leaves, and I kept inspecting them, looking for those first telltale signs of white clusters. One morning when I went out there was a pale green cluster; in fact, there were pale green clusters all over all of the sets of leaves. Like nice fat little clusters. I was delighted. How had they grown so fast? I never expected them to come out green but now I was a FARMER and I knew that cauliflower comes out green. How exciting. If they grew that fast overnight they would probably double in size by tomorrow and I'd have ginormous, Whole Foods sized cauliflower heads in a few weeks. Ah, rapture! We'd be knee deep in cauli-rice (cauliflower grated on a cheese grater and cooked with cilantro and salt and pepper). I mentally set up the photo ops of myself in a lovely fitted dress holding a cauliflower head as my bouquet.

I looked closer and realized the little green clusters were looser than I'd originally realized and got really excited. Maybe each one of these little heads were going to grow into a separate floret. And with multiple clusters on each plant maybe there would be multiple heads! I was a cauliflower farmer! Maybe I could start a roadside stand like the end of the Dixie Chicks video "Goodbye Earl" and sell strawberry jam and cauliflower heads in a gingham off the shoulder top with a flattering neckline. I went inside to pull my sleepy husband out to the garden to show him my budding new business.

He peered inside the leaves. "Babe, those are aphids."

I was furious and shocked and suddenly terrified that he was right.

"No they're not," I said bravely.

He bent closer and picked at the green cluster. It came apart in his fingers, with effort, though it was still sticking to the leaf with malicious adhesion. With a cry of dismay I fell on my knees and dug through the cauliflower leaves and picked the center clusters apart. Aphids. I wailed to the heavens and tried stubbornly to pick off the aphids in hope there was something buried inside the clusters of bug bodies. Aphids. Nothing but aphids all the way through to the center. No cauliflower buds. No emerging leaves. Just a crawling, writhing, filthy pile of APHIDS living in sin with no other purpose than to devour my dreams.

Why. Why would you do that. 

I need a moment.

Bottom line, it's not been easy for me to recognize things like beneficial bugs. The very concept of that seems oxymoronic. Following the aphid-pocalypse I bought expensive boxes of ladybugs which I delicately refrigerated and carefully, lovingly, trustingly bedded amid my cauliflower plants. They blackened my plants in impossible numbers with so many many legs, for the first  time in my life I realized a ladybug was not an adorable pet but a foul swarming beetle; and then in the morning they took off, leaving the aphids all but untouched, presumably in search of the next champagne and aphid caviar bender they could hustle their little polka-dotted behinds into. Oh, aren't we SO cute. Betrayal, most foul, ladybugs. You are no lady.

Lady, my ass. 

However...

About a month later, after the sullen and resentful aphid-stunted cauliflower leaves finally withered in on themselves at last and died, I dug up their beds and went to plant peas, and noticed all the nice fat red wiggler earthworms squirming around in the half-compost soil mix I'd made. I definitely didn't want to touch them but I went and got my little poppy-print garden gloves (aha! This is what those are for!) so I could finish turning the soil without having to worry about getting worm on me and finished the job without disturbing them. The peas and bush beans I planted came up like gang busters. When I finally got ready to renovate the bed again this time I fitted the chicken run over the top and let them feast on the spent pea shoots, bean leaves, and all the worms they could dig up. When I went to turn the soil the next day, there were even more red wigglers, even after the chick-pocalypse, than I'd seen before the peas. Hmm.

My husband suddenly got all excited about something he'd read about called black soldier flies, which could supposedly chow through six inches of green compost a day (human food waste, basically) without needing any leaf or wood amendments. He started sending me links with bizarre composting contraptions and videos of what the soldier fly grubs looked like; and then with all the pride he'd had in introducing his first born to people, he announced that we. HAD. SOLDIER FLIES! YES! In our very own backyard, flies. Who could have known that this momentous occasion would strike our simple farm. It's far more than I ever dared to dream.

And they were gross. When I got home from work that day he took me out to show me his exciting discovery and shyly lifted the compost bin lid to expose the writhing heaps of soldier fly larva. Like thick, serrated, fat and stubby worms, they lay wriggling all over each other, cupped inside an orange peel.

"You're disgusting," I told him primly, and turned on my heel to head back inside.

He took a video of his precious grubs and posted it on Facebook.

Then came in sadly to tell me he hadn't gotten even one "like".

I have to admit, over the next few days I became sort of fascinated with the grubs when I realized they really were going through a half foot of waste a day and turning it into beautiful black castings for our garden beds. They were gross. They writhed and crawled over everything in the compost bin. I waited to see the adult flies, but realized I never did. The females just laid their eggs inside the compost bin and settled in to a life cycle near the renewable food source, our trash. Huh. I realized they were eating our peels and pulp and coffee grounds, and decided to stop the tedious but necessary practice of cutting up our organic trash into 1" pieces for the compost bin. Disposing of a pineapple had been hell, but now the little guys in the compost bin cleaned the rind for me completely and turned it into soil. Huh.

I started watching them. There they were, unattractive, unsightly, unassuming, but patiently taking what we would have sent to a landfill and turning into super nutrients for our garden. We'd use the dark soil they made in a bed for carrots and then give them the carrot peels to start the process again. It was...elegant. Once a week, my husband took a handful of the grubs and threw them to the chickens to scratch for, keeping the numbers from getting overwhelming, giving the chickens some extra protein, and saving us on having to buy the chicks supplements.

Yesterday I saw one that had escaped when my husband turned the compost piles and realized when I saw it sitting there that it wasn't gross at all. While it certainly wasn't cute or the kind of bug you'd hold out your hand to hold, it was compact, utilitarian, and functional. Soldier fly was a great name for these guys--they had one job and the did it ad infinitum, impossibly, genetically well. This simple black grub had earned my respect.

I scooped him up and deposited him back into the compost bin where he happily wriggled over to a carrot piece to grimly start his work.

I was surprised to find I didn't shudder at all.

Barnyard Vet in Heels

After an unseasonably cool San Diego August, with temperatures in the high 70s and some sprinkles of rain, we had a hot day today. A very hot day. My first day back teaching school and I alternated between shivering in the blasting air conditioning and dehydrating with the preposterous heat when I stepped outside. When I finally got into the car to head home at 3:30 p.m. the outside temp was 104. I had moved the chicken run this morning to a shadier spot beside the house with more grass for them to nibble, and supplied them with some nice cold pineapple and carrot pulp from my morning juice to help keep them cool during the day.

It wasn't enough.

I pulled up to my house to find three little feathered heaps lying under their angled shelter inside the run. They looked lifeless. I jumped out of my car and ran over to them, clucking to them. The black and white Maran perked up her head and looked at me without getting up; the auburn Rhode Island Red and the brown Welsummer with her pretty gold quail-patterned feathers didn't move at all. When I opened their run the Maran got to her feet but didn't run away (a first for her) and let me pick her up docilely. I put her under one arm and scooped up the Welsummer and the Red into the crook of my other arm. I could feel them panting (they cool themselves like dogs do) and their hearts beating, fast as horses, but they didn't struggle or even do more than lay quietly together in my arm.

Before we even thought about buying chicks I had been like a pregnant mother, reading every single scrap of literature on chicken rearing I could get my hands on. The Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, A Chicken in Every Yard, the chapters in Little House in the Suburbs and The Backyard Homestead's Guide to Raising Farm Animals. So as I was hurrying the chickens back to the backyard to care for them I didn't think, I just reacted.

• Cool their feet. I set down all three chickens and sprayed down their feet with cool water from the hose to help them lower their body temperatures. The black and white Maran perked up immediately and struggled and flapped to get down. My redhead, the Rhode Island Red,  pepped up a bit and lifted her head so she could sit up in my arms instead of dangling loose. I sprayed her feet for another minute and she clucked indignantly at me. Then I turned to the brown Welsummer. Her feet just dangled lifelessly underneath her, and her mouth was gaping wide and outstretched. I sprayed her feet but they didn't seem to feel any cooler. 
• Get them into the shade. I brought them back to their coop where it was not just shady but completely dark and put them inside. The Maran, already feeling the peppiest of the three, started walking around and fluffing her wings to cool herself. The Rhode Island Red and the Welsummer laid down immediately in the doorway of the coop. 
• Water. Normally the chicks have a nipple waterer (a big five gallon bucket with a metal nipple system underneath that they can click for a drop at a time without getting soaked themselves) but they seemed uninterested in drinking, and I knew they were dehydrated. I brought them a small tub of ice water and dipped my fingers in to coat the tops of the Red and the Welsummer's beaks. The Red almost immediately gulped down the drops, then the next ones I dripped onto her beak, then when I dunked her beak in the tub she got it and started drinking greedily. The Maran, not the brightest of birds under the best of circumstances, came over to investigate, but of course instead of drinking like an intelligent thirsty creature, tilted her head at me curiously. I sighed and dunked her beak, too, and she was like, OMIGOD you did not tell me that this was WATER why have I been drinking from a spigot like some kind of ANIMAL. She went to town on that tub like water was going out of style. 
• Cold fruit. I grabbed some cold peaches from the fridge and cut them up so their cool juicy flesh was exposed and threw them into the coop. Red and Maran immediately went for the fruit and tore open the fleshy center piece peck by peck down to the pit. 

By now Red and Maran were feeling good, clucking and drinking and eating freely and jumping down from the coop to peck for bugs under the coop. But beautiful Welsummer was still not moving. She lay there in a fat pile of pretty feathers, her little sides trembling with her panting, drinking the drops that I tapped onto her beak but otherwise not moving. I watched her with a critical eye, and noticed her golden eyes were dilating and contracting and dilating and contracting. This couldn't be good.

I pulled her out of the coop gently and put her on my lap with a bottle of ice for her feet. I laid her talons over the curve of the frozen water bottle with my bare thighs freezing under the painfully icy cold bottle but her feet still feverishly hot. With one of the peach pieces in hand, I was able to squeeze juice into her open beak. She nibbled the first ten or fifteen drops down but then lost interest, turning her head when I tried to tempt her with the sweet juice. I checked her feet. Still insanely hot, burning to the touch, but after a few minutes her golden eyes had stopped dilating. I switched to an ice water dish, dripping cold water into her beak with the ice bottle on her feet. After another few minutes she struggled to sit up and flapped to get down, so I set her on her feet. She made it a few unsteady steps before staggering like a drunk and falling over. 

Shit. 

Okay. I tried again. I filled a six inch deep tub with water and dunked and held her feet in the cool water, then dripped cool water over the top of her head. I dunked her beak into the water and she came up sputtering but slurped down the drops; I dunked her again and then two more times until she was slurping steadily. She was still unsteady on her feet so I picked her up and flipped her onto her back like I had when she was a baby chick, just two weeks old, and let her feet naturally curl around the ice water bottle as I held her in my lap. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her breathing stilled and she almost immediately fell asleep in my lap. When I touched her feet several minutes later they had finally started to move from oven-hot to her normal humming warmth. She opened her eyes and sat up, then struggled to flip over and sat on my knee. 

She looked up at me. I dripped some water onto her beak. She slurped it greedily then pecked my thumb. Hard. And turned a baleful eye on me. 

I felt a sudden warmth. 

The warmth spread over me like a font. 

It was not my heart, in an outpouring of tenderness, but the Welsummer releasing the last of her feverish heat with a truly alarming quantity of hot, watery chicken poo all over my leg. She shook herself and clucked at me, indignantly. 

Sigh. 

I'll just go inside and change my shoes then. 

Seed Savers

I always get carried away buying seed packets. It's hard to think about something that will literally grow at a slightly-faster-than-snail's-pace as being exciting--still, the bright colors of the beautiful mix of flowers on the cover, the interesting tomatoes you've never tasted or even seen in a store, the gourmet herbs from Italy and France carry little grains of hope inside their envelopes. Packet of sunflower seeds and you can automatically envision fields of the bright yellow blooms, emptying their bowing heads into your waiting hands at the end of the season to just pour out their seeds for you to roast and stuff into your mouth. Packet of corn and I suddenly realize I'll never need to buy corn again, not ears of roasting corn or popcorn or corn for corn flour because I will now have a cornfield in the corner of my backyard. Lettuce? Eggplants? Hops? Lemon basil? Purple sage? Holy lord. With seeds you can have anything you want in your garden without being at the whim of what seedlings the nursery keeps in stock.

This year was no exception. I walked into the nursery in April and absolutely lost my mind. I bought seed packets for butter lettuce, alpine strawberries, cilantro, green beans, nasturtiums, runner beans, loofah gourds, swiss chard, torpedo onions, baby kale, and basil, on top of the six packs of seedlings I bought of cauliflower, broccoli, butternut squash and roma tomatoes.
I had ten times as many things as I needed, especially since I had three packets of different pumpkin seeds, corn, green beans, and all kinds of flower seeds from last year. I mean, seeds are literally a little packet of potential, and $3 a packet seems a small price to pay to hold a little potential hope in your hand...except of course those packets add up...

That'll be $947.

So one of my goals this season was to find out exactly how to save seeds from as many things as possible, and decrease my overall costs for the endless question people always seem to have, "How much are you saving on your food now?" What I was most surprised to learn was that you can't always just dump the seeds right into your hand and put them into the ground; and that not all plants that should have seeds do have seeds. A hybrid plant (most often something like a tomato) doesn't create seeds or if it does they won't be true to the parent plant. That's one of the reasons people make the choice to use heirloom seeds: they're always open pollinated (meaning, they can spread their seeds on their own by wind or by pollinators). And a lot of plants, heirloom or not, have specific recipes for success for collecting their seeds. For example:

Lettuce: It's so damn cool. Basically as soon as the weather warms up too much or the lettuce is done growing, it goes to seed with these little obelisks. To protect itself while its putting its energy into seeding, the plant emits a bitter chemical into the leaves making them taste, you guessed it, super bitter. The lettuce that was a normal looking head will sprout up two or three feet into these tall towers and at the very top are some little yellow flowers. 

Seeds: the yellow flowers on any kind of lettuce need to be pollinated and the seeds inside need to dry; so although there are seeds inside the flower heads almost as soon as they emerge, they are ready to be harvested when the yellow flowers turn into a fluffy white chaff like a dandelion that's gone to seed. It's the perfect little package, so super elegant--yellow flowers particularly attract bees; then, left to its own devices, the flower pod would dry and float on the wind using the white chaff, spreading the seeds in all directions so as not to compete with each other. Once the white fluff has appeared you can pop off the heads carefully and roll them between your fingers to find 15-20 seeds. 

  

That's right. A packet of lettuce seeds--in this case an Heirloom type that I paid $3.25 for--has maybe 100 seeds. Just one of those seeds can turn into a tower like you see below, with hundreds of flower heads on it once it goes to seed, and come out with thousands of individual seeds. 

Tomatoes:You'd think, since tomatoes are a fruit with very visible seeds, harvesting them would be a piece of cake, but most sources say that fermenting tomato seeds is the best way to separate out highest quality and most viable seeds from an individual fruit. It also makes a lot of sense. Hopefully you've chosen the reddest and most juicy fruit, or maybe the biggest fruit; in any case, the one you want to eat--so presumably you want more fruits just like that one. 

Seeds: the nice thing is that you can save tomato seeds right from a fruit that you're eating. Heirloom tomatoes or Romas (technically not considered an heirloom, but an open pollinated variety) can be cut in half and the seeds and the gel they're suspended in squeezed out into a shallow dish or cup. This worked really well for me when I was drying the roma tomatoes for sun dried tomatoes. Add 1/4 cup of water to cover and leave the mixture for a few days. A scummy layer will form (perfectly okay) as the seeds separate from the goo; the good seeds will sink to the bottom, the unripe or unviable seeds will stay in the scum at the top. This also helps separate out seeds that might carry disease or fungus. After the seeds are completely separated you can take a spoon to lift out the scum and add more fresh water if more gel remains. After a week the good seeds are easy to see. Drain and dry on a paper towel, then store in a dry place. 

Green Beans: Seems easy since you open up a green bean and there is literally a pod of bean seeds just sitting there. Except if you've ever tried to plant a green bean while its still green? You know there's a little more to it. 

Seeds: At the end of the harvest season, leave the biggest healthiest plant with all its beans. It'll take between a month and six weeks for the beans to wither and shrivel into pale tan seed pods that you can easily snap open and shell. Inside, the once green bean seeds have hardened and turned a deep purple brown much easier to store. 

Sunflowers: Another plant that seems obvious but which actually takes much longer to get to harvest than I expected. The heads have to completely fade; then the pollen dries and turns into a brown fluff that you can brush aside with your finger. The seeds will turn from white to striped black and white to completely black. 

Seeds: Once the seeds are totally black, just take a bowl to catch the seeds and run your thumb over the seed heads. The seeds should just fall easily from the head (if not, leave the flower to dry longer). A good rule of thumb is if the back of the head is brown and dry the seeds are loose enough to harvest. If you don't like the look of dead sunflowers hanging around, you can cut off the top 12" of the stem with the head attached and hang the stems to dry upside down with paper bags tied around the heads to catch any seeds that fall prematurely. 

Of course you can always roast these seeds with salt and eat them instead of replanting!

Over the course of my season of seed saving this year, from each planting that I started from a seed packet, I got an exponential return. I'd estimate that from this season alone I saved enough of everything I planted to seed three or four whole beds of the same with plenty left over to give away packets of the same seeds to everyone in the neighborhood. Not only am I going to save at least $100 in seed for next year, I can actually expand my garden by two or three times with no extra cost at all. 

Awkward Bombshell tries to Neighborhood

My neighbors keep, like, stopping to talk and I don't really know what to do with that.

Hi! This is totally not awkward. Welcome to my yard.

Ironically, before the water restrictions from the drought encouraged me to go apocalypto on my lawn, I never really spent any time out on the front yard. The perfectly green lawn was watered automatically and mowed and edged by manlier hands than mine so no need for me to do any gardening; and despite its cool green carpeted visual appeal, it seemed a little odd to pull up a lawn chair in the grass and just like...what...sit there or something? There is exactly zero percent of that going on on my street, except of course for the crazy/wise? person who last summer came and spread a blanket under my trees to have a picnic with her baby on my lawn.

Can you not?
I mean, actually what are you doing right now, just...having a picnic on my lawn? This is not a public park! There is actually, ACTUALLY, a public park like two blocks from here. THIS? Is my lawn omigodpleasedon'tstabmeinthehead....

Honestly I go out into my front yard so little that I recently went a block party two doors down from my house. My neighbor looked at me strangely before handing over my paper plate ticket to the potluck-buffet pasta-salad extravaganza and asked me if he could help me. I smiled awkwardly and said oh, I live in the white house on the corner. (subtext: I am not a crazy baby-picnic people's lawn-sitter, I didn't just stop in here for the questionable food and the company of strangers who I have nothing in common with and who will ask me for the one millionth time whether teaching music is like being on Glee because NO; I  can go get my astro-bright neon invitation you put in my mailbox so I can prove that I came here to build community. With you strangers.) He laughed even more awkwardly and handed me my plate. "Oh," he told me. "I always thought that guy lived alone."

Hmm. Note to self. Sit in grass on lawn more often.

But of course this year we made some major changes, one of which was to actually save water by putting in a handful of raised beds and dwarf citrus trees in the front yard and letting the lawn die; and saving rainwater to water by hand--so I'm out in front a lot hauling water cans. And of course there was one major change to our landscaping this spring.

"Are they talking about us right now?"
"Gurrrrl, how could they not. Shake a tail feather."

God.

When I spent about a month doing some hard digging and hand tilling to move all my rosebushes to the front yard, a smiling, coiffed middle-aged lady walking her pug said "Starting to look better!" I looked up at her with barely concealed fury. Is it? Is it "starting" to look better? Is the fact that I am covered in clay loam from head to foot and have eight broken nails beginning to meet your expectations of my yard? I mean thank you for letting me know it's not looking good yet but that it's starting to look better. Yay! Neighborhood! 

When we let the lawn die one of our older neighbors across the street came over to watch us, his hands on his hips as he surveyed the wasteland with an emotionless expression. "Huh. Think I liked it better the way it was." Oh did you? Did you?!

A lady stopped by to demand to know what was going on with my neighbor's car, a junked out jeep he's got in his driveway. "That is an EYESORE! What are you doing about it? Where is our homeowners association? We need to complain to the civic association. I didn't spend my whole life saving so that I could have a house in a neighborhood like THIS! We can't continue this way with our neighborhood being turned into a JUNKYARD and a DISGRACE!" I looked back at my dead lawn and thought about the bale of chicken wire I had in the garage. 

I hate people.

But when we put in our raised beds and recognizable squash vines started to sprout, people started stopping to talk. Not to do this awkward "I make a comment in the hopes of starting a conversation and that way we can pretend we have a neighborhood community" small talk, but actual TALK. "You've got some squash growing in there!" a couple called to us from the sidewalk. "What else is in there?" They stepped onto the lawn and came over to see. "Ooh, pumpkins too? That's just great! What kind, Big Macs? They just grow like crazy don't they?" And then the man told us how they'd had fifteen raised beds in their back yard at the end of the street for the past twenty years, quietly growing squash and pumpkins and cucumbers. The wife smiled uncomfortably and tugged at him to come along with an expression that told me she was worried about boring us young people, but I was more taken aback with how nice they were. That was, like, a real conversation. 

And when we started work on the chicken coop, the neighbors really came out of the woodwork, so to speak. There must be a silent alarm bell on the street when a girl uses power tools that rings at a frequency only suburban men can hear. They all came over to see "Whatcha got going on over there?" Meaning, of course, "Do you want me to do that for you?" and "Sorry, I just came over here to see whether it really was you running that power saw. You ARE! Lookit that." They wanted to know what I was building and how it was going to get put together and what it was for, and then gaped in delight at the box of chicks. "Look at that. LOOK AT THAT. I've always wanted chickens. How much work are they? They don't smell. That's so strange! I always thought they smelled. And do they make any noise? Not really, huh?" Again, I was startled. No judgement. 

Three gleaming ladies in their Coldstone Creek casuals stopped by yesterday, walking their purebred golden retrievers and immaculately groomed akitas. They paused at the sidewalk while I was feeding the chicks some watermelon and stopped as one hive mind. 

"Look how big they're getting!" the leader exclaimed. "I think they've put on another pound, haven't they?"

Awkward face. Why do you know about my life and my chicks? Why?! Who sent you?! What have you heard?! Brace for impact. Here comes the burn.

"I was so excited when I found out we could have chickens in our neighborhood!" the next one said with a  brilliant smile. "We all were!" 

"Oh yes. We were so disappointed when you moved the chicks into the backyard. We look forward to seeing them every time we take our walk! Are they easy to care for?"

Inexplicably I found myself talking about the chicks. Yes they were easy to care for, like a parakeet. Just feed. No they didn't make any noise, or have any smell, and yes they ate just about everything including caterpillars and snails from the garden and the new grass from the unexpected summer rain. 

"Well, I for one can't wait to see them just keep getting bigger. I'm bringing my grandchildren over here tomorrow to come and look--if that's okay." The leader smiled at me warmly, like we were neighbors having a normal conversation. Ay. Like, more, just...talking to people? And we're all going to pretend this is normal and we're, like in some Minnesota small town where we...like, know each other? 

I heard myself say yes, and laugh, and make a joke about starting an egg stand once the chicks were laying. Delighted, they made me promise to do just that and walked off in a cloud of cheerful goodbyes and Michael Kors perfume. 

What is life right now. Urban farming grows community? I'm not sure if I'm ready.