Mighty Mice

“’Twas the week before Christmas and all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…”

Well, that’s not the way things went down at our place. 

In my last mouse post, I mentioned those destructive little buggers--who had eaten their way through my spinach bed this fall--had really stepped up their game. And did they ever! But let’s start at the beginning…

My favorite cartoon when I was a kiddo was “Mighty Mouse,” featuring a muscular, take-charge rodent wearing Superman-like togs. This mouse righted wrongs, and always got the bad guy. (My enjoyment in Mighty Mouse’s exploits was pretty predictable: I was a mousy, underweight child, perennially bossed around by my older sister.)

But there’s where my mouse fandom ends.  

I’m as revolted by rodents as the next person—although I’ve learned that living in the country means that mice are inescapable. My most memorable mouse encounter was back in the day, which I relate in my memoir Little Farm in the Foothills.

For a couple of months, my then-husband, my baby and I lived in a drafty old mobile home in the middle of a dairy farm. When we moved in, nearly every horizontal surface was sprinkled with mouse droppings.

You’d think that would have been my first clue, to store all my food in mouse-proof containers.

But what did I know? I was a city girl. Anyway, one chilly December evening I opened my kitchen cupboard, filled with food wrapped in plastic—and caught a mouse by surprise. It jumped on me and ran down my leg!

Let me tell you, there was some shrieking—and I felt that sensation on my leg for years.

Fast forward to present day: my husband John and I will soon celebrate 17 years living in the Foothills. All this time—save for discovering some mouse droppings under the bathroom sink many years ago—all our mouse incursions have been outside the house.

These little critters, their droppings, and their nests are pretty much everywhere: in our shop, the woodsheds, and the carport, in every corner, cranny, and hidey hole.

A straw bale in the chicken coop shed once made for a very hospitable mouse abode, judging from the day I was fetching some feed and a mouse jumped out of the straw and dived into my muck boot. You can bet I tore off that boot and flung it away.

The sensation of a mouse wiggling against the top of my foot was one I also felt for years.

Mice have even invaded our car engine, finding their way to the air filter, which they chewed for nesting material. But let me stress: all those mice were outside.

So, just like I had been lo, those many years ago, I was confident our house was mouse-proof. That being the case, we stored lots of food stored flimsy plastic bags. And one week before Christmas, after stocking up on holiday items, the pantry was filled to the brim.

John and I had just arrived home, weary after a seven-hour drive from my daughter’s house. We trudged through the icy pathway to our house, schlepping my suitcase and totes and the bags of groceries we’d bought before the last leg of our trip.

I was trying to figure out how to stuff more groceries into our already-full pantry when I saw something on the lowest shelf.

A small dark flash, then a tail. It streaked out of sight.

My heart stopped. “Oh, s&%#!” I scrambled backward before the mouse could jump on me. “John!” I yelled. “There’s a mouse in the pantry!”

Running over from the living room, he said incredulously, “A mouse?”

We both peered into pantry. “I don’t see anything,” said John, cautiously moving pantry items out of the way. 

I kept my eyes peeled, but I didn’t see anything either. For a second, I felt ridiculous. Had the mouse been a figment of my tired imagination?

“Maybe it was a salamander,” I ventured. In my mind’s eye, I could still see the intruder’s dark-gray skinny tail. I’d seen plenty of salamanders in the rocks bordering the shop, and inside it too. And this critter definitely had a skinny, potentially salamander-ish tail.

Okay, I was doing my Pollyanna thing again—trying to think positive. Still, we had never, ever had mice in our kitchen.

As John cleared more pantry space (I didn’t have the courage to do it, afraid of the mouse-down-the-leg replay), I couldn’t delude myself. Behind every plastic-wrapped food item were tiny, tell-tale (tell-tail?) tiny black bits, unmistakable against the white pantry shelves.

Mouse evidence in my pantry!

Mouse droppings. My heart sank all the way to my dog-tired toes.

What now? I hoped our presence had scared the mouse enough to sneak back to wherever it had come from and leave us alone.

But I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to put any more groceries in my contaminated pantry! I stuck them back in their paper bags and left the bags in the middle of the kitchen floor. 

Surely no rodent would be bold enough to cross the floor right under our feet!

To be continued.... 

I'll post the rest of the story next week here at the Little Farm in the Foothills blog. Or, you can find the full post right now in my latest Little Farm Writer Substack! 

My Substack newsletter is open to everyone, so you don't have to subscribe to read it. But if you join, you can get every issue delivered the 10th of each month directly to your email inbox!  

Irish Novel on Sale!

Are you dreaming of spring yet? And enjoy warmhearted love stories set in the country, with chickens and gardening in the mix?

Then you might like my tender Irish novel The Galway Girls—which Kobo Books has selected for their 25% off January promotion! The story follows Kerry and Fiona, two Irish thirtysomething friends, as they search for their heart’s desire in the misty green hills of County Galway. 

For Kerry, it’s a second chance with the love of her life; for Fiona, a surprising romance with a younger man. You’ll find more information at SusanColleenBrowne.com.

Or you can check out The Galway Girls at Kobo’s 25% Off January Sale! Just scroll down to the Fiction carrousel. The sale goes through January 30, and the promo code is 25JAN. 

While you wait for warmer weather, I hope you’re enjoying winter gardening, deep diving into seed catalogs, and reading great books!

Mystery Afoot at the Little Farm

You know how sometimes you don’t realize you’ve got a problem, until it’s almost too late to solve it?

Taking advantage of the winter lull in our garden, I’ve been looking back on this past growing season. While it’s always fun to reflect on John’s and my successes, what stands out are all the wrong turns I made. Especially in one area.

The evidence about the problem was right in front of me, but as I often do, I ignored it. Hoped I was wrong. And paid the price.

I first noticed an issue in my parsnip bed. I planted two rows instead of my usual three, since I’d overplanted last year. I didn’t want a repeat of having too many ’snips to harvest between freezing cycles, and tossing out so many, after the roots had become too woody to eat.

As soon as the tiny seedlets emerged, I looked at the bed in dismay. That’s not many parsnips! I ended up planting a third row after all.

Smartly (I thought), I surrounded the bed with organic garden-friendly slug bait.

The seeds germinated, the first teeny, oblong leaves unfolded. Then disappeared.

Grrr—those were some aggressive slugs, getting past the bait! But slugs being slugs, they are ruthless about devouring seedlings. Luckily, it wasn’t too late to replant. 

Parsnip seeds can take weeks to germinate. I watched the bed eagerly, delighted when this next row emerged. Then one by one, here and there, the seedlings once again disappeared.

Now, I was getting mad. I put out more slug bait, and planted yet one more time.

Same result. You know that classic definition of insanity, about doing the same thing and expecting a different result? (Albert Einstein.) And it was too late in the season to replant, so I wasn’t going to do a dumb thing like sow even more seeds.

The odd thing was, the parsnip seedlings had disappeared sort of sporadically. One or two would be  eaten, the others untouched. Then a day or two later, a few more would be gone, at a different spot in the bed.

In my experience, slugs will sort of pick a spot in your seedlings, and in one night, mow down 1/3 of a row in one fell swoop. They don’t waste time picking and choosing, leaving food right in front of their horrible sluggy faces.

But I had better things to do than figure out weird slug eating habits. I’d have to be content with the surviving parsnips.

Along came midsummer. I was spending more time in the blueberry patches, which need weekly watering. Placing the sprinkler near the base of one of my most reliably productive shrub, I noticed the bark. Actually, the bark that wasn’t there.

Looking closer I saw gnaw marks. Hoo-kay. The mice were at it again.

Mice storing sour white berries under the lavender!

I already knew mice just loved blueberries. A few years back, they’d stolen unripe berries right off a bush and made a little cache of them under a nearby lavender plant. There were a few blue and purple berries, but the pile was mostly white ones!

If you raise blueberries, you know they do best with not only frequent watering, but deep. That lavender plant, which you know are very drought-friendly plants, got extremely vigorous from all the extra water.

You may not be surprised to learn that soon afterward, I consigned that bushy lavender hideaway to the weed composting pile. It was too  large to transplant without damaging the nearby blueberry roots.

John, who studied horticulture back in the day, says that the most nutrient-laden portion of a shrub or tree is the layer just under the bark. So those mice were chewing off the bark to get to the really yummy stuff.

(It’s also worth noting that if mice can chew off bark, it’s no big deal to chew holes in the walls of your house.)

Anyway. Now that I knew mice were damaging my shrubs, I used a natural deterrent I’d heard about: garlic. I cut up some old, woody garlic heads left over from the previous season, and scattered the pieces around the crowns of the shrubs.

It worked!

I periodically examined the shrubs for further damage, but it looked like the mice had moved on. If I’d been smart, I would not have moved on too. I would have put some traps in the blueberry patch.

But the growing season was beginning to wind down—and it stopped raining. Nothing to worry about; August is our usual late summer dry spell. I had to let go of weeding and bed-care, and focus on harvesting. And more importantly, watering.

I don’t have any kind of automatic sprinkler-watering system. It’s just me moving hoses. My main hose bib leaks, so I keep a galvanized steel bucket beneath it, emptying it periodically to hand-water separate plants, then empty it again before I go in for the night.

One day I reached for the faucet to turn on the water, and Blecch! There was a dead mouse in the bucket!

I could only guess it had gotten really thirsty. The mouse must have climbed up the house exterior to jump into the bucket for the few remaining drops of water at the bottom.

Well, at least there was one less mouse to make trouble in my garden. And it was time to plant late-summer spinach for overwintering.

So in went the spinach seeds, out came the slug bait, and the up came the seedlings! Spinach takes a bit longer to germinate later in the summer, so I sure was happy to see those sprouts appear.

Than the same thing happened. Seedlings began to disappear in no particular pattern or order. Just like they had with the parsnips.

I replanted, conscious that the window for consistent germination was closing. Fortunately,, the spinach did come up, and I sprinkled more slug bait around the bed, and added more garlic close to the seedlings. But they continued to disappear.

In this hot, dry weather, I'd noticed the slugs were few and far between. Probably slunk off into the woods to stay cool and moist. Still, before long, I had maybe a dozen seedlings left out of 50.

I was really getting frustrated.

Interestingly, about two weeks after the last mouse dead in the bucket, I found another.

The light went off. It was thirsty rodents, making mouse salad from my spinach greens. And they were the culprits that had eaten my parsnips as well.

My biggest mistake was not realizing that these darn mice were taking over our place until they’d done serious damage.

Well, I wasn’t going to let the grass grow under my feet. I still had some old garlic, and did the same drill: cut it up, and sprinkled it among the spinach seedlings.

It had absolutely no effect. Not enough garlic? Or the mice were enjoying their free salads too much to let a little garlic bother them?

I know I’m a bit eccentric, but surely not insane. It was time to make like Einstein and do something different, to get a different result.

I’d learned from a student in my Homestead-Style gardening class that mice loathe peppermint. So I raided my peppermint patches and pots, cut up the leaves and stems and scattered them all around my poor surviving spinach sprouts.

Then for good measure, I set bird netting over the bed. My two-pronged approach worked! The spinach stayed unmolested through the rest of the fall.

But then came the day, shortly before Christmas, that the mice upped their game…

You can read about it in my latest Substack newsletter, just out this week: Home Invasion & A River Runs Through It. 

As a preview, here's a pic! 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner!

You don’t have to be a subscriber to read the newsletter—but if you like, you can sign up and have it delivered straight to your inbox.

Now back to mice…any more non-chemical repellents in the garden that have worked for you? I’d love to hear about them!

Inflation Resolution

Hearty seed bread goes great with nut butter!

Last spring, around the time food costs began to skyrocket, I was busy with planting season… and buying my usual food items without checking the prices. At the grocery checkout, I’d vaguely noticed I was writing bigger checks. 

But didn’t pay much attention until this past summer, when I started checking my receipts once I got home.

Whoa! What an education. The cost of this or that item had noticeably increased: $.25, $.50, and more often than not, by $1.00. Or more! And a dollar here and a dollar there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

When I first noticed that the price of the artisanal whole wheat bread that John and I like (made with locally-milled wheat) had gone up by a dollar, I wasn’t alarmed. I liked my own homemade organic bread even better. 

At the time, we had a whole quart of home-raised honey on hand—a gift from a friend. Since I could be lavish with honey, I vowed to bake my own bread more often.

You can find the recipe in my April 17, 2022 blog post. I like to think my bread is a bit artisanal too, since it’s made with organic, locally-milled whole wheat flour, and the wheat for the white flour is grown and milled just 40 miles away.

Anyway, I had good intentions. Then my garden chores and family responsibities stepped up, and sure enough, we were back to buying the expensive bread without a blink. Once in a while, I would bake a loaf to supplement it, but the purchased bread was once again our mainstay.

Fast-forward to the present: the store-bought bread suddenly went up another dollar. It’s now $9.95. When I saw the receipt, my eyes nearly bugged out of my head. Ten dollars for a loaf of bread!

Well, that kind of spend (on bread that wasn’t even organic) was my personal tipping point.

It was past time to get serious about going homemade. I baked one loaf of bread last Thursday. Then yesterday, we ran out so I started another loaf. Never have I ever baked bread twice in one week!

I slightly tweaked the recipe: cutting down on honey and adding a couple of teaspoons of organic sugar, and a handful of rolled barley to make it a three-grain loaf.

And even if John still likes buying the expensive store-bought bread for variety, I have resolved to personally rely on my own home-baked as much as possible.

Then last night, waiting for the bread to rise, I had a little epiphany: if I was going to go all in with my own bread, the least I should do is find out how much money I was saving…Or if I was really saving much at all.

I checked a recent grocery receipt, a shop when we stocked up on all our baking supplies. The price of white flour was the same it had been all year, but whole wheat bread flour had gone up by about 25%. 

Then in that same receipt, I discovered our usual pint of local honey was up to $15!

I admit, it feels a little insane to spend that much on honey…but here’s my excuse. John and I rarely eat out. So we spend almost all our food budget at the grocery store—and spoil ourselves with really high-quality items.

Still, doing some very rough calculations—and cutting the honey down by half in my recipe—I came up with the approximate cost of my home-baked: about $3 for flours, maybe about a dollar for honey. 

The other ingredients--yeast, olive oil, a spoonful of organic sugar and some salt, and sprinkling of seeds and rolled barley--came to another $1.50, max. The total: around $5.50/loaf.

Last night, I told John about computing the cost of my homemade bread—and he asked me a surprising question: “So, did you factor in your time?”

“I actually didn’t,” I confessed. It’s true, the whole process takes at least a couple of hours, mixing and kneading and baking and cleaning up. Which then brings up the question: what is your time worth?

If you’re self-employed, like me, it gets complicated, doesn’t it? Especially if you spend lots of time growing food, like I do, instead of working on your business. And John is really good about helping me protect my writing time. 

But I realized something else. It’s not only about money. The mini-mediation break I get while kneading dough, and the pleasure of eating such delicious and good-for-you bread more than offsets the time I spend on it.

And while we don’t make special trips into civilization just to buy bread, we do save time and gas not having to drive to the bakery when we are in the city.

In any event, I can make a delicious, organic loaf using many local ingredients for almost half the cost of high-quality purchased bread. Food prices being what they are—always going up and never down—I plan to make this resolution stick!