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| Barred Owl…Photo credit: Pixabay |
This spring, my “Grow a Homestead-Style Food Garden” had so many interested students, the college ran a second session!
The second class was just as fun and insightful as the first, but a pair of students shared a garden pest control strategy that’s actually a bit magical…
Back to “The Biggest Little Farm.”
In the film, the farmer couple watched helplessly as their crops—in which they’d invested years of hard work—were devoured by pests. Then, they had an insight:
Put Mother Nature to work!
By creating habitat for certain wildlife, and adding certain farm animals, they discovered every pest has a predator:
*Hawks eat starlings
*Ducks eat snails
*Spiders and wasps eat caterpillars
*Ladybugs eat aphids, and
*Owls and snakes eat gophers
The two students I mentioned above, a married couple, had created a wonderful food garden…then the pests arrived. Critters were attacking everything they grew, from starlings, rats and mice, to voles and squirrels. They said the starlings were the absolute worst.
They couldn’t harvest anything.
But the husband, an engineer who likes to tinkerdoodle around his property, had a brainwave:
An owl house!
It’s also known as an owl box. It’s like a birdhouse, only really large, where owls can raise their young. You can find kits online, but if you’re handy, you might make your own.
He shared how his owl house came about: after thorough research, he hand-built his own owl house. He advised to make it larger than most kits; his owl house is 2-feet x 3-feet, with a 6-inch round opening.
On the floor, he uses twigs or wood chips for bedding.
An owl house is just not a simple box: you need to attach hinges to one of the walls to make it moveable. This way, you can simply lift one side to clean out the inside a couple of times a year.
My student placed his owl house in a tall fir at the edge of his property. Online, I saw you can set it at a height of 10 - 20 feet, but he recommended 12 feet.
He also installed a wildlife cam, and showed me a video. In it, the owlets are staring, big-eyed, into the camera. He said he and his wife spend a lot of time watching them!
Anyway, in a short space of time, the starlings were the first to vamoose, then the rest of their garden pests disappeared…Like magic!
We have lots of barred owls around our neighborhood—here’s a story about my recent encounter with two of them. Since we also have LOTS of voles, my husband John is looking to build an owl house too.
But if you have lots of pests, and are just beginning your food gardening adventures, here’s something to consider:
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| Rhubarb: A resilient crop |
Why not start by growing food crops that don’t really have pests? While voles do eat rhubarb roots, the rhubarb root systems are very robust, and can generally hold their own. Garlic and onions aren’t plagued by critters that I’ve ever seen.
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| Homegrown is the best tasting garlic you’ll ever eat! |
Plus these crops are easy to grow. A win-win!
More Interesting Tips:
Fava Beans: We were discussing cover crops, pros and cons, and one student said, “Fava beans work great.”
These aren’t the regular Fava beans, but a small Fava bean specifically bred as a cover crop. She said when you’re ready to overplant your Fava crop, you can pull the plants out easily—unlike most cover crops that have to be tilled in, and often get invasive.
Dairy Whey: One student makes a lot of homemade yogurt. I’ve made a few batched of ricotta cheese. If you’ve ever made either one, you know you end up with a lot of whey. If you don’t have pigs to share it with, what can you do with whey?
This student actually dilutes the whey with water, and uses it in her garden…and reported that regular whey applications have made her asparagus patch flourish!
I hope you love these off-the-wall tips as much as I do…and I’ll report back once John builds our owl house!
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