Magical Garden Pest Control and More Homestead Garden Class Insights

Barred Owl…Photo credit: Pixabay

Have you watched “The Biggest Little Farm” documentary? You’ll never look at garden pest control the same way. More on that below…

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:

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. 

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!

Homestead Gardening Class Takeaways

“Starter homesteaders,” newly arrived in our county, made my recent community college workshop, “Grow a Homestead-Style Food Garden,” one of my most interesting classes yet! 

One woman, recently moved from California, was now living on 2 acres close to the city—and learning to care for the 100 blueberry shrubs that came with the property! 

A couple who also hailed from California had just purchased 14 acres of woods and brushy areas. Despite having to break ground to cultivate a workable garden, both were motivated to start growing food asap. 

Another husband and wife, who’d had a small but thriving garden in Maryland, were looking for a 5-10 acre parcel to start a small farm. Land is quite expensive in our area of the Pacific Northwest, but they were excited about their search for property.

My class centers around working with nature…and we discussed how incorporating native plants into your garden will encourage native wildlife species that will enhance your food-growing. 

“Good garden friends” as my husband John calls them: wild bees and butterflies, and other pollinators, insect eaters like spiders and toads (and wasps), and plenty of birds, just to start—all of which create a balanced habitat right in your food garden.

And help you raise food without pesticides! When I mentioned the natural balance the farmers had created in the film, “The Biggest Little Farm,” the Maryland couple broke into grins, and the wife shot her hand into the air. “I’ve seen it twice!” 

The farmers in the movie were plagued with a LOT of pests of all kinds, ruining their crops. Literally, plagues of them: starlings, gophers, snails, caterpillars, and aphids. 

But they were really smart about using nature to deal with nature! So, they added animals or created habitats that brought in all kinds of wildlife. 

This way, the bigger wild creatures could eat the smaller ones, right down the line: 

1) Hawks eat the starlings spearing the fruit, 2) Owls and snakes eat gophers, 3) Ducks eat snails, 4) Spiders and wasps eat caterpillars, and Ladybugs eat aphids! 

As for voles—which have been very destructive in our food garden—the tried and true remedy is having a dog!

A balanced little ecosystem can help with lots of insect pests. Planting marigolds and aromatic herbs around your food garden can discourage a lot of destructive insects. I understand marigolds will scare off tomato cutworms. 

And though we have far too many paper wasps in our yard (see my previous post!), they do feed on a lot of destructive insects. However, we do not live in a pest-free nirvana!

Earwigs go after our no-spray apples, and it seems there’s more every year. But you can easily brush them off the fruit, and then, it’s very satisfying to stomp on them! 

Keep in mind that in your sustainably grown food garden, you’ll have some pests. Nature can be messy, but if you don’t interfere too much, things balance out in the end!

We also talked about using raised beds—I only wished John and I had started with them when we first created our food garden, instead of having to re-do most of our beds. This year, we installed our first galvanized steel tub, and filled it with our own on-site soil. 

The potatoes we planted there have appeared to thrive—I’ll let you know if they actually did when I harvest them!

 

Important: if you need to import garden soil/compost for your crops (as opposed to having spare piles of it for your raised beds!), make sure it’s good quality. Ask your gardening friends and neighbors for recommendations; ask the retailer/source where the soil comes from, and what’s in it!