How to make an inverted planter out of an old soda bottle.
Category Archives: Garden
Herb Garden
You’d never know it from this photo, but by dusk tonight this space will have become an herb garden.
Flowers in My Garden
Apropos of nothing, I just like the picture.
HGTV
You know what annoys me? HGTV — that’s Home and Garden TV– seems to have given up the “G” part of their name. They’ve cut back drastically on the gardening shows. Even the idiot savant, that geek of gardening, Paul James, has had his show cut back from four episodes a week to one. (Paul is wildly popular, and has a substantial following, but I ain’t one of his fans.)
Instead, HGTV seems to be focusing on instant remodels that no human could do and “flipping” houses (a REALLY good way to lose your shirt and probably some body parts in the current real estate market.) And there’s no shortage of “reality” makeover shows featuring otherwise unemployable “designers.”
As an example, today’s HGTV menu has sixteen shows with “design” in the name, and zero that have anything to do with gardening!
Skunks!
It’s that time of year again! If the evidence in my backyard (and my nose!) every night wasn’t enough, I could tell just by the number of links I get from the search engines for “how to get rid of skunks”.
So if you’re coming here from a search engine, let me give you my words of wisdom on how to get rid of skunks yourself. The short answer is, you can’t. But you can improve things a whole lot, at least to the point that it isn’t a wildlife adventure to walk in your garden at dusk.
The best approach to getting rid of skunks is to trap them in a Havahart trap and turn them loose far away from where you captured them. (“Far away” means ten miles or more; skunks are almost as good as dogs at finding their way home again.)
But I live in California, where it’s illegal to do that:
The California Code of Regulations, Title 14, Section 679 (f)(4) states: “[t]hese regulations do not authorize any person, facility or organization to accept, possess or relocate nuisance wildlife. Any healthy wildlife trapped in towns or cities or removed from under buildings or otherwise taken or trapped because of human/animal conflict shall be immediately released in the area where trapped or disposed of as directed or authorized by the department[…]”
What that means is that if you catch a skunk, your only options are to release it where you caught it (that sort of defeats the purpose) or humanely euthanize it. And, of course, California has all sorts of regulations that define “humanely euthanize”. I won’t quote them here, but suffice it to say that you can’t do it in your backyard. Besides, then you still have to dispose of the corpse, and I do not recommend putting it in your garbage can. I cannot tell you why I know that, but please, take my word for it.
Anyway, forget trapping them. You can call a “nuisance wildlife trapper” but they charge big bucks for their services. Forget County Animal Control… if you can even get ahold of human there, they don’t care unless the skunk bit someone.
So what are you going to do? Simple: convince them to move somewhere else!
If you know where they’re nesting (say, under a deck or a shed, which is where mine were) block off all entrances EXCEPT THE MAIN ONE. (That might seem obvious, but if you’ve got a dead skunk under your deck you’re going to have a long time to regret it!) Chicken wire or quarter-inch steel mesh is good for this. Peg the bottom into the ground so the skunk can’t push under it.
Prepare a cover for the main entrance. If you do this during the day, in bright sunlight, the skunk will not come out unless you really, really piss him off. If it does come out, run away. Quickly.
Once you have the cover fitted, take it off and set it somewhere nearby. You’ll need to be able to find it after dark. Take the opportunity to think like a skunk, and make sure there aren’t any other places nearby where a skunk might like to make a home.
Now pour some fine sand, flour, or chalk in front of the main entrance. Wait until a couple of hours after dark, when things are quiet. Go out and check your sand patch. If there are tracks going out, excellent! Slap your cover in place and you’re done for the night. (Be a little careful; there might still be another skunk hiding inside. Make noise and carry a bright light.)
If this worked, great! You’re well on your way to being skunk-free. It’s your neighbor’s problem now. But (and this is important) you need to repeat this process for a couple of nights. Smooth out your sand patch and pull the cover off during daylight, and go out at night and put the cover back on. Skunks live in families at this time of the year, and you want to get them all out.
If that little procedure didn’t work, leave a comment and I’ll post some more. There are other strategies!
My lawn
A lovely anti-front-lawn screed by Michael Pollan. It covers some theory on just why we Americans are so lawn-crazy.
Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
It’s also got some interesting bits of history (curse you, Frederick Law Olmstead, for starting this fad anyway.) An amusing read.
And oh yeah, Frank’s Gardenlog may be about to re-sprout.
Butterflies
The butterflies have started coming back to my backyard. I keep a fairly butterfly-friendly area in one corner of my yard, and every spring I get visited. I was a little worried this year. We had a weird winter, with little rain, and abrupt hot/cold cycles. Plus there was a massive monarch butterfly die-off in Mexico. But they have started to come back; this morning I spotted several of these, so the Monarchs and Swallowtails should not be far behind.
Plant Pest Handbook
This is a test. This is only a test. If this had been an actual entry, something other than the below link would be here.Plant Pests!
Fall Garden
Finally it’s gotten a little cooler here in southern California. At last I can stand to be outside in the garden for more than a few minutes.
Most of the summer plants are gone. My tomatoes, while they yielded well for a couple of months, have mostly shrivelled up. Not entirely their fault, of course– my sister was visiting for a week last month and the watering got neglected. Bad move in the heat of summer.
As you can see from the picture, I’m trying something new. I’m wondering if tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers will have enough time to grow and ripen if planted in September. It’s been a few weeks since they were planted, and the plants are doing well. There are blossoms but no small tomatoes yet.
Bugs!
Ewwww! My fig tree has an infestation of figeater beetles. These things are huge! Upwards of an inch and a half long! There’s a picture of one on the linked page. I’m trying to get one of my own photos, but the beasts won’t stay still long enough for me to get close. And they fly around and buzz me when I get close neough to the tree. I thought the birds eating the figs were bad, but these are way worse.