Homesteading Disasters: The Skunk Menace

Franky, I think our mistakes are more interesting and educational than the high-horse blog posts we typically churn out. I'm hoping, in fact, to collect our misadventures into a little booklet of homesteading disasters. To that end, I'll periodically write about the latest problem around the Root Simple Compound starting today with how fun it is to garden with skunks.

Angry red arrows mark skunk dig sites in our new keyhole bed.

I know that I've got a skunk problem. Yet each year when I sow lettuce seeds I get lazy about putting up the required bird net barrier over the beds. Or I haphazardly put it up, thinking that the skunks aren't smart enough to squeeze through any gaps. And each year I wake up the morning after planting to a kind of vegetable garden apocalypse--dozens of V shaped holes, overturned seedlings and scattered seeds. And each year I swear off vegetable gardening entirely.

Actual photo of absent-minded conquistadors.

So what's the science behind this? Why do skunks dig? Skunks dig for doubloons dropped by absent-minded conquistadors many generations ago here in California. Our gardens in Los Angeles are thick in doubloons. In fact, if it weren't for my metal detector I'd never be able to pay our inflated mortgage. Remember, our crumbling 92 year old bungalow (located in the "hippest neighborhood in America" according to Forbes Magazine) cost more than an entire town in Kansas. So these damn skunks are not only ruining my vegetables, but they are taking a big bite out of our house payments.*

The moral here: you gotta make time to fence off the veggies. For us that means hoops with bird netting carefully stretched out and held down by bricks. There's no easy way out short of hiring 24 hour guards (off duty conquistadors perhaps?) And let's not even talk about the deer menace (which, thankfully, we don't have)! Deer harassed readers are welcome to share their horror stories in the comments.

More on that kooky new keyhole garden in another post . . .  

*Ed. note:  Skunks are actually digging for insects. The irony is that better soil (moist, rich with life, etc.) invariably attracts skunks. In that way, you may wish to consider skunk attacks a sign of gardening success.

Shibori Challenge Proves Challenging

So it's May 15 and I have not met the terms of the Shibori Challenge. I have been playing with both natural dyes and shibori techniques, but have not yet made anything worthy of being sewn up into a cocktail napkin.

I think I'll have declare my challenge a little over-optimistic. As it when I start any new craft, I'm hitting various walls and spinning around trying to figure out what's what. But that's okay. Our motto around here is Go Forth, Embrace Failure, and give Her a Big Kiss.

The foraged, plant-based dyes I've been working with are only producing pale tones for me, even with mordants. I've made a sort of olive grey out of mint and a light sage out of artichoke and a beige out of coffee. These shades are fine in themselves, especially if you want to dress like a hobbit, but not really strong enough to show off shibori patterns. I know it's possible to get strong colors out of common plants--it seems other people manage it--but I'm beginning to understand why indigo is the classic choice for shibori techniques.

Wanting to play with shibori and having no luck with local plants, I experimented with turmeric. Turmeric is a "fugitive dye" -- a phrase I love -- meaning it will fade fast. It fades especially fast in sunlight. Nonetheless, it's nontoxic and makes a bright, deep yellow with no fuss. And I just happened to have a big container of stale turmeric just wasting away on the shelf. I tried some shibori techniques with that, with some okay first time results -- though also with plenty of beginner mistakes.

In the pic above, the white cloth with the yellow lines on it was done by folding the cloth into accordion folds, like a paper fan, then folding that shape into a stack of triangles, then clamping the resulting bundle together and dropping it in the dye bath. Only the edges dye. Supposedly. In mine, the middle edges of the bundle hardly dyed at all, and I'm not sure why. I'll do a separate post on this with pics soon.

Next I took some old white napkins and twine wrapped parts of them to make the classic spiderweb pattern. That I'll also cover as its own post.

I've decided to do my cocktail napkins with indigo. Interestingly, natural indigo dye is activated through a fermentation process. Love those fermentation processes! Nowadays indigo can be made quickly with chemicals of different sorts, and there's a very easy to use artificial indigo available, but if you want to make your life hard--and smelly--like me--you will want to make a natural, old-fashioned fermenting vat. Out of stale urine. Yep. There's also one made out of ammonia and bread yeast which might smell a little better. A very little. But whichever I choose it will take a little while to get the ferment going, and if we choose urine, it will take a while to collect all that urine. So it will be a while before the indigo experiments begin.

If you are curious about the urine vat, check out this nice lady's account of her own, until I get back to you with more adventures in dyeing.

Avoiding Hyperthermia

When spending a day baking pizzas at a public event in front of a 1000º F oven in the full Southern California sun remember to drink water and take breaks. Otherwise you will spend the next day in bed with a splitting headache, unable to eat, barely able to drink anything and at the mercy of two young cats.

The first time I pulled off a case of hyperthermia was after a long bike ride. I would not call it fun, nor would I like this to happen when in the backwoods on a long backpacking trip. It also prevents coherent blogging. I'll be back tomorrow with a plethora of home ec tips . . .

Yet More Urban Homesteading Mistakes

My new excuse: I didn't write it, the kitten did!

Three of my favorite Root Simple compound blunders happened this week.

Yesterday I announced a "Vermincomposting" class. I meant vermicomposting, of course, but I'd point out that it is good to remember that vermin are actually compostable, along with everything biological --including bloggers.

Earlier this week I meant to mention Native Americans  but, due to the lazy application of spell checking software this came out as "Naive Americans".  Now, as I'm sure most readers of this blog would agree there actually is a class of Naive Americans. Maybe they'll get around to opening some casinos. Oh, wait, Naive Americans go to casinos, they probably don't operate them. This mistake reminds me of when the UCLA student newspaper, in a similar spell checking blunder, announced that the orchestra I was in would be playing Beethoven's "Erotica Symphony".

Lastly, I stained some cement pavers with iron sulfate and blogged about it. What I forgot to mention is that, the day before, I had accidentally reached for the bag of garden sulfur rather than iron sulfate and carefully brushed all 16 pavers with sulfur. The next day, noticing that nothing had happened, I realized that rather than staining the pavers I had, every so slightly, acidified them.

Time for those much delayed mindfulness exercises.

Urban Homesteading Mistakes: Landscape Fabric

Since you all seem to enjoy accounts of our many failures around the Root Simple compound, I thought I'd share what must be one of the worst mistakes I've made. It's a error up in our great chandelier of failures along with buying a 91 year old house on a hill with a bad foundation.

Two words for you: landscape fabric--that plastic stuff sold in rolls at big box stores that allegedly blocks out weeds. Just after we bought our "crack" house I started constructing brick paths and decomposed granite walkways (another mistake we'll blog about later). I thought it would be good idea to lay down landscape fabric to keep weeds from poking up. So why is landscape fabric a bad idea?

1. It's made of plastic.
2. It rips.
3. It just plain doesn't work.

After a few years Bermuda grass will inevitably poke up through it and you'll end up with what you can see in the photo above. To repeat: landscape fabric doesn't work and is a waste of money.

My favorite alternative is a very thick (minimum 4-inch, but preferably more) layer of mulch. The added benefit with mulch is that you build soil over time. With landscape fabric you just add another piece of plastic to the landfill. I know some folks swear by cardboard, and in certain situations cardboard is probably OK, but I still prefer, when possible, just piling up the mulch. You get better water penetration with mulch and you don't have the problem of bits of cardboard floating up to the surface.

So, my two cents: don't add landscape fabric to your landscape.

The grape that ate the world

grapefail or grapewin?

We've posted about our grape problems before. Pierce's disease makes it hard to grow grapes in SoCal. We've been trying to get resistant varieties to grow on our patio arbor (aka The Masculinity Pavillion) with no success. Our most recent planting attempts are stunted and unhappy, meaning that once again we're experiencing A Summer Without Shade.

While our "resistant" varieties are proving not-so-resistant, there is at least one grape that laughs at Pierce's disease: the native California grape, Vitus californica. I believe this sturdy wild grape provides the root stock for the vineyards up North. We planted one of these near our north side fence maybe five years ago now. While the rest of our grapes wilt and struggle, this one is completely the opposite. It is monstrously huge, cheerfully indestructible, and absolutely out of control.

Without water or any encouragement whatsoever it has grown all along the side of the house, from the back yard to the front yard--some 50 feet. It long ago swamped the 6' chain link fence and now entertains itself by making grabs at both our house and our next door neighbor's.

This week we have to go next door armed with pruners and machetes and flame throwers and beat it back out of the neighbor's yard. Meanwhile, tendrils of the vine are reaching into our kitchen window. I've allowed this to go on because it pleases me to be reminded of the supremacy of nature--and also, it ensures we can't forget to go save the neighbor.

(And yes, we really should have done this over winter, when the vine was bare. As I recall, I made noises about it, and Erik grumbled, "Put it on the list..." Anyway, the monster didn't lose its leaves until quite late--maybe December or January, then seemed to sprout again immediately.)

The grape grows about six inches a day. Since I took these photos, 3 more vines have made their way in and one has reached the ceiling. It's going beyond cute to somewhat alarming.

Oh, and do we at least get fruit from this beast? No, we do not. It has never fruited. Not a single grape. californica does make fruit, supposedly, but we've never tasted it. Our vine is too busy putting all of its energy into swamping the world.

You may be asking why we don't plant a Vitis californica on our arbor. The answer is we probably will next year. Erik had his heart set on a tastier grape, so resisted that option, but judging how the newest set of contenders are struggling out there, I'm thinking we have a native in our future. Perhaps the beautiful Roger's Red.

If we do so, we will definitely be better about staying on top of the pruning. This is our lesson learned.

I like my chamomile stressed

This poor, abused little seedling is flowering like crazy.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

I made a mistake--I predicted a while ago that this would happen, and here it is. When we remodeled the yard and I set aside space for The Phan of Pharmacy (tm) my goal was to maximize the production of herbs and flowers.  I prepped the ground in the fan like a fine flower or veg bed: double dug and richly amended. It was only after I planted my chamomile starts in it that I realized the soil was way too rich for chamomile. Not that it wouldn't grow, but it wouldn't grow the way I wanted it to grow.

See, chamomile is a tough, scrappy plant. In our dry climate, it pops up with the winter rains, and lives a fast, hard life, like a beautiful young self-destructive celebrity. It shoots up overnight and throws off blossoms like crazy, its one goal being to spread seed before it dies.

In the past, I've harvested chamomile from volunteer plants in my yard. I never planted or tended them, but one or two would get about knee high, and from those one or two plants I'd gather all the flowers I needed by remembering to pick a handful every time I went in the back yard. The thing about chamomile is the more you pick, the more it produces.

But I was greedy--and somewhat lazy, as usual. I thought, why be out there every day milking some scrappy chamomile plant, when you could plant a chamomile crop and harvest a ton of flowers in just a couple of days? So I planted I don't know how many plants--20, maybe? More? The chamomile thrived in the rich, fertile soil, putting all it's energy into making lots of feathery green foliage--not flowers. My entire chamomile crop is presently netting me less flowers than one or two abused volunteers would. That sad little plant in the top picture may have to become my harvest plant.

Uh, very pretty. But where are the flowers?

The lesson here is to know your plant, and to pay attention when you're prepping your garden. I amended that soil on auto-pilot, when I could have left one fan wedge un-turned and un-amended and the chamomile would have flowered all the better for it. To be clear, this isn't necessarily the case for other herbs and flowers. The calendula I planted in the fan is doing very well, producing huge, hearty blooms. All I'm saying is that you can't generalize.

My next step is to withhold water from the chamomile and try to stress it into flower production. Of course, we're heading into another rainy period, so it will be a while before that chamomile is feeling any stress at all.

Our ladies are also well practiced in stressing chamomile

Seedling Disaster!

"No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrongheaded and foolish . . . Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up."

-Tom Jennings, as quoted in Mark Frauenfelder's excellent new book, Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World 

Oh, but those mistakes sure can be frustrating especially when they happen in the garden!  I've had nothing but bad luck germinating seeds this spring for our summer garden and, as a result, our vegetable beds are as bare as the Serengeti. What happened? Here's a list of possibilities:

• watering too much
• watering too little
• damping off 
• unseasonably cold weather (we germinate outside here)
• the occasional hot day on top of cold evenings
• the mindset of the gardener: being in a hurried, stressed mood as we finished our next book

Nature being a complex system, you can often get stacking problems that make figuring out what went wrong difficult. I'm leaning towards the cold weather as I've noticed some of the seeds I planted starting to come up as it has warmed up. Lesson: you've gotta watch the weather reports even in a mild climate such as ours or invest in heating mats or a cold frame. 

Despite my pledge to grow vegetables only from seeds, panic over a summer without homegrown tomatoes prompted me to call Garden Edibles owner Craig Ruggless to see if he had any seedlings. Thankfully he had some heirloom tomato seedlings that he gave to me in return for helping him try to capture a swarm of bees that had shown up in his olive tree (unsuccessfully, it turned out--more on that misadventure in another post). At least I'm not alone. My friends in Chicago, the Green Roof Growers, had their own tomato seedling apocalypse.

I once saw Julia Child on Martha Stewart's show demonstrating how to make an elaborate dessert called a Croqembouche, a pyramidal tower of cream filled pastry balls. Stewart and Child built separate Croqembouche towers. At the end of the demo Stewart's was perfect and Child's was, well, a big mess. Yet Julia soldiered on, laughing at her mistakes. My pledge with the garden is to try to do the same and have fewer of my notorious garden meltdowns when the inevitable crisis happens. So what if it ain't perfect around here? Now Mrs. Homegrown and Homegrown neighbor should make note of that pledge . . .

Readers, please feel free to share some recent disasters.

On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce's Disease

Damn Pierce's Disease!

I really wish that glossy gardening magazines would, every once in a while, devote some space to capturing some of the soul-crushing disappointments of tending plants. Can we please have a cover of Sunset Magazine featuring an aphid and slug infested cabbage? Frustrations are compounded when a beloved perennial plant you've been growing for years comes down with a fatal disease. Such was the case when my flame seedless grapevine, which was planted to cover our backyard arbor, contracted Pierce's disease, caused by an incurable bacteria (Xylella fastidiosa) spread by an insect called the sharpshooter. Pierce's was discovered in 1892 in Anaheim and is basically the reason we no longer have many vineyards in Southern California. Once a vine gets Pierce's it will die within a few years. You have to admit failure and rip it out, which I plan to do soon.

"Wood on new canes matures irregularly, producing patches of green, surrounded by mature brown bark."

To confirm that my vine had Pierce's I called Jerry Turney, plant pathologist at the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner's Office. When I described the symptoms, Turney agreed that it sounded like Pierce's. The signs of Pierce's, as described in UC's pest management guide, are:

"(1) leaves become slightly yellow or red along margins in white and red varieties, respectively, and eventually leaf margins dry or die in concentric zones; (2) fruit clusters shrivel or raisin; (3) dried leaves fall leaving the petiole (leaf stem) attached to the cane; and (4) wood on new canes matures irregularly, producing patches of green, surrounded by mature brown bark."

"Fruit clusters shrivel or raisin."

Turney described the life cycle of the sparpshooter, one of the main carriers of Pierce's, who spread the diesase by feeding off the sap of infected plants. Sharpshooters live in riparian areas and when a stream goes dry they fly off in search of irrigated plants to feed on. Sharpshooters also like to spend the winter in citrus groves which, while not susceptible to Pierce's, provide habitat. Our hot dry summers, which dry out local streams and rivers, and abundant citrus trees, make inland Southern California an especially bad place to try to grow grapes. Why nurseries continue to sell vines suseptable to Pierce's here is a mystery to me.

In the 1990s Pierce's disease wiped out 40% of the vines in Temecula's vineyards. Northern California's vineyards have experienced what Turney described as an "edge effect", with Pierce's claiming the vines on the outside of vineyards. The only way to prevent the spread of the sharpshooter is frequent application of pesticides (on both grapes and citrus), not practical for the home gardener and we're organic around the Homegrown compound anyways. In fact, one of the pesticides used to control shapshooters is Imidacloprid, implicated by many in the recent disappearance of honey bees.

Pierce disease resistant Vitus californica attacking our house.

The only hope for long term control, as Turney sees it, is by breeding hybrid grape varieties resistant to Pierce's. Turney strongly advised against trying to grow wine or table grapes in Southern California. After losing three table grape vines in ten years, I can attest to the wisdom of Turney's advice. To grow grapes in the warm southern parts of the U.S., you simply have to plant Pierce resistant varieites such as the native Vitus californica or muscadine grapes. The contrast between our flame seedless and our Vitus californica vine, in fact, is stunning. The flame is stunted and diseased, while our Vitus californica is so vigorous that I have to beat it back on a daily basis to prevent it from subsuming our house and the neighbor's.

And while we're working on resistant grapes we may need to start hybridizing citrus as well. While the strain of Pierce's that took down my grape vine is harmless to citrus, there is a variant of the bacteria that is currently ravaging the citrus of Brazil and Argentina which causes a disease called Citrus Variegated Chlorosis. It's also fatal and has the potential to spread to North America via the shipment of infected trees. With a global economy and porous borders it's bound to show up someday. Might as well get ready.

Gardening is a humbling lesson in evolutionary biology. It's all about survival of the fittest. Work with evolution by selecting for immunity to pests and disease and you'll harvest the rewards. Resistance is futile.

More info at piercesdisease.org.

If any of you readers know of a comprehensive list of resistant varieites for California please leave a link in the comments! So far I've been able to find lists for Florida and Texas.

Update 7/6/09: Reader Anduhrew sends an amazing link about a home remedy involving injecting antibiotics into an infected vine.

And here's another article on possible cures.