February 19, 2015

Good morning, I hope this doesn't sound like a complaint but I do wish we would get a little bit of a dry spell. There is getting to be things I need to do in the garden but it is just too wet. I also realize that it will be dry soon and I will be eating my words. It was the neglect in January that allowed a caterpillar (species, there were thousands of them) to wreak havoc on some seedlings. I know that I have said that I do not do sowing s in December, but I was lulled into it by the wonderful weather clean up to Christmas, welll it was at that time it got real damp and cool. I must say I had a pretty good germination or at least until the critters hatched and got a tad bit hungry. Oh well, such is agriculture, live and learn!

Anyway when all else fails watch the fowl. Last year I mentioned that we had two guinea fowl just show up. One was purple and the other was the more traditional black with white dots. This has turned out to be a very interesting experience.

The drive for guineas to flock is quite strong but there are limits. They seemed to have joined right in with our 3 males, and the new birds were males too. A real stag party. I suspect different things would have happened if the new birds were females. Any way they all seemed to be quite happy to be a bird flock of five, but who knows why but four of the birds started picking on the purple bird.. It was an obvious ostracizing of this bird. It was chased , pecked and just plane picked on.

This went on for awhile when it finally decided to roost out side (this was a bad move) in one of our mulberry trees. It wasn't long before all five birds were roosting out side. After this happened it wasn't long before a great horned owl started cruising the property. It did scare the tar out of the birds. Nothing like a guinea alarm call in the middle of the night. Well I managed to heard them all to coop at 3 AM. Silly me, I am thinking “ that fixed the outside roosting thingy!” Not!! Well they all continued to roost outside when first the purple bird disappeared (must have been tasty) and then one of the white birds too. Being the Einsteins that they are they thought (? ) twice about this outside roosting thing and decided that they would join the chickens in the coop once again.

For what ever reason the two white birds started harassing the black and white bird and eventually this bird stopped hanging with the white birds. Now for something that is very interesting The black and white bird paired up with a barred rock chicken. These guys are inseparable. They are totally different species so no young can become of this relationship. What I see is they just like to hang with each other. The barred rock seems to have the better part of the deal because at the feeder, water “trough”,or at scratch time, the guinea chases all the other birds away so it can eat and drink to its heart content. This guinea has totally abandoned even thinking of cruising with the white birds. As far as I know these two birds roost side by side in the coop.

This is all very interesting to me. I look forward to the next chapter.

Yes the Bt I used to control the little brown caterpillars has worked quite well. I am seeing some of the spinach that was grazed back to the ground making a comeback. Time will tell if this was too little too late, because it is just about time for things to start warming up and it has just gotten to 12 hours of light . These two things could force the spinach to bolt.

It has been a real challenge with several crops this year from these little pesky root caterpillars to the harvester ants “harvesting” my cabbage, kohlrabi and kale seeds, the ice.....even with all that the garden is doing reasonably well. Things are being harvested faster than new veggies coming on line so we may be needing to duplicate veggies to fill bags. Hope this is not so, but it could happen.