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Post by farmermike on Jan 30, 2018 20:49:08 GMT -5
Little buggers!! i find here that young trees need a few years protection from ring barking hares, trade off though, they taste nicer than rabbits. Haha! That's convenient. Haven't been able to bring myself to try eating vole meat yet. I've killed plenty, though...with my digging knife, my boot heel, even once a full water bottle tossed from a distance. They're not too wily -- just numerous. They are related to lemmings after all! We were cleaning dead ones out of our horse troughs every day.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 30, 2018 20:39:48 GMT -5
Well, the bummer is that unless you resolve the issue of vole damage during peak populations it doesn't really matter where the orchard is located. Happen to know the timeframe of the population cycle of those critters? I suppose I can web search for that answer... I can easily stop bunnies girdling my saplings and chewing off my seedlings by using chicken wire or hardware mesh cages, I do not know how you would use such a thing for voles being they can just burrow under the cages or below the soil surface to chew on the trunk just above the roots. Can't use those plastic tree saver tubes because of same issues plus they could just chew through the plastic. I am curious, did you notice an increase in predator populations that coincided with the increase in the vole population? First thing that comes to my mind is what eats voles...or perhaps simply what are they afraid of/what chases them away? Maybe regular coyote or fox urine applications? Just thinking out loud... Update: A quick check and they claim trunk protectors work... ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7439.htmlThe good news is that, once the tree trunks get to about 3-4" in diameter, the voles don't seem to bother them much. Part of the reason I would rather have the orchard on the north facing slope is that I think they may grow faster there, and get past the vulnerable stage more quickly. I'm sure that our hawks and owls were gorging on voles the past 2 years. Probably coyotes and foxes too. I definitely saw all of our barn cats eating voles regularly. The predation wasn't enough to save our crops, but eventually something did the pests in during early fall. I wonder if there was some disease outbreak among them. We were seeing dead voles around the ranch all summer long. They don't live very long, but they can have up to 10 litters per year of up to 10 babies (under ideal conditions)...so, exponential population growth! I posted some photos on this thread.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 30, 2018 20:22:07 GMT -5
As I have mentioned elsewhere my local region experienced an extraordinary "plague of voles" during 2016 & 2017. I thought I would post some photos here to document the event. Hopefully this will help (or at least console) other people who have similar experiences. In 2015, the final year of the drought in Northern California, voles did not do any visible damage. In 2016, after a mild and rainy winter, they had a population boom starting in mid-summer. In 2017, after a mild and extremely wet winter, our vole population "hit the ground running" in the spring, and destroyed maybe 90% of our fruit and vegetable crops. The worst damage they did was girdling our youngest fruit tree. They have probably killed ~50 fruit trees over the past 2 years. Apples seemed to be their favorite. Fortunately, once the tree's trunk get to 4" in diameter, the voles don't seem to bother them. They hit my naked-seed squash project pretty hard. In this photo from 2016, I had to harvest some pumpkins a little early just to get them out of the field and away from vole activity. As long as I kept moving them around, I could keep the voles away from them, but if I left them alone long enough this is what happened. We managed to use and sell a good number of them though. We got almost zero watermelons at the ranch in 2017. Every time a fruit would start to form, the voles would hollow it out. In late summer, after the vole population crashed, we did finally get 4 ripe watermelons. I sure saved seeds from those "Volepocalypse Survivors"! More photos to come.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 28, 2018 14:51:34 GMT -5
So the voles are native to the area? Yep, the California Vole is native and widespread throughout the state. But most people know nothing about them. I wasn't aware of them either until 2010. Years ago, I had a little business planting native meadow gardens in peoples suburban yards. In 2010 I went back to look at one meadow I had planted way back in 2002, and found evidence of some rodent living in it. I set up a camera trap, and got a photo of a native vole. It seemed like a great victory at the time. My habitat planting had attracted a native species back to a location where they hadn't lived for years. (California Quail were also nesting in that meadow garden!) Fast forward to 2018...now I know better. I think the population booms after mild and wet winters. During the drought from 2011-2015, they didn't do any noticeable damage.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 28, 2018 14:06:34 GMT -5
farmermike : " A steep south facing slope was probably not the best location for the orchard." - Just curious why you think this - do you mean not the best from an ease of harvesting perspective? I guess I can understand that. Terracing might have resolved that. I would think that would have been a wonderful location for a vineyard, although terracing would probably be best for that as well. :-) I think the south facing slope is not right for the orchard because, it is the hottest spot on the ranch, and the first place where the soil dries out. If we had planted our apples and pears on deep alluvial valley soil or on a north facing slope, I think that they could have lived a very long time with no summer irrigation -- once they were established. I'm not sure that the trees on this south facing slope will ever be able to survive long term without irrigation. An outside organization planted the orchard for us in 2015, and I was out-voted when I suggested planting it on a north facing slope. The current location has better access from the parking lot, and nice visibility from the street. I thought that organization knew what they were doing, and would help us care for the orchard, but they bailed out and I was left fighting a pitched battle to maintain this fairly unsustainable situation. I have definitely considered abandoning this location, but I think I may just try to maintain like 30 trees near the bottom of the slope; the deer fencing and irrigation system is already in place. The original planting was 80 trees. Harvesting won't be a problem, because the slope isn't too steep. And the crew that did the first planting did do some light terracing by hand. We would probably need much more dramatic terracing for substantial moisture retention.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 28, 2018 13:37:04 GMT -5
farmermike : " Voles have taken a huge toll on those trees the past 2 years; we've lost at least 50 trees so far." -What toll, I mean how are the trees being damaged/destroyed? Maybe we can help you come up with a solution... The voles damage the trees by eating the bark. In many cases they girdle the trunk all the way around, from ground level up to 8 or 10". This will kill the tree, of course. Although, I am planning to try bridge grafting in attempt to save some of our more established trees. In some cases, on our youngest bare-root trees, they stripped every inch of bark all way up to the tip of the 4 foot tall tree. I tried many methods of excluding them, and when one didn't work, I tried methods more and more elaborate. Finally, in late summer when I thought I had it really figured out, their population crashed and I never got to see if my cages actually worked! I'll have to find some photos of the damage from the summer, and I think I may post them on a new thread to document this event. I've never seen anything like it. Edit: Oh yeah, they also chewed through all my plastic drip irrigation hoses. I ended up having to triage those repairs, and a lot of things went without irrigation all summer. Fortunately, we had so much rain that the soil was at maximum moisture capacity. I think this saved a lot of trees that were not fully established. I assume the excess rain also contributed to the vole boom.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 28, 2018 13:17:10 GMT -5
The educational ranch looks an interesting setup farmermike , what's the rainfall per year? The ranch probably gets about 18-19 inches (~480mm). Just a little bit more rain than at my house, because the ranch is about 6 miles closer to the ocean. Of course, that rain pretty much all comes during the cool season (Nov.-Apr.), and virtually none during the warm season. That aerial photo was taken Sept. 2017, which is why the grasslands are totally dry and brown. Last winter we got double our normal rainfall (38in or 960mm), which made weed-cutting our firebreak much more difficult -- due to some very robust wild black mustard stalks. That heavy fuel load also contributed to the terrible fires in Napa and Sonoma counties last October.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 27, 2018 12:20:02 GMT -5
farmermike: voles, really? Voles are obligate carnivores; they don't mess with plants aside from shallow soil disturbance (and will starve to death if offered only plants); I'm not even aware of any voles in Cali. You may have conflated them with gophers (I've said I'm a zoologist; gophers are the spawn of Hell). Moles are carnivores. The California Vole is an herbivore. Typically they eat mainly grasses, but their population has boom and bust cycles. During the booms their diet include other things, like fruits, vegetables and tree bark. We have gopher problems too, but they're more continuous, and never get as overwhelming as the voles during a boom year. Of course, in typical (bust) years voles do very little damage in the garden...at least around here.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 27, 2018 0:46:48 GMT -5
Cool idea, toomanyirons. It's really interesting to see everyone's growing areas. Here is my home garden, on a 1/3 acre lot. The areas outlined in green are vegetable gardens totaling ~1500sqft. We've been here around 2.5 years. The property already had mature apple, plum, fig, mulberry, and orange trees. There are also prickly pears, grapes, a large black walnut, and a huge redwood tree. I've been planting new fruits and berries since we moved in, including several avocados. In the lower left corner of the yard, I'm planning to prune the walnut tree way back, and remove a plum that gives very inferior fruit, so that I can expand the vegetable gardens. This is the educational ranch where I work as facilities director. The green line roughly traces the perimeter of the property. It is mosty steep hilly grassland. Only the bottom of the valley has an mellow enough slope to be usable for building or planting. On the left is a terraced food forest full of fruit trees I planted about 5 years ago. On the right is an orchard we planted 3 years ago. Voles have taken a huge toll on those trees the past 2 years; we've lost at least 50 trees so far. A steep south facing slope was probably not the best location for the orchard. Near the middle is the teaching garden where classes of children get to learn about gardening. The paddock garden is where I plant large plots of corn and watermelons. Last year we lost probably 90% of all our produce due to voles. It was devastating to watch; this must be what a plague of locusts feels like. The acorns and black walnuts here ripened late enough that voles didn't get them. Fortunately, it really seemed like the vole population crashed back in the fall, so I'm optimistic about 2018. This is a 1.5 acre vacant lot my parents purchased around 2 years ago. They are hoping to break ground on a house soon. In the mean time they let me plant a small field of corn and beans last summer. There are voles here too, but nothing like at the ranch. This property has an interesting history. An original house was built here in the 1850s by John and Louisiana Strentzel. He was immigrant from Poland who came to CA by wagon train from east Texas, through El Paso, and San Diego, before finally settling in Martinez. They were the in-laws of John Muir. The Strentzels built themselves a bigger house (now the John Muir National Historic Site) in the 1880s, and John Muir and his family lived on this property from 1882-1890. Sadly, the original house burned down in the 1990s. There are several 250+ year old oak trees on the property, and I am tickled to think that John Muir himself may have sat under them long ago.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 24, 2018 11:12:30 GMT -5
reed, how are you storing the roots you intend to sprout for slips? I was keeping mine in a paper bag at room temperature. They weren't getting soft or rotting, but a few were starting to sprout. They were on a high shelf where the temp was 70F (or +) when the heat was running. I decided to stick them in the fridge.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 22, 2018 17:14:47 GMT -5
Pretty corn Day . In my garden PM matures very fast but a lot of ears tend to overshoot the shucks and attracts bugs and the like. I have crossed it to lots of other flour and flint corns and also have good amount crossed to a sweet swarm. I'll be growing a lot of these crosses this year. I want to keep the early maturity and small row number in mine so I'm putting up with the downside for now. What is you opinion of it, do you grind it for meal or anything?So... uh.... I've just been.... eating it? Like, dried uncooked kernels. I know it sounds bonkers, but it's an amazing 'fidget food' for when you're watching tv or something and need to keep your fingers out of the potato chips. I'd say about 50% of the ears have this amazing, nutty savory flavor that goes behind just the corn taste. Unfortunately I shucked all my B quality kernels, which are the ones I'm eating (from short ears, not filled out, etc), all at once before tasting each cob individually. So each one is a surprise. Even so, the ones without this flavor aren't bad, just taste more like normal dry corn. Day, have you tried parching it? I actually can't help munching on my flour corns raw, as I'm shelling them. In fact I have a tendency to try out all my corns that way, and it's a quick and easy way to determine the flint/flour ratio (I don't try it with anything that's obviously very flint, though). But when I parch those flour corns -- in a skillet or microwave, like popcorn -- they taste even better. I try to always keep a little bowl of them around to snack on.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 21, 2018 12:20:04 GMT -5
I can see all the photos just fine on my iPhone.
Occasionally, there seems to be a glitch and some photos disappear temporarily, but they always seem to come back.
I have had good luck with postimage.org. I don't store the images there. I just upload them and it sizes them and provides a link to copy and paste to a forum.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 11, 2018 0:55:58 GMT -5
Sorry, I meant to add, that with 'swarm lures' the most important thing is to site your bait hive at the right height. Bees will rarely enter a hive close to the ground but they will be attracted to old comb in hives at around 4ft to 6ft above it. I usually stack old bee boxes to raise the height to around 4ft for the entrance. You can play around with various herbs if you like, but the easiest and best thing to use is some honey (from a clean source). Smear this over some old comb and the bees will soon find it. The way it works is that foraging bees from various remote hives will become acquainted with the existence of your hive, and when their hives start to swarm they will be heading there to inspect your hive as a potential new home. Their prior knowledge from taking honey there will give you a big advantage. I've used this method for around seven years and have caught swarms every single year. reed, you got me thinking about beekeeping now, and I found this old thread. I found this bit particularly interesting about luring swarms. Maybe I'll give it a try too this spring. I've also heard that lemongrass oil is supposed to help attract them.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 9, 2018 20:44:19 GMT -5
I'v done lots of reading and have decided on a top bar construction cause it seems easier to build and more natural to how bees live. I have lots of questions for example, where to locate it, sun? shade? or does it matter much. Anyone use top bar hives? Any comments? reed , my brother recently took up beekeeping using top bar hives and "treatment-free beekeeping" (about a year ago). I don't really have a ton of information about it, but the treatment free thing sounds a lot like what we on HG are all doing by saving seeds and adapting crops to our environments -- essentially it's like honeybee breeding. Basically, you start out with several hives (more is better) and put bees in a couple of them. As the colonies start to increase their populations, you split the one that is performing the best, by moving one of its brood combs into one of your empty hives. The bees that come with it will make a new queen and then you have a new colony descended from the fittest bees. Then you keep doing that indefinitely, build up a good stock of hives, hopefully share bees with your friends and neighbors, and have your own strain of bees adapted to your location. Most likely some of your colonies will die off, but as long as you can keep one colony going you can rebuild. At least that's my limited understanding of the process. It probably helps to have lots of hives and some collaborators in your area. My brother started out with 2 top bar hives and 2 purchased colonies. He found a really simple and cheap hive design and build a 3rd hive and split one colony that was doing really well this past summer. He has his hives in a couple different borrowed locations (he lives in a condo). Top Bar hives don't produce as much honey as a conventional langstroth hive, but they are very low maintenance, much cheaper, and easier to build. My brother checks on his only occasionally (maybe once every month or two?), and only performs any management when there is an emergency -- like getting attacked by argentine ants. Treatment free means no pesticides, of course, but in cold winter climates you would probably need to feed them sugar water or honey to get them through. As with plant breeding, it would probably help to start with bees that have a lot of diversity in the population. So, buying bees from a place that raises them with lots of treatment is probably not ideal, but it might be the only option. Maybe catching a wild swarm would be better, with more diversity, but I'm not sure. I caught a wild swarm a couple years ago, for the first hive my brother built, but they left after about 3 weeks. I think the problem was the hive being in full hot sun. I'll ask my brother for some of his resources and post links to them if you are interested. P.S - Apparently, some people think treatment free is controversial -- that buying bees bred with treatment and them "torturing" them with no treatment is animal abuse. I don't buy it! I mean, did anyone give Joseph Lofthouse a hard time for all the butternut squash he tortured while adapting them to his climate? [Edit] The first part of this article explains more about why there is controversy over this.
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Post by farmermike on Jan 5, 2018 12:23:09 GMT -5
richardw, those look amazing! That's exactly the sort of "turnip diversity" I'm looking for. It's great to see how effective selection against bolting can be.
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