I Hate Rodents

Forget that “all creatures great and small” nonsense—rodents are the bane of my gardening existence. I hate them. If it isn’t mice trying to eat up my pantry stores or ground squirrels munching on tiny seedlings, it will be voles snacking their way through a bed of Jerusalem artichokes or destroying my echinaceas. Really, there are days when I think that nuclear weapons are a reasonable option in this war.

The weather has improved considerably, although we’re supposed to get another snow/windstorm this weekend, sigh. I headed out to the herb garden yesterday to do some cleanup but stopped short when I saw this mess in the yard outside the garden fence:

Those are vole tunnels. And they go right into the herb garden, where there is even more carnage. The echinaceas and hyssop are almost totally gone. Two currant bush starts Cathy gave me are missing. There are no columbines (I had quite a few). Even the hops vine, which has been there for 20+ years and has a root system some of the pine trees would envy, had significant damage. Apparently, the lavender and sage are not as tasty, because they survived with only minor gnawing. I think the bee balms are okay.

It’s a mess.

I was grumpy about this all day. The herb garden needed some work this year, but at this point, it would be faster to tear it all back and start over. I had planned to move many of the plants over to the big garden anyway. When the husband got home, he came over to assess the damage with me. After a few minutes, he said, “We could just extend the chicken yard into that spot and give the chickens more room to run around.”

[I have long suspected that the husband spends a lot of his time trying to stay three steps ahead of me, which is highly annoying but also very admirable considering that my brain is on overdrive most of the time. I alternate between being delighted with his ideas and irritated that I didn’t come up with them myself.]

It’s an elegant solution. The chicken yard is only about three feet from the west end of the herb garden fence and it wouldn’t take much to connect the two spaces. Expanding it would triple the size of the chicken yard. And it would eliminate the vole problem.

I’m going to dig out the plants that are left and move them over to the big garden. We’ll have to take down a couple of beds in the old veggie garden and figure out how to get rid of the huge, annoying comfrey plant that is trying to take over the world—that one is not getting moved over to the big garden—but this should be a relatively straightforward process.

I do need to spend some time out in the big garden today figuring out where I want to put the various plants. On the one hand, it’s been nice to have all my herbs and flowers in one spot close to the house. On the other, I really want more polyculture out in the big garden. Having herbs interspersed here and there is one way to make that happen, as long as I mark them well so they don’t get plowed under.

If any of my Kalispell peeps want lavender plants, let me know this week.

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I ordered an incubator yesterday. Thanks to all of the people who panicked and have decided to become instant homesteaders (good luck with that, by the way), there are no chicks to be found in Kalispell. Stores are still getting shipments, but they can’t say when and they won’t reserve any. Getting a batch of chicks would mean going to one of the farm stores and camping out until the delivery truck arrives and I am not going to do that.

I got a nice plastic incubator with an automatic egg turner and temperature and humidity alarms. It will hold three dozen eggs. This is something we have needed to do for a while and we might as well start now. Baby—the husband refers to him as “Todd,” after the guy we got him from because he doesn’t think Baby is a suitable name for a rooster—seems to be doing a good job with the hens. I do wish a few of them would go broody and hatch out their own chicks. The one I thought was going broody last week was just having a bad day, apparently.

While I was out working in the garden yesterday, I took a break to go play the chickens’ favorite game with them, Mining for Earthworms. I dug up a few that were as thick around as my pinkie finger. The chicken that manages to snag a big worm then runs around being chased by the other hens until she has a chance to stop and gulp it down. It’s pretty entertaining and the chickens like the addition to their diet.

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Mask sewing continues. I have a system set up. My Janome is positioned so that I can see the TV in our bedroom and I’ve been watching the excellent YouTube quilting tutorials put out by Jordan Fabrics, in Grants Pass, Oregon. When this is all over and I can take a road trip again, it would be fun to drive through central Oregon and stop in Sisters, at the big quilt store there, and go to Jordan Fabrics. (Tera?) The first road trip I plan to take, though, is to see my kids.