How hot was it? It was so hot, the thermometer broke…no lie!
I sure hope it didn’t actually hit 120!
Even Bugs Bunny would reject this one.
At the corner of Hollywood and Dead Vine.
All the ducks left of their overnight lettuce.
Cloudy with a chance of lettuce.
Pamela escorts the girls to their mist-equipped pool–
only the best for our ducks!
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Finally, something in my garden that the ducks like but I won’t even touch!*
It started the other day when I offered the usual kibble and they pushed past me to get their bills in the lawn instead. Apparently, the girls figured out that the pH content of our soil combined with sprinkler action in the wee hours of the morning provided a forest of fungi just in time for breakfast. How can they tell (Mother Nature?) which are safe to eat?! Have no idea and, as you can see in the video, it would be tough to stop them (and just try eradicating wild mushrooms from your lawn…ok, I’ll wait.) As I never ever ever ever go near any but pizza-ready mushrooms, the ducks are more than welcome to them.
They might have to arm-wrestle the squirrels, though.
Technical notes: Footage shot with my new Lumix (just tried video feature for first time yesterday!) and imported into the latest iteration of iMovie, which I’ve also never used before. Yikes! I sure missed good ol’ Final Cut Pro but realistically, the integration features for uploading, compression and webcasting are probably sufficient.** Since we’ve got a backlog of baby duck footage from the old Casio I just wish the Editing Fairy would show up soon.***
*Some folks like to forage, I do not. Even ordering “wild mushrooms” in strange restaurants gives me pause.
**Maybe if I actually read the instructions instead of intuiting my way through, you might see a few more moving images on What the Ducks! Or not…
***The Tooth Fairy moonlights, did you know that?
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Will the Defendants please rise?
Did you or did you not on or about a period commencing from June, 2012 to July, 2012, cause to be taken into your mouth any or all of Plaintiff’s vegetation including but not limited to Corn, Beans, Pumpkin and/or Sunflower? Did you or did you not also or in conjunction with said ingestion of said Plant Material cause to be trampled or otherwise damage same? This Court finds, based on a preponderance of evidence hereforth presented that the Defendants: Creampuff Buff Orpington, AKA Puff; Bonnie Cayuga, Fannie Cayuga, AKA Onondaga and Tuscarora; Peep, the Welsh Harlequin Formerly Known as Quack; and Gladys W. Harlequin, AKA Ouack are Guilty as Charged.
This Court, however, declines to sentence Defendants because they are so darned cute.
Dismissed!
One of the scenes of the crime.
Lead me not into temptation…
Too late…I’m there!
Just one little nibble.
Guilt loves company.
Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out.
Uh, guys…
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
“Pssst! Don’t turn on the lights yet!” I whisper-yelled at my husband first thing in the morning, a hot and cloudy July 4th.
“Why?” he asked as he turned on the lights anyway.
“The ducks will know we’re in here…aieeee, no, too late!”
Peep and her cohort stared at us through the kitchen door. (Hello, Police? Yes, we have a Peeping Tom problem. Er, Peeping Duck. Peeping Peep? Hello, Officer? Officer?) Four of the ducks were on the deck; Gladys was not. Trouble in Duckville. I was still in my robe, my yard shoes were at a different door and it was raining. I would have to go out anyway. If I didn’t, we were headed for a major quack problem at 6:30 AM on a public holiday. I was going in.
The gentle, much-needed droplets felt refreshing but I didn’t have time (or the proper attire) to enjoy the precipitation. As suspected, the Westchester Four were up on the deck leaving their timid sister, the still slightly hapless Gladys, on the lawn. Gladdy-Waddy (as my daughter, Pamela, calls her) was quacking her heart out over their perfidy. I didn’t blame her. Heck, it was sorta OK if they quacked to get our attention when Gladys needed help (stuck on her back, snarled in bird netting or trapped in the pumpkin patch—to name a mere few) but if she quacked because they weren’t playing nice, it peeped me off.
“Get back here and play with your sister!” I barked. “Off that deck right now!” Naturally, they ignored me.
“Alrighty then,” I huffed. “If you can’t beat ‘em, Gladys, you have to waddle up there and join ‘em.” I coaxed her from the hangout spot near the over-nibbled honeysuckle. The little Welsh Harlequin didn’t like it but she managed, inelegantly, to mount the stairs, one to the lower deck and two to the upper, and then the others quickly clustered around like they hadn’t seen her in weeks. (Which, for all I know, may be what it feels like to a bunch of ducks.)
I tried to finish making breakfast (i.e. spilling dry cereal into a bowl, pouring milk, finding a spoon) but every five or ten minutes, the duck posse came to the door looking for action. Andrew didn’t see what the big deal was (“I like it when they say hi”) and Pamela took herself off duck duty to watch Disney Channel. It fell to me to make sure they didn’t make too much racket before 8 AM.
“What do you guys want?!!!!” Not a peep. I directed them to the pile of wilted vegetables I had left the day before then went back inside.
Glancing at weather.com, I noted that we might have a strong thunderstorm any minute and then went on sending email, paying bills, reading stories on Lamar Odom and other things that are Not Writing. Intent on the screen, it took me a few minutes before I heard the patter of hard rain on the metal roof outside my office window. I looked up to watch the predicted downpour but, that’s odd, nada. No rain, no wind so what was that… I jumped up from my desk then slammed to a halt: All five ducks were banging on the French doors, rat-a-tat-tatting like a toy drummer. Good Lord! What the duck did Andrew teach them while I was out of town?
SMASH CUT TO: My HUSBAND, on the couch*, PEEP and PUFF on either side, watching TV. GLADYS plays with Pamela’s old fairy DOLLS. The CAYUGAS are at her desk, watching duck videos on a LAPTOP. We can hear the digital PEEPS and QUACKS from time to time.
ANDREW
Did you see that! What a shot!
Puff and Peep QUACK in agreement. Puff reaches for the REMOTE and SWITCHES to reruns of “Two and a Half Men.”
FADE TO BLACK over my SCREAMS….
At the dining room window, I shake my head and go looking for Pamela.
“You have to do something!” I beseech.
“I’m watching a show, Mama,” she demurs. “You do it.”
Outside in the now rainless but still puddly backyard, I approach the poultry perps and try to lure them off the deck with a nice bowl of duck food (their second—they’d already knocked over the first.) Lo and behold, neither my soft words (“get your tail feathers on that lawn—now!!!”) nor the kibble did the trick. There was something about getting on the deck that was easier than getting off the deck and, finally, slowly, I realized that this might be the reason they were banging on the glass in the first place. Hmmmmm….
I tried to remember Pamela’s much-perfected technique. She had spent weeks herding the ducks around the yard, getting them up on the deck and then “showing” them how to get back down. In the beginning, this involved a duck, carefully and slowly taking each step then stumbling onto the grass in a big rush. A couple of weeks later, to PJ’s great excitement, the ducks figured out what those gorgeous accessories strapped to their backs were and decided to flap/jump off the deck instead. Soon, Peep and Puff and then the Cayugas were getting major air as they practiced maneuvers.**
Only Gladys struggled to master this beautiful birdy thing called flight. On top of her other issues, the little duck had developed what we suspect was a condition called “angel wing” where the flight feathers split in a cosmetically imperfect but not life-impairing way.*** Pamela enjoyed picking her up and “helping” her as needed and I suspect that Gladys didn’t mind a little help from her big friend.
This morning, with Pamela glued to the flatscreen, it was Mama’s turn to play flight instructor. I bent down a bit and scooped out my arms in front of me, using the “pen up” motion that had worked faultlessly up until now. The ducks, suddenly skittish, tried to avoid my arms and resisted leaving the deck even though it was clearly getting hotter and their food and water and now the shade, too, were somewhere else. This would take stronger measures. I semi-lunged a bit at Peep and she flew off the deck and even nailed the landing. The Cayugas quickly got the picture and followed suit, gracefully flying onto the grass. Puff went next, achieving the longest distance, the most air and, later, probably the biggest high five from her peers.
And then there was only Gladys. She gave me a little “who me?” look but I didn’t back off. I couldn’t. As I scooped toward her she launched herself like the Spruce Goose, impossibly heavy, wings akimbo, flapping and running and jumping and fabulously, awkwardly landing.
But, for one small moment, Gladys flew.
*Special thanks to my friend, Christine, who suspected the whole Andrew and the ducks on the couch thing from the start.
**Taking Off appears to be easier than Landing.
***Our vet suggested that she might even grow out of it and, as of today, her wings look pretty darn good.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Coyotes, raccoons, someone else’s cats, oh my! Although I’m reasonably sure our current housing situation will cover us in most Predator Events, I nonetheless wanted to do all I could to prevent and/or deter. No, I didn’t relocate our bedroom to the backyard (although I did give passing thought to sleeping outside in a tent.) Instead, I decided to install a few Solar Nite Eyes to the outside of the pen, a techier method than mere old-school “hardening the perimeter” strategies. Having seen ads for this nifty device, I, of course, decided it would be perfect for our suburban homestead.*
About the size of a small flip phone, the Nite Eye is a black box with two little red lights on it. The idea is that if a predator sees the red lights, they will think these ominous orbs belong to a competitor animal and take off. No mess, no fuss, no poultry loss. The units attach with magnets directly to the pen or you can mount to a post nearby; the top includes a tiny solar panel so no batteries necessary. As I said, nifty. Are they effective? Well, I haven’t had any issues yet but at this point I’m adding tchotchkes as much for their talismanic value as much as anything else so who knows?**
The PDF instructions (which I didn’t download until after I installed them, naturally!) feature a photo of a fox licking its lips (yikes!) and details on how high to mount units against which sort of predator–12” off the ground for raccoon, 20 feet apart; for coyote, 24”, 30’ respectively. If you’ve been doing the blog math, you will quickly realize that my pen is not even 20’, let alone 30’ so keeping them on the same side of the pen won’t meet manufacturer standards (I need to separate and mount on separate posts.) But where it got head-scratching for me is they give instructions for deterring raccoon (12”) and coyote (24”) but no mention of those with multi-heighted needs.*** We have (at least) two kinds of duck-eaters in the vicinity so I thought I was left with the following choices: buy more units and mount some at each height, split the difference at 18” (hmm, not good—probably miss both!) or just call the company and ask them what to do.****
Of course, what I didn’t realize when I bought them is that Nite Eyes do not operate like human-deterring lights. For some reason, I thought they would only activate whenever a possible furry fiend crossed its path—just like our driveway sensor lights do. Nope, that’s not the deal. What Solar Nite Eyes do is start blinking as soon as it begins to get dark. In other words, they are dusk-activated (not to be confused with Duck Activated, something entirely different, I’m sure.) This means they start blinking as soon as night falls and they keep blinking all night long. As I had bought three (and considered at least four or more), it occurred to me that maybe I got it wrong. Note to Self: Thoroughly Read Instructions Next Time Before Installation. Thinking they would only blink as needed, in my ignorance I had placed two on opposite ends of the pen on the same side facing our house and one on the side slanting toward the back of the yard. And as I gazed out on that second night of duck sleep-outside-ness, I realized that the fast blink of six red “eyes” was pretty flashy. I mean, I’m not a raccoon but my version didn’t look anything like the orbital equivalent of a gang of rival raccoons. What it did look a bit like were runway lights for a terminal at Duck Airways. If you squinted, that is.
Deciding that eight units might be a bit much after all– don’t want to annoy the neighbors instead of the creatures of the night!– I resolved to call the company and run my situation by them. As I looked out in the now total darkness, the runway effect was even more striking than at dusk. Sure glad we don’t live too close to Westchester Airport…
Wait, too late. Air Canada Geese, coming in for a landing!
* The website where I bought them says: “Protects against owls, coyotes, opossum, raccoons, fox, bobcats, muskrats, bear, cougar, wild boar, mink, weasels and many more nocturnal predators.” Jeez Louise, how many more nocturnal predators are there?!!!
**That sound you just heard is me knocking on my wooden head.
***And what about that hill? Twelve inches is not the same if you’re downhill, right? OK, I am now officially over-thinking this.
****Called the company directly and a kind employee advised that I needed at least four and covering all angles is key. I’m getting more—as we both agreed—better safe than sorry. (Or short a duck or five.)
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Quick peek from Day 3 of our recent heat wave (102 degrees F on the car thermometer–yowee!)
LIKE IT HOT
Happy carrots (don’t tell the bunny!)
DON’T
Puff takes cover. The ducks molted the rest of their baby plumage–all in one day!
LIKE IT HOT
Tomato plants, pre-actual tomatoes, but still happy.
NOPE
Tarragon didn’t like cold, wet and rainy either which might have been the real problem.
LOVE IT HOT
Baby corn and bean plants.
The beans grew that much in 3 days!
NOT SO MUCH
Droopy dill.
OKAY WITH HOT
Pumpkin…so far. When further along, continued
heat will make the vines droop.
ABSOLUTELY NOT
Very unhappy hydrangea.
Since the girls have littered their pen and favorite resting places with so many feathers, it looks like two kids had a pillow fight and didn’t clean up. Speaking of which, how am I supposed to clean up feathers? They don’t quickly biodegrade like other things ducks, er, drop. I know, let’s make our own puffy coat!*
Safe to come out yet?
*If we start now, we might have one by the time Pamela goes to college.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
One of the ironies of this whole “let’s grow our own” saga is that it takes so much work to grow the food, I barely have time (or energy) to cook the food, let alone eat the food. Maybe I’ve just bitten off more than I’m too tired to chew but between duck chores, cat chores, house chores, garden chores, not to mention, husband and daughter chores, I’m too beat to bake. Or sauté. Or chop anything (might cut off a finger, you never know.)
For a variety of reasons including my still-novice status, the relative smallness of our arable land, the weather, the bugs, the duck-trampling, the plain ol’ bad luck, I have been able to produce only a smidgen of the food that we actually eat every day. A far cry from my hopes in the depths of our (admittedly temperate) winter, when I airily dreamed of perfect rows of perfect vegetables complementing copious eggs from a perfect flock.
SLAP! OK, I’m awake.
So, as of June 20th, in 2012 this is the sum total of food produced (and eaten):
3 servings of sugar snap peas*
4 servings of spinach**
4 servings of bok choy**
Lettuce in profusion, mostly given to the ducks (they love it!)
Dill on demand
Lots of dill and carrots (unless the swallowtails show up!)
Cilantro, copious
Pending food—expected to survive to harvest but who the ducks knows?:
Basil (newly replanted—the first plants went outside too early and failed in the rain)
Rosemary (very hardy)
Shallots and scallions (did well)
Carrots (first time I’ve had success from seed—they’re in the planter so it’ll be interesting to see how stumpy they are)
More lettuce (you can never have too much)
Potatoes (out of control big now but the proof is in the digging up)
Tomatoes (killed two plants by not getting them in the soil fast enough, two to go)
Looking peachy!
Pepper (one plant, not great odds)
Blueberries (I think we have about 6 berries)
Peach tree (looks exactly the way a peach tree should look, only smaller)
Olive “trees” (more like olive “branches” but flowering and holding their own)
Indian corn (lost a few plants due to Some Bird pulling up the emerging leaves, I won’t name names, ok, Peep….)
Runner beans (just coming up now but so far so good)
Pumpkins (again, lost a few due to ducks but put up border fence and now thriving)
Ah ha! Duck feather left at the scene.
Outright losses:
Fig tree (when still inside, cat nibbled at leaves and later, outside, didn’t get right amount of water and keeled over)
First blueberry bush (never made it past stick phase)
Yo! Was this fence here yesterday?
On life support:
Two apple trees (alas! both in the soggy beds along the property line. We elevated them slightly but they don’t look too feisty at the moment)
Two pear trees (compared to their peach tree companion, look pretty sickly)
But a couple of large salads do not a balanced diet make. Luckily, we made a strategic investment in early spring, in case we had a total, not just mostly total, crop loss. That’s right, we joined a CSA. Community Supported Agriculture*** allows you to buy weekly supplies of fresh farm produce by paying a set fee directly to the farmer who then in turn, delivers a “share” of vegetables and sometimes other crops to a designated location, usually weekly, from about June to November. (Not a bad backup plan, right?) This week, for example, we received the following (Ducks: ooh, more salad!):
Red Lettuce-1 head
Green Lettuce-1 head
Arugula-1 bunch
Bright Lights Swiss Chard-1 bunch
Summer Spinach-1 bunch
Mustard Greens-1 bunch
Mizuna-1 bunch
Chinese Cabbage-1 head
Garlic Scapes-6
As my mom would say, lots of roughage. To which I would add, when it comes to farming, all’s well that, um, ends well.
*Many more to come, some to be frozen because I DON’T HAVE TIME TO COOK!
**Bolted or almost bolted early
***Our local CSA is with Stoneledge Farm, a 200-acre certified organic farm in NY state.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
When we were kids growing up in Northeast Philadelphia, we delighted in our cat’s hilariously conditioned response to the electric can opener. This cat could be anywhere in the house (admittedly, not all that far in an 18’ Airlite row home) but if anyone pressed the lever for any reason, she would come running as fast as her calico legs could carry her. My brother, I think, first figured out that it was not necessary to actually be opening a can of cat food in order to trigger this reaction. (You can fill in the blanks re: that boyish pastime.) And, yes, we occasionally opened cans of other kinds of edibles not normally on the feline menu, like, say, cannellini beans. Nevertheless, on the off-chance that it just might be dinner (or second breakfast) our cat invariably rushed to the kitchen to make sure she got her kitty dibs in.
We got rid of the electric can opener years ago (next to a trash compactor, is there any more vestigial appliance?!) but Pavlov’s lessons live on. With our ducks, it’s not just food-related, it’s Pamela-related. They’ve apparently decided that she’s their Big Sister and whatever she’s doing, it’s a lot more fun than what they’re doing and they want her to come out and play (or feed them) RIGHT NOW. One way they know she’s around, of course, is to hear her through an open window.* Or, if the girls catch a glimpse of us when it’s just about mealtime, Peep starts the chant and the others join on the refrain: Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, QUAAAAACK. To make it worse, the now-ironically named Peep has developed this raucous QUACK that sounds like a drunk at someone else’s party.** I recently asked one of our neighbors if Pamela’s quack-triggering antics with the puppyish ducks ever bothers her. She said not at all and then added, that one with the really loud voice is so cute. (Urgh, sure hope that cute doesn’t get tired….)
If there’s one thing, however, that triggers an automatic quackfest it has to be the garden gate. Our babies have been conditioned to connect that special squeak of the latch combined with the kind of cedar board slam only a 4th grader can achieve as “hello, ducks, I’m home—wanna play?” Problem is, everyone has to use this gate and sometimes, poor things, it’s me not PJ coming around the house. Like our old cat and the burrrrr of the can opener, when the girls hear the squeak, they start quacking and, in five-duck formation, waddle up for food and/or fun. Often I have to console them when they realize it’s grumpy old Mama Duck not Sis but they usually accept the offered bath or water bowl fill-up with laudable flexibility.
Meanwhile, we’ve been letting the flock roam at-will in our large yard but, surprisingly, getting them to pen-up at night has been fairly effortless. (Try that with a cat!) Since we’ll eventually leave town on vacation and will need to show the pet sitter the ropes, this is a real bonus. We already know they’re more likely to go inside if duck kibble is on offer but how to find them if they’re avoiding the heat in some hidden area? That’s right, it’s easy. Just slam the garden gate like you’re a 10 ½-year-old. That should do the trick.***
* I, myself, have taken to keeping my voice down sometimes, which feels oddly as if I’m being duck-stalked in my own home.
** Her original, pre-arrival name was Quack inspired by the famous children’s story by Robert McCloskey. We changed it to Peep because that’s all she said as a duckling. Joke was on us, as usual. (And Gladys was supposed to be Ouack. Ouch.)
***If that fails, we can always try to find the old can opener.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Everything seemed to go slow or wrong today. The corn is still tiny. The sunflowers are wilting. The pumpkins had to be replanted (again!) I didn’t get to cook a good meal. A heat wave is coming so I can’t finish the lawn. The grass needs to be reseeded where the pen sat last week. I need to get more fencing for the plots/mulch for the weeds/ornamentals for the pots/hours in my day/depth to my sleep/fruit in my diet.
But everywhere that Pamela goes, there go the ducks And she loves it.
So do I.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
It’s been seven years since I bought a new camera and decades (yikes!) since I got one with interchangeable lenses. Despite that, I remember well the pleasure in capturing a subject with exactly the right focal length vs. grabbing everything with a basic 50mm lens.* Digital photography blossomed while I puttered in the garden of life so I took the sage advice of my tech maven friend, Laura, rather than attempting to unravel the research on my own. She advocated for the Panasonic Lumix system, specifically with the “G X” version of its crisp and lovely lenses. This new generation camera uses Micro Four Thirds technology to achieve fabulous results in a smaller and lighter package. You may have noticed a difference in the past few posts when I switched from my old Casio Exilim point-and-shoot (now in Pamela’s possession–watch out!). Still working through the menus but so glad I upgraded. Thanks, duckies, for giving me a reason to do it!
Note: All photos shot with Lumix GX Vario 45-175.
Detail of Peep’s gorgeous plumage.
Robin loves the maze–another place to perform.
Abandoned nest probably found by a gardener.
No buts about it, our ducks are cute…!
*Still have soft spot in my heart for my first SLR, the Canon AE-1.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Last month I broke down and finally bought a rechargeable string trimmer and wasted an hour reading the instructions, $99 plus tax and probably a couple of clicks off my hearing chart as well. When we first bought this large-yarded house and dreamed of Going Green, the plan was completely off the grid, no gas-powered tools, no petroleum-based (or other) chemicals. Well, one and a half out of two ain’t bad, right?
As my amused readers know, the first artillery purchase in my lawn-taming battle was a reel mower, a snazzy-looking, easy-cutting but bolt-dropping exercise machine that is absolutely perfect for a medium-sized, flat parcel with not-too-tall grass. Not our yard, alas. (Or not with me doing the mowing, double alas.) So as early as last summer when we first left to go on vacation, I had to call our old landscaping service because, frankly, you needed the heavy guns by that point.
This year, we reached that point a full month earlier. When gardeners start dropping business cards in your mail box and a contractor offers a free mowing, you know it’s time to throw in the organic cotton towel. On Tuesday, we had a professional team come by and whack away. Wow, who knew we had such a nice lawn?
But back to the trimmer. Although I had the push mower, I realized even last year that with the design of this property, i.e. a standard suburban set-up made for power-tooled garden maintenance, doing all the weed pulling, lawn edging and leaf clearing would be another Herculean task.* I began, as I always begin things I know absolutely nothing about, with Research.** Some people go to Home Depot and ask the nice orange-aproned folks for advice. Others chat up family or friends or total strangers in the checkout line. Techies exhaustively browse the Internet, price-comparing and feature-evaluating until the digitized cows come home. I, of course, did all of this and decided what I really needed was the Stihl Lithium-Ion Battery Powered String Trimmer because they had a picture of a gal operating it. Must be perfect for me, right?
Ahem.
Well, frankly, I may never know. When I went to the closest lawn & garden store (that’s right, not a box store but a genuine small business catering to the local gardening services community), they must have thought I had just come in for change for the meter. They did not expect me to ask for the product I asked for; in fact, although they carried Stihl, this product was so new, no one else had asked for it, they didn’t carry it and it would have to be ordered.** Luckily, I had my clipping (so to speak!) from, I think, Mother Earth News and gave them all the relevant info including my name and phone number so they could call me “as soon as it came in.”
That was ten months ago and after a few other tries, never heard a thing. Oh well, back to the box store….
Spending absolutely no further time on research because the bad grass was that bad,***I got over to HD for a quick feature-and-price comparison. I did not see the Stihl I had obsessed over so I focused on two things: 1) battery time for use and re-charging and 2) expandability (using same tool for different applications, i.e. trimmer and leaf blower and snow blower and margarita-maker, whatever.) Since battery power seems to be the most crucial feature in the world o’ lawn trimmers, I have to say, I got more caught up in that than maybe I should. As you probably know, Home Depot has these tags whereby you can see at a glance which product is Best, Better and Good. I did not end up with the electric trimmer designated as Best in the Actually Trimming Category. Oh well. That would be My Bad.
After getting a little freaked out over the warning labels (17 separate Warning! boxes for the trimmer, two more warnings and a caution for the battery), I gingerly slotted the 18 volt lithium-ion pack into the recharger being careful to avoid fire, heat, damp or wet locations, pilot lights, paper clips, coins, keys, nails, screws and not to crush, drop or damage the battery on its path to the charging unit now situated in a well-ventilated area. Phew! Why did I want a lithium-ion battery again? Oh, right. I was worried about battery power. Hmmm…
Sometime later when the Charge Indicator Light glowed the appropriate color in the appropriate pattern, after removing jewelry and any other dangling objects, I prepared my armor: long pants, wool socks, Doc Martens, work gloves, safety glasses, 44 SPF sunblock, straw hat. Securing all children and pets from the area, I made a mental note to update my last will and testament and then ever so carefully, placed the battery into the trimmer handle. Emerging from the garage into the implacable sunshine, heart pitter-pattering, I stepped onto the lawn and squeezed the trigger.
Which brings me, finally, to the hyperbolic title of this entry. Fully realizing that I am generalizing to a dismaying degree, I, nonetheless, have decided that Men like Power Lawn Tools because, well, they work. Are they the best thing for the Environment? Nooooooo. But if you think of the Lawn as the Enemy, then you can fulfill the role of Warrior and convert that couchless task to something steeped in meaning, even heroism. (“Look, honey, I saved you from a thousand weeds!” “That’s nice, baby, can you do something about that stopped-up toilet now?”)
Strapping one of those suckers onto your back, man-handling those mowers over the spaces of your dominion, these are things that may appeal to Team Testosterone in ways I can only imagine. I got a small glimpse of it, however, when I first turned on the battery-powered string trimmer. Attempting to look like I belonged in that brotherhood of gardeners that so smoothly swing the machines to and fro, topping tall grass, eliminating weedy fringes, I failed. Miserably. The darn thing is HEAVY. Oops, I forgot to check that part on the compare-and-contrast chart. And, moreover, it shakes so much I could mix James Bond a drink if there wasn’t a Warning! about avoiding alcohol while operating. Now, admittedly, our grass was savannah-tall at this point and although I tried to “start at the top” and work the weeds down, within minutes, I was so pooped my arms could barely hold the thing up. I had “trimmed” about 1/50th of the area I set out to trim. I had intimidated the ducks and my daughter with the very noise of it. And, beneath the gentle whisper of the spring breeze, I could hear the grasses laughing.
Just think, my biggest concern was running out of battery power.
Happy Father’s Day!
*What, you mean Lawn Maintenance was not one of the original Labors?! Okay, well, it shoulda been.
**Arguably the most fun part. Certainly the least sweaty.
***As previously noted, the Bad Grass is that tall, seed-coated stuff that the reel mower just pushes over but doesn’t really cut. It’s too tough for the ducks to eat and the rabbits use it for evasive maneuvers but not snacking.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Photos by Lori Fontanes and Pamela Rosenburgh
She said as she happened upon the metal sculpture, reminiscent of lawn-and-mowerless Southwest yards. Why Westchester? she wondered, thinking perhaps the sculptor or store owner still heard the dry snap of desert in this wet and sticky verdure. People used scarecrows, we could use a scare coyote to keep the sunflowers safe and possibly give another one pause….as he stands at the edges, looking for his moving food, ears up, tail down, eyes alighting on the outline.
I only hope he doesn’t think she’s cute.
File this under “couldn’t resist.”
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Halleluiah! Went out to tear off some lettuce for the girls and noticed the peas had podded—yay! Grabbed a handful of the first, sweet fruits of the glorious pea vines and raced to the kitchen. We were having modified Mexican but what the heck.* I was gonna make my favorite Asian-inflected pea recipe anyway. As long as you’re not counting the two months from seed to table, nothing faster!
And I’ll take a pPod over an iPod any day.
Three-Minute Peas
Fresh-picked sugar pod peas**
Sesame oil
Coarse sea salt
Red pepper flakes
Turn on broiler, not too high (our oven has a “center” setting.) Wash a big handful of new pod peas and dry in paper towel. Place in appropriately sized baking dish so that they all lie flat. Drizzle lightly with sesame oil. Sprinkle with a dash of sea salt and red pepper to taste. Broil one minute on each side. (You should start to smell that deep green smell just as you have to flip. Careful, don’t burn them!) Eat as a side or with rice or your choice of protein or just eat straight outta the dish like I did. Makes a great afternoon snack, too.
Variations:
Olive oil instead of sesame oil
Add minced ginger or garlic if you have a bit more time but really the pods are so tasty you won’t need to enhance them very much!
*Spanish rice with melted cheeses and a side of homemade avocado salad. OK, a weird combination with the peas but what are you gonna do? Peas come when peas come.
**We grow organic Oregon Sugar Pod II snow peas, $2.39, from Botanical Interests. For this recipe, cook them when they are still flat and small, about 3-4 inches.
Note: You can also buy sugar peas at the supermarket or farmers market but the longer off the vine, the less tasty they become. It’s actually super easy to grow peas, a great choice for the beginning kitchen gardener (me, two years ago.) The plants need some kind of support for the vines but they’re perfect for planters, no giant backyard necessary.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Our hometown paper features a colorfully written local crime report that ruffles feathers with its sly characterizations of usually low-level infractions, misdemeanors and the oddball felony. Two days ago, I chuckle through descriptions of leaf-blower violations and exuberant “youths” but almost choke on my Cheerios when I see the first of three reports: Coyote Sightings. They’re baaaaaack.
I guess I shouldn’t have made fun of good ol’ Wile E. last week because I know full well what it means to live with the not-too-distant cousin of the Pekinese. Having spent half my life in the West, I became, let’s say, warily blasé about the coyote. In L.A., you could come across one walking down the middle of the street, a stone’s throw from the most congested intersection in America (that’s why they walk, it’s much faster!) Coyotes were also charming co-residents in places like Arizona—I mean, what’s a desert golf course without their pungent aroma and atmospheric yips and wails?
But if the golf course is on the Other Coast in a town where the biggest animal-related hazard used to be dodging white-tailed deer on the backroads (not a joke, by the way), it looked like Mother Nature had just upped the ante in the suburbanization wars.* Put simply, we were told “they” were moving south into new territory as humans moved north into theirs. Not sure I totally bought this argument (Westchester County has been colonized by ex-city folk for hundreds of years), nonetheless, it was what it was—coyotes were here and they weren’t leaving any time soon. Worst of all, though, was what happened when they first showed up. Two children were hurt in very scary circumstances and there were reports of rabies, already endemic in local wild mammals.** We were all pretty shocked. In all my years of Western living, I had never heard of a person being attacked by a coyote.*** But even though it was strikingly rare, it still scared the heck out of people and for good reason. Thankfully, since those initial incidents, the coyote and the citizens of Lower Westchester seemed to have found equilibrium because other than the occasional Coyote Sighting, I hadn’t heard much.
Then we got the ducks. In the era B.D. (Before Ducks), living close to wildlife meant you sometimes heard of other people losing pets, a sad but not surprising result of residing in a place where you were surrounded by green stuff. Now we realized those same green spaces could be concealing a predator that could eat the raccoon for breakfast and still have room for, say, a few backyard ducks. (Big) gulp! Will my triple fencing hold? What if they show up when we’re out of town ? Or when I run to Whole Foods? Didn’t I say earlier that if a coyote came by the ducks “may be outta luck”? Ok, that sound you just heard like Velcro® ripping…that was my bet that coyotes wouldn’t be an issue. It’s off.
Wonder if I could teach the girls to use a cell phone?
Maybe a Jitterbug?
*The more immediate threats for most people are from insects, namely, tick and mosquito. So small and yet so potentially disease-carrying!
**Early warning from our neighbors: If you see a raccoon during the day acting like a drunken sailor, get outta there and call the police.
***Mountain lions, especially those encountered on lonely razorback trails, are a whole different story. There were also rattlesnakes, deadly spiders and multiple natural and unnatural disasters, but I digress.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
Okay, I was warned. Ducks like green things. Ducks like young plants. Ducks have big feet and like to lay right on top of stuff. Do they care that you spent hours digging, mulching, planting, weeding, weeding, weeding and maybe even more weeding? (And why don’t they eat weeds, by they way? They’re green. They’re available to be eaten all over my yard. But nooooooo.)
The girls have been living outside full-time for about a week now and there have been more than a few casualties in the just-planted department. Those cute volunteer pumpkins from last Halloween? Gone. The whole crop of dill put in for the black swallowtails? Nada. Last Thursday, Pamela and I spent an hour poking sunflower seeds into the edges of the spiral.* Before I realized, the plants had put up their first leaves and, zap, some Bird or Other Creature, had at them already. And the thing that always kills you with wild animals is: They don’t even eat it! They yank it up, toss it aside or take a nibble and leave the rest. Do they care that you might have actually wanted that seedling to grow into a giant happiness-giving sunflower?!!!!! ** Apparently not.
Spot the hidden plant killers.
I am preparing to cover the baby sunflowers with leftover plastic poultry netting right now. That is, if I can elbow my way in between the ducks, the rabbits and now, heaven help me, the robins. Had no idea all these animals loved sprouts. It’s like living in Venice Beach all over again. *Sigh*
Who, us?
Honeysuckle victim.
Poor baby sunflower!
A couple of acres of repurposed poultry netting should do the trick. Or not.
*It’s supposed to be a Sunflower Maze, like a corn maze but without the corn. And maybe now without the sunflowers!
**When I first posted the maze photo, people were like “what the duck is that thing?” Unfortunately, it is not an alien landing site (good guess, though!) or a nod to pre-civilized didactic tribal thingamabobbery (another guess, not so good.) It’s just a place for Pamela and her friends to play. They figured it out right away….
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
The battery on my long-suffering laptop passed away today which further deteriorated the pace of my recent blogging. So here’s a quick photo essay to fill in some of the digital blanks. The girls got out early and took advantage of the wet weather. Toward the end of the day, they heard Pamela come home from school and went looking for a playdate.
What are you guys doing up here? The lawn is down there….
Oh, no! They’re heading for the salad bar!
Checking out the living room window. Ignore the dust bunnies, please.
Can Pamela come out and play?
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
The bok choy bolted way too soon. Seems like just the other day it was so little and now it’s applying to be in a salad! The weather had been mild for months and I’d been deceived into thinking I could buy a few extra days. Nope, no way. Not certain whether the taste goes “off” after the flower shoots up, I resigned myself to plucking the whole crop at once and possibly just composting it.* I’d gotten one meal out of the baby leaves and, like leaf lettuce when you pluck moderately, it appeared to handle the trimming just fine. Then, about a week later, in the midst of a warm and persistent couple of days of rain, up go the leaves and one morning, I notice the tiny flower heads nestled in almost every cluster. Not fully grown but the plants got the memo: Time to go to seed. Spring is over.
*I looked up “bok choy bolting–ok to eat?” on the Internet first. There’s some dispute over how long you have, if any. It did make me go ahead and harvest (and eat) all the spinach crop before that bolted, too!
Pretty Easy Bok Choy
Prep time: 5-10 minutes
Cooking: 5 minutes
The reason for “pretty” easy is that bok choy needs to be prepped a bit. (But it’s worth it!) Trim off the bottoms, separate the leaves then wash and towel dry. Prepare the green tops and stems separately. Grab the greens in a bunch and ribbon them. Roughly chop the stems into bite size pieces.
4 largish baby bok choy, prepared as above
1 TBL sesame oil with more for drizzling
2 garlic cloves, minced
TSP grated fresh ginger if you can—really deepens the flavor
Red pepper flakes, just a few
Dash of low-sodium soy sauce
Warm sesame oil over medium heat in a stir fry pan or other wide lidded pot, just until it shimmers. Add garlic cloves (and ginger if using.) Saute about one minute, taking care not to burn the spices. Add bok choy stems and stir fry about two minutes until softened. Add bok choy leaves and let them just wilt. Swirl in drizzle of sesame oil. Remove pan from heat and stir in a few red pepper flakes if you dare. Blend in dash of soy sauce—don’t overdo or it will be too salty, even if using low-sodium version.
Serve with warm white rice, such as Calrose, a Japonica variety. Nuttier grains might fight the flavors but whatever you like, go for it!
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
I’m reading (and I’m not making this up) a NY Times Dining Section story on crazy Californians banning foie gras with the obligatory illustration* of a sunglass-wearing duck when all of a sudden my own ducks start quacking up a storm outside the kitchen door. As smart as my girls are, it can’t be that they’re reading over my shoulder, right? Nah. And besides, it sounded more like a startled “quack quack” than a “you go qwacky L.A. types!” (if indeed that is their political opinion on this issue.) In reality, the quacks are more mundanely sourced. It’s the cat. His water bowl is situated smack in front of a glass-paned door so that he and his sister can have entertainment with their hydration. Up until this point, it’s been cowbirds, robins and the occasional mourning dove but five full-sized ducks less than a yard away? A whole new kind of feline-on-feather interaction. Luckily, there’s a double-pane between the two species so this can’t possibly devolve into something other than a quack-growl fest.
Unless the raccoon opens the door for him.
* The duck in the illo appears to be a Pekin. Never a Cayuga or Welsh Harlequin, of course.
**Plus, if I step over it (or into it!) several times a day I can remember to keep it refilled.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
“Did you hear the raccoons last night?” one of the neighbor kids inquired breathlessly as we headed off for school. “Did you hear that awful screaming?” asked a parent. “Someone called the cops. It was just awful.” I will spare you the details of what exactly they think the raccoon was doing except to say that it was…awful. I shuddered. Raccoons do what raccoons do but will they have to do it to my ducks? Returning home, I considered a possibility that I had firmly put aside before: Electrification.
Electric fencing is the ne plus ultra of poultry protection. Old hands, often speaking from painful experience, recommend this method as the very best way to keep out predators of various ilk.* To fill this need, farm supply companies offer fencing in many configurations, often displayed in ads featuring blue-jeaned women of gentle mien and slight figure. In other words, you don’t have to be a big burly flannel-clad guy in order to protect your flock/herd/lettuces. (If you have a blue ox, however, please come by and help out anytime.) Fences that are super-easy to put up are all well and good but it’s not the fence part of electric fence that worries me. My mother reminded me the other day that on one of my early visits to her place in farm country PA, I accidentally touched an electric fence while trying to get close to some really cute horses. My bad. I didn’t even remember the incident but apparently, the deterrent effect worked. On me.
I guess it comes down to this, despite the fact that it’s not high-voltage enough to do a critter serious harm, I dislike the idea of zapping any animal, which includes, unfortunately, raccoons. My plan (and please don’t laugh) (yet) is that I wanted to see if it was possible to out-think the varmint with a variety of physical barriers instead. Fully aware that I had just cast myself in the Wile E. Coyote role in this saga (I didn’t buy one Acme-labeled product, I swear!), I nonetheless began to install some duck-protective homespun upgrades to my chicken coop/pen. (Ok, you can start laughing now.)
Detail of welded wire cage covering run.
With some input from the engineers at the Egg Yolk , I eventually decided that a hardware cloth overlay that extended up 24” with a 12” apron along the perimeter of the pen would close the gaps in the welded wire fence to a very small size. Small enough to block crafty raccoon fingers? I very much hoped so. It took me many hours on my hands and knees to attach the darn thing with military-grade UV-resistant cable ties (that’s what it says on the package, who knows?!) In the middle of the night on the eve of my planned First Outside Sleepover for the ducks, however, I began to worry that the raccoons might still be able to get their claws through even this tiny opening. Not to do real harm but even poking might disturb my babies. Can you look up “length of a raccoon claw” on the Internet?** I wasn’t sure but at 3 AM seriously considered trying! Instead, I told myself I would use heavy-duty clear plastic (the kind used for industrial shelving) to the inside bottom edges of the pen. I could hole-punch and attach it with yet more cable ties. (I think we’ve used over 300 on this project so far. Should have bought a case and saved some bucks!)
Side angle of attached hardware cloth apron.
The reason for the triple redundancy barrier are these two things: 1) ducks like to lay up against stuff when they sleep, typically, the wall of the enclosure and/or each other and 2) they would not be sleeping in the predator-proof coop but in the outside pen. Okay, three things. (Yes, this is beginning to sound like a Monty Python skit.) The third reason is that I needed them to be able to sleep safely outside of the coop because when I went out of town, which I most definitely would have to do, they needed much more space than the coop alone would offer. They would have pet sitters but it wasn’t workable to set up a system that required someone to be there at first light and absolutely before dark. And, in the summer, that little coop would be too warm for sleeping unless the overnight temps were very very mild. Summer in suburban NY? Mild is not happening.
Don’t forget that little part where the coop attaches!
Hey, I know. We still have that partially dismantled electric dog fence from the previous owners. I never heard of this sort of thing before I moved to Westchester but apparently, this is an invention whereby your dog wears a device on a collar that delivers a “sensation” each time s/he crosses a border. This “fence” is created by underground wires hooked to an electrical outlet. It’s supposed to deter them from leaving your property while still allowing the free passage of humans. We don’t have a dog and I doubt I would use it even if I did but I wonder if it would work with raccoons?
The only thing I can’t figure out is how to get them to wear the little collars.
*Ilk here meaning “claw” or “fang”.
** Yes, you can but you won’t get back to sleep if you do.
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
It’s 3 AM, do you know where your ducks are? A teeming rain penetrates my much-needed rest and suddenly I’m wide-awake. I left the window open a crack so I could hear if…. I could hear it…. If anything…. I’m too foggy to go on. I close the windows in all the rooms except mine and then attempt to peer into the early morning darkness. The canvas cover glows slightly in the stygian gloom. But all’s quiet. No peep, no quack, no nothing.
I check my trusty outside thermometer. Sixty degrees. A bit cool for a wet night but I’m not a duck. Good thing I didn’t let Pamela stay outside (not that I seriously considered it.) At least, there’s no thunder. Just the determined pelting of raindrops. Hope they got themselves under the shelter. Right. They’re ducks. They can handle wet. Go back to bed, Lori.
I did. And at 6:35 AM, woke up again. Very late by recent standards. The sun sparkled in its pretty hackneyed way. I grabbed my camera and a bowl of poultry pellets. Organic, of course.
I might have woken the girls up. They were resting, not quacking. And they were not under the canvas cover, naturally. They posed for a few wobbly snapshots then I fed and watered them, trying not to think too much about this scenario come December.
More importantly, it’s 6:49 AM, do I know where my coffee is?
Copyright 2012, Lori Fontanes
What the Ducks! 