July brought an invasion of several billion plant-eating grasshoppers, pictured here sunning themselves as they did each the morning on the north garden fence, prior to embarking on another day's hard work of eating everything we had planted in the garden, (including all of the leaves and buds off of the $500 worth of new fruit and nut trees we'd planted in April). "Thanks Linc and Jeanne, we're hoppingly happy!" they said, wriggling their thoraxes at us for emphasis. "I hate you." Linc replied, as he spread out another day's supply of NOLO Bait (an organic, grasshopper biological control agent that appears to have been completely ineffective). We watched in disbelief as they ate every bean, squash, melon plant that came up, then started in on the kale, lettuce, raspberries and blackberries, rhubarb, onions.... We now know what a true insect plague looks like.
We emailed a few friends and let them know we were thinking of trying to put the cover on our greenhouse, and were pleased to have a small crowd gather, swarm up onto the frame like kids on a jungle gym, and despite some wind, pull the cover on and cinch it down in a matter of one or two hours of fun work. Thanks everyone!
Now there's just one problem. The beds that we're prepping are in the west half of the greenhouse area, and the greenhouse itself is on the east half. Which means that before winter, we're going to have to un-anchor it, and roll it westward on the rails to the newly planted beds of winter greens. More on that in the fall...
The chickens, living their mobile RV lifestyle, received the addition of a new dust bath trailer (small yellow tented trailer in the photo above). The old mobile dust bath was a blue plastic kiddie pool that tended to collect water, turning their dust bath into a chicken mud wrestling pit. Fun for the chickens I guess, but the eggs were getting pretty dirty with all of their muddy feet running in and out of the nesting boxes after the latest henny-penny mud wrestling bout, so we put a roof over the new bath house and the mud wrestling stopped.
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