ForbesOnTech

Wild Things and butterfly 101 for Second Graders-- San Diego Style.

OK, so I love most things natural: from playful skunks and other mustids to the local colony of gangster hummingbirds that pick on juvenile hawks.But caterpillars in my garden? not so much.

Having made that confession, I hastily admit to planting milk weed and other wild butterfly attractors in my back yard, far away from my vegetables. I mean, is there anything more abhorrent to your average gardener than an ugly green tomato caterpillar munching on the yellow flowers that would otherwise have turned into delicious one keelo grum plump French heirloom beefsteak tomatoes?

But there is a buterfly culture here in northern San Diego County that puts second graders in front of monarchs, yellowtail swallow butterflies and even mundane painted lady and yucca moths. I think that's a very good thing.  Thr buterfly program is headquartered in the nearby town of Encinitas. In it's near 20 year history, this program has turned out multipe generations of nature lovers here.

What's not to love about butterflies or a butterfly house?"

Here they can pet the caterpillars and a lot of them are very soft," Marriott said. In addition, there are caterpillar races, where children choose a particular caterpillar that they drop through a hole in a special box made with narrow lanes.

"They give them names, and scream 'Common' Fred!,' " he said. "It's a lot of fun."

"If you go to other butterfly houses, all you see is butterflies and there isn't a docent to explain things," he said. "Our main goal is to educate people about their life cycle and how they fit into our ecosystem."

The children also can hold out a slice of watermelon and watch the butterflies drink.

Close encounters of a natural kind

The program opens its doors on certain weekdays from April through November for field trips and is generally open to the public Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons in the summer. Admission fees of $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and $4 for children older than 3 go to underwrite nearly all of the costs of the program.

It's programs like this as well as the local White Sea Base nursery program that I vote for with my check book.

Besides the Encinitas Butterfly House has caterpillar races and those are almost as much fun as horse races. "Ride the wind, Fred. Show the world how fast a monarch butterfly caterpillar can go."-- Jim Forbes, 08/20/2008

Trying to Garden in Soil That's Been Compressed by Tons of Remodel Trash

For most of the gardening season this year, my best plot was rendered unusable by a  hulking construction debris box chock full of tons of lumber, plaster, concrete, and the detritus of our remodel.

            The debris box was hauled away, emptied and returned three times, to it’s spot over where for the last five years I’ve grown vegetables and been tormented by a clan of truly evil field voles.

            So when the debris box was finally removed a little more than a month ago I had feint hopes of getting at least one crop of tomatoes from the plot, and I sincerely believed that the local snakes would have wiped out the shallow burrowing voles. But when I got around to preparing the soil in the upper garden for planting, I quickly discovered the effects of tons of trash sitting in a metal box on what previously had been “perfectly balanced lose soil”. One week of using a pick and Maddox later, I was able to use my tiller to build two small rows for my last of the season French heirloom beefsteaks.

            How hard was the soil?  Well I’ve had to reset and sharpen the tines on my mighty Mantis two-cycle tiller and I’ve added 10 cubic feet of soil amendment to get the dirt back to a Ph level that’s conducive for tomatoes. And even after all that, four of my prized French beefsteak heirlooms, croaked within one week of going in the ground.

            On a whim I also planted Mad Max giant orange pumpkins in the just-reclaimed upper garden patch.  They took off right away, giving me just enough false hope to believe I might actually get something out of the beloved patch.

            And two weeks ago I discovered that the local vole and rattlesnakes were working in concert with the damn debris box to dash my hopes for produce in my upper garden this year.  

Unbeknownst to me, the voles and rattlers had signed a mutual non-aggression pack while living quite happily under the debris box. The net effect of this is that the voles now frolic in my garden, free of concerns about being injected with venom and subsequently eaten whole.

How was I to know that every vole in the county has an insatiable hunger for tender young pumpkin plants? Four plants in two weeks?

I surrender—until this winter during which season will have eradicated each of the little pests.

In the mean time, I have nearly two score tomato plants down in the lower garden, free of attacking rodents and later this evening. I may excavate and harvest the last of my Kennebec potatoes.

Of such small victories are smiles on a gardener’s’ face created.—Jim Forbes 07/20/2008.

When Your Best Made Plans Go Horribly Wrong--Miss Butterfly Meets Mr. Horned Toad

Sometimes your best intentions can have very bad repercussions.

Case in point: My love of wild things.

When I moved to my little mountain here in Escondido, one of the first things I noticed was a large population of Monarch butterflies flitting about my yard and hanging around a patch of milk weed at the base of my hedge in the front yard.

Seeing the Monarchs triggered two memories: First, Escondido was right in the path of the Monarch’s migration from Mexico to Monterey, CA; Second, I vaguely remembered learning that Monarchs were attracted to milkweed.

In the fullness of time, I started cultivating small clumps of milkweed, carefully transplanting them into one-gallon pots set along the walkway to my front yard as they matured And, it worked.

For the last several years, the milkweed has regularly hosted several colonies of Monarchs. This year has been the best so far. I’ve watched about 30 Monarchs make the transition from caterpillars to adult butterflies. Watching this process is  one of my ties to the natural world. And, I really enjoy having my coffee while I watch butterflies.

But this year I realized I had done something wrong. Very wrong! This morning I checked the milkweed pot by my patio and saw about five just-hatched butterflies drying their wings. So, I go in to the house and grab my coffee. But, when I come back, there is only one insect and there’s none flying around in the rose garden.

I glanced over at the base of the planter and saw a big fat horned toad with Monarch wings hanging out of his reptilian mouth. Swear to God, I think I saw him burp butterfly dust. The glutton!

Honest to God, I thought cultivating a plant that attracted Monarch butterflies would be a good thing. I didn’t know that I was setting up a cafeteria line for the local reptiles. There was something horribly wrong in my equation, but it’s just dark enough to make me chuckle.—Jim Forbes 07.01/2008.

here's What Happens When you have Untamed Water Presssure

Woops ,I think I may have a tad too much water pressure on the circuit down among the fruit trees. the sprinkler on the left is gear driven and lated 20 minutes before it blew its top. the one on the right, which  cost half as much as the larger sprinkler lasted all of seven minutes before it too blew its head off.  thank God Home Depot is only 4 miles away. i replaced these sprinklers with a Rabid oscillating sprinkler and now only open up my faucet half way. Everything is working well. High water pressure can be a good thing in the fire season, but I definitely have to put a regulator on the circuit down the hill. 120 pounds of pressure is a bit much.--Farmer Forbes 

Construction Debris Box and Portapotty Removed-- Huzzah the Remodel is Really Done!

Today will be a very good day for me.  The final phase of my remodel—new cabinets and a glass enclosure for my new tub and shower are in, marking the completion of the remodel we started seven months ago.

            The most difficult part of the remodel—living through the demolition of the eastern pary of my house here in Escondido to make room for aa fully self-sufficient in-law for MaForbes—was completed six weeks ago. The final phase/project was wrapped up yesterday afternoon.

            Sometime this morning I expect to see glorious rich brown earth that has hidden by construction debris box in mid December for the first time in 2008. The contractors’ portapotty will be removed at about the same time today.

            I’m going to celebrate by reopening my upper garden and tilling a 50 by 25-foot patch, and then planting two long rows of heirloom tomatoes and four or five melons as well as a couple of big pumpkin hybrids. I’ve got four rolls of quarters wrapped and set aside for my trip to the nursery and with just a little bit of luck my upper garden will be planted by Sunday.

            While the debris box has been sitting in the space where I’ve gardened for the last five years the voles have been quietly establishing their colony.  Voles are fecund, fast breeders, and my strategy is drown the suckers using my hose or use God’s own rodent eliminator-- weasels. I know this sounds hateful, but when it comes to my garden, it’s just me against the burrowing rodents.

            I also think I’ll buy a small stock tank and keep it filled with water out there. My reason? As long as they are prey/food, nearby if there are weasels on hand, they’ll come running for the combination of water and live chow. And nothing eliminates a garden full of gophers and evil voles faster than a mommy weasel and two hungry kits. Besides they’re highly amusing to watch.

            A battle between weasels and burrowing rodents or venomous serpents? There’s no reason to bet on the outcome. It’s a done deal.—Farmer Forbes with another how to attrract weasels to the garden strategy on 6/25/2008.

The Great Serpent Infestation of June 2008-- Road Runners Say "Meep, Meep,Thanks"

    It's been a wild week here at Rancho Bizarro. the temperature has hit 100-plus degrees four days running, the yellowtail fishing has been too fantastic to ignore and yesterday I discovered I had a genuine infestation of venomous serpents, of the noisy geometric pattern kind.

     My discovery of the phenom came as i was pulling weeds in the ice plants on the northern edge of my glorious rose garden. As i reached down to yank an errant dandelion I sensed movement to my left side.  What I glimpsed was a small rattler coiling with it's little tail raised high. I'm not someone who goes out of their way to kill rattlesnakes. In fact, i was raised to believe that they have an extremely important role in the  southern California ecosystem. As an avid gardener I appreciate rattlesnakes' appetite for gophers and voles. So, I grabbed my long handled hoe, draped the snake around its end and gently placed it in an overgrown field on the other side of my driveway.

     Going back to the task of weeding, I heard more rustling in the ice plants. Bingo, another small buzz tail captured and removed to the field. Two small --sub 18-inch--rattlesnakes by 10 AM makes me think a female rattler or two gave birth a week or so ago to babies near my house. Two more of about the same size as i worked down in my vegetable garden made me even more cautious.

    I think the local roadrunner colony appreciated my moving the snakes to the field. Riding my  ATV down to the street to pick up my mail, i saw one of  long legged birds that live on my mountain top striding down the road with a rattle snake hanging like spaghetti out of his beak.  I'm sorry for the rattle snake. But the image of ferocious road runner makes me smile.

    OK, I'm over being sorry about the little  buzz tails demise. For now.

     It's a long way from Escondido to Silicon Valley and somewhere when I was southbound on I-5 moving back to Southern California, I shed a layer of tough skin and morphed back into Jim the Naturalist.  I think the transformation happened somewhere around Kettleman City after I passed three miles of apricot orchards.--Jim Forbes 06/26/2008

My Tomato Cages Aren't Plumb or Level, But I Don't Care-- Dancing Through Another Gardenining Season

The 100-foot patch of land where I normally garden here at Rancho Bizarro has been taken over by a huge construction debris box and a portable toilet for the contractors working on my two-day-from-completion remodel, so I’ve found new dirt to grow things in.

            Well it’s not exactly new dirt, judging from my experience tilling and cultivating the 80 by 20-foot patch in front of my house.  To be quite truthful, I’d have to classify it as dried hard-packed Triassic adobe. In one place the damn dirt was so hard I wiped out the teeth on my Mantis tiller. That really bummed me out.

            But I’m not a quitter, so I went to plan B: chopping ground like a mad man with a long handled mattock.  What the hell, I don’t really have anything else to do and I’m not about to sit out a gardening season because of a little thing like a massive remodel. The good news is that I’m about half way through the 2008 gardening season and all my neighbors have gotten baskets of fresh beefsteak tomatoes, fresh Italian broccoli and bags of fresh Kennebec potatoes.

            I’ve survived two massed attacks by voles and gophers and convinced the local bird population that it’s less worrisome to take the free food in my bird feeder than it is to dig up seeds I’ve planted.

            Two weeks ago I caged up my last crop of tomatoes.  My older brother, Saint Chuck, happened to be down for the day and I was showing him my garden, somewhat proudly.  So St.Chuck (who in real life is an accomplished land surveyor who teaches that trade to apprentices here in Southern California) looks at the cages cracks a frosty smile and says, “Why aren’t they plumb and level?”

            There never seems to be a pick ax around when you want it, damn it!

            I have to admit it: my steel wire cages are in their third season and have seen better days; furthermore, I really don’t pay a lot of attention to how they’re set, when I put them in.

            But to someone who checks and certifies the alignment of support girders in multi-story buildings, I suppose everything should be plumb and level at the top. Needless to say St Chuck went home with only a few beefsteaks that evening.

            I’m not a linear gardener. And truthfully, I don’t care a whit if my tomato plants are aligned perfectly, or if my rows of beets wander  left or right.

            I do love gardening, feeling the back of my neck grow a little redder every day I yank a bucket of weeds from my patch. And, I’m a full contact gardener, so I get to smell rich earth as the year cycles through. My gardening clothes are stained brown from rich San Diego soil, my fingers are dirt-stained and calloused, but I’ve found an avocation that keeps my busy, exercising my afflicted left hand. And at the end of the day, I find I have a little more fine motor control. That’s part of why I love gardening and why I don’t quit.

            Besides when I get discouraged by crops that don’t respond to my husbandry, I can a voice in the back of my mind, quietly speaking across five decades, “ Now, Jimmy, don’t be a quitter, and take time to enjoy what you do.”

Lordy me, it’s been 50 years this week since that voice was stilled, but I still hear it from time to time down here on perfect and imperfect days alike, in the nurturing soil of rural Southern California.—Jim Forbes 06/12/2208.

Remodeling Completed, It's time for Landscaping-- Back to Blogging.

Sorry for the absence. For the last three weeks, I’ve been swamped closing down the house in Azusa where I was raised and getting MaForbes settled in her new digs here at my house.

I’ve been very surprised by how much she likes living here and how much I appreciate the company. The only glitch I’ve had in the whole process was having  to install and removed a stacked washer dryer combo that was dead on arrival.

But now even that is a memory and life here at Rancho Bizarro is on an even keel.  The final part of my massive remodel is my responsibility. For the last ten days I’ve been knee deep in landscaping the extension to my house where MaForbes lives and the front of my house.

Four years of gardening here has made me appreciate how hard it us to break hard packed clay. But even my gardens left me unprepared for how difficult it’s been to break the soil where my new planters are going in.  The bright ray of sunshine to this problem appeared this morning when I stopped by a local discount tool store—Harbor Freight—and came across a package of three large diameter auger bits with ends that I thought would fit into my cordless drill.

            So there I was this morning drilling eight to 12-inch deep holes in the clay.  I lightly watered the plot with its approximately 100 holes, let it sit until this evening and fired up my Mantis two-cycle tiller. To my surprise, the mantis flew through the plot and my flowerbeds are now ready for the four cubic yards of “Tierra jardin” (enriched garden soil) that was delivered this afternoon.

I have about 60 plants to sink in the soil sometime tomorrow, including star jasmine, the smell of which I love outside my bedroom window.

My remodel is now done and I can enjoy a long soak in my Jacuzzi bath tub. Whopee!-- Farmer Forbes 06/07/2008.

Perfect Trim on the Boat, Yellowtail and Fun Loving Seals-- Your Sense of Humor is as Important as Your Bait.

There is a natural rhythm to offshore fishing in a small boat that resonates with something that’s deep in my Southern California soul. It begins with the slow departure from the launch ramp and but rapidly builds as I leave the basin where the bait barge is anchored and then purr down the right hand side of the channel at the entrance to Mission Bay in San Diego and take a line for the leeward kelp beds that are just visible beyond the waves crashing on the breakwater.

            Going out of the harbor, I gently feed more power to the boat as I slowly push my throttle forward. But where the music really begins for me is when I pick up the incoming swells, kick my outboard up to about 2500 rpm and trim up as I leave the breakwater. Without any trouble, I find exactly the right combination of power and angle on my outboard and the magic suddenly happens; my boat is in perfect trim and I surge effortlessly along the edge of the kelp paddies under a perfect San Diego morning sun.

            Kelp cruising requires attention to detail.  I look for bait breaking the surface in clear parts of the beds or diving seabirds. Both of those things are signs that my favorite sport fish—yellowtail—are feeding below. Once I see evidence that the yellowtail are present, I unhook my trolling lure from the eye on my rod and stream the artificial bait about 100 yards behind my boat, as I chop the power to my outboard to about 1,000 rpm.

            For reasons that are unclear to me, I haven’t developed a preference for using lures or bait. Each has advantages.  If I see other boaters hooking up using lures I troll slowly up the kelp beds and keep one open for the sharp movement of my rod signaling a hit. The sound or sight of line spooling off my reel wakes me up faster than a cup of Yuban and is cause for me to walk quickly to the back of my boat to pickup my rod and reel to see if I have a fish on, or more often, have merely snagged a piece of kelp.

            Over the years, I’ve caught a lot of kelp. But even a four-foot piece of kelp has its purpose in my world. It gets reeled aboard and dropped into a bucket that collects things I add to my compost heap.

            Fishing is a past time of that rewards patient observation. Once I make the turn south of LaJolla and head back down the kelp beds towards San Diego, I keep my eye on the kelp for baitfish breaking the surface.  That’s the cue for me to unlimber my seven-foot rod with it Ambassadeur 9000 bait casting reel and impale a lively green sardine or wiggly anchovy on a sharp hook and then gently lob it into the kelp to swim unencumbered by weight. With any luck I’ll get a hit with 15 minutes as I bob about the ocean letting the bait swim through the kelp.

            The feel of a lightning quick hit on my bait and hearing the line spool off my reel is what keeps me out on the water. I don’t muscle fish to the side of my boat. I prefer to let them run and tire as I slowly keep pressure on the fish and recover line on my reel. If it’s meant to be, I soon glimpse color out beyond the point where my line enters the green gray Pacific inshore waters.

            If I’m fishing alone, I’ll take a moment to identify the species of fish and then reach down with my short handled gaff if I want to take it. Yellowtail are keepers, so are barracudas and big sand bass.

            But the one thing that can ruin an otherwise perfect experience is to sense something large cutting through the water, then hear a big exhale and witness the slashing attack of a seal ripping a 20 pound yellowtail off your line and then swimming happily away to enjoy its fresh hamachi.

            There are days when I really hate seals! But at the end of my time on the water I can’t help but smile at an animal that’s figured out how to enjoy the benefits of someone else’s luck in catching fish in the morning sunlight of a perfect day on the Pacific.—Jim Forbes m06/02/2008/

Organic Gardening And Celebrating My Returning Weasels

Monday of this week, I was in garden heaven. The noontime temp out in the vegetable patch was right around 100 degrees. I picked four ripe tomatoes and a double handful of broccoli. It’s months like this that makes me glad I live in San Diego, where you can have a garden that produces table crops abundantly on a near year-round basis.

            The only limitations to my gardening are those imposed by my commitment to sustainable organic techniques.  I use no petroleum- or manufactured chemical additives of any kind and thus far the results of my four year commitment to this type of gardening have been very good.

            Also, I don’t grow Frankenfruit produce and limit myself to seeds from organic suppliers—most of which adhere to open pollination standards. This means in most years I’ve used $.88 bag steer manure for fertilizer, crushed oyster shells for calcium and ash from burned hardwood for potash. I also screen and fine my soil by hand at the start of the gardening season, carefully pulling out grubs, Jerusalem crickets and the like and putting them in a bucket for the neighborhood scrub jays and mocking birds, who seem to delight in my method of soil prep.

Once my garden if established I revert to Tom Sawyer-like pest control.  In middle age, I’ve managed to resurrect the ability to catch lizards by the diving and scooping technique of my long-ago youth. While my method of pest control may seem funny to some, I like using natural things to get rid of garden pests. I just wish the local ‘zard population had a taste for the slugs that are gobbling up my potato vine leaves. When bugs overwhelm the ‘zards I do use organic pesticides; a Canola oil based product and the old stand by of a mild soapy water and nicotine.  I’ve found that slugs really don’t like nicotine and for now this seems to be working on my potato patch.

Another pest control measure I’m using this year are rows of tobacco and burley plants on three sides of my garden. Anecdotally, this seems to work very well—providing you keep the tobacco four to five feet away from unvaccinated tomato plants.  So far this year, I’ve not seen a single white fly or horned worm in the garden. And, the tobacco (mostly Havana, but I also grow a Virginia hybrid) looks quite attractive.

One final thought on pest control. The weasels are back so that means that the gophers and voles that routinely feast on my vegetable roots have changed tense; going from “are alive” to “were alive, but have been consumed.” Damn I love watching the two weazettes gallop through the garden, even if they do occasionally eat my alligator lizards. And, like last year, on of the chick weasels appears to be nursing—always a good thing for a wild thing making a slow comeback.

Late last year, after talking to an agricultural biologist I met at my favorite nursery, I learned the secret to attracting weasels. The California long-tailed weasel really wants a supply of fresh water—which exists in my garden in the form of a 120 year-old hand made stone and cement watering trough set amidst my rose garden. And proof that the weasels like it can be seen once a week or so when I find a desiccated rattlesnake carcass at the bottom of the tank, and little weasel foot prints in the ground on the ground around the tank.

Wild weasels in a garden;  good. Rattlesnakes amongst my hybrid tea rose bushes;not so good.

Yeah Weazes!

One of the new crops I experimented with this year is an Early Girl-like tomato developed in Siberia. Although its fruits aren’t as large as an Early Girl, the Siberian tomatoes are sweet and seem to bear in about 45 to 50 days.

As my plants bear and die back, I uproot them and toss them to the part of may garden that “I’ll plant in June. I turn the decomposing plant material into the soil in the hope of raising the nitrogen content of my garden and aerating the clay-based soil.

Although it was hot early in the week, it’s raining cats and dogs now. And the temperature is dropping. I just checked my trusty barometer and saw that the pressure has dropped two-tenths of a point so I might just tent my tomatoes and potatoes in case it hails tonight.  Another year, Another garden. Jim Forbes, from rural San Diego County on 5/23/2008.