Soy vey is mir
March 6, 2006
Dang birds, eating my beans! If you’re going to kill a sprouting soy bean plant, the least you could do is eat the whole bean. Note to self: Next time make a scarecrow.
Tomorrow I return to the Netherlands. Hope the snows will have cleared…
technorati tags: allotment, kitchen garden>
debra at 23:28 | | post to del.icio.us
Aha! Once, a number of years back, I had a similar problem. Quail were snippin’ the sprouted tops off some cantaloupe. Grrr! Next time, I placed a little plastic basket—the kind we get strawberries in back here in California—over the sprouting cantaloupe until it was big enough to fend for itself. Nothing like growin’ more deliceous cantaloupe than you can safely eat.
Comment by dad — March 7, 2006 @ 1:37
Good tip Dad, I’ll be sure to do that on my cantaloupe and gala melon crop. But these are rows of alfalfa, mustard, buckwheat, red night kidney, adzuki, and soy, soy, soy. AMBRASS! Last year, KvR once put up nets to keep the birds off her stuff and ended up catching a few inadvertently. We’ll see how much bean still comes up. So far it looks like my best bet may be to over-sow. Which I did. For no apparent reason at the time, I just couldn’t stop myself and kept thinking, ‘All seed carriers go overboard, and so shall I’.
It’s one big teaming ball of nature down there. Way more animal life than I’m used to. (Will have to work on getting used to that.)
My neighbours are Muslim and therefore… drink beer in private. They had disposed of some half-empty bottles of beer at the end of the field flanking the allotments (different concept of public space) and mice found their way into the bottles, drank the beer and drowned. All of this going on behind my back of course.
Yesterday I got the bright idea to put some of them thar beer bottles on some sticks at the end of my bean rows, in the hopes of scaring the birds away when the sticks sway around in the abundant wind. I was pouring out what I thought was the remains of the old beer when… IIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKS, on more than one occasion a half dissolved dead mouse slithered and glugged out of the beer bottle, accompanied by a smell that you would expect to go along with that scenario. Yuckus and Yickus! The mice were so decomposed that I thought they were massive slugs for the first few, and then I ran into one that was still recognizable. Half a day later, I’m still nauseous at the thought.
Getverdemme!
I need to share this story with the world in order to get it out of my system.
YICK!
Comment by debra — March 7, 2006 @ 4:10
seems to me that beer in a bottle is a failry efficient way to kill ‘em off those mice-monsters! I know for a fact that beer is a fab way of catching sluggs/snails in the summer; just dig an almost empty can of beer a bit in the soil, they can’t resist it tumble in and get drunk. Than you collect them and put them in a bowl and feed them to the birds who’ll in turn be saturized and not eat seedlings anymore. Well, at least that’s what I’d like to think.
Comment by kristi van Riet — March 7, 2006 @ 8:20
Ktje, you’re disgusting! Thanks for the excellent idea.
Comment by Debra — March 7, 2006 @ 19:43
I recently visited a farm with a similar issue. The room where I would be eating as an intern featured dead mice all over.
Beer- now that’s an interesting mouse trap.
Comment by matt — March 13, 2006 @ 6:34