Pear Season

 

This year I got a somewhat good pear harvest.  I mentioned previously that one tree produced somewhat well one year.  Many years they fall prey to late freezes.  Fireblight has been a problem--very much so this year.  I was able to keep more or less ahead of it through pruning and spraying through June.  I'll be more diligent about dormant- and early-season spraying this winter and next spring.

Both Kieffers produced well this year, but squirrels swarmed the trees.  In late July and early August, I saw squirrels running across the grass with pears in their mouths--not good. The pears were still nowhere close to ripe.  They basically stripped one tree bare--the one closest to some cover.

They attacked the other one, too, but I did get about 20 pounds off of it.  I picked them at the end of September, when they were falling to the ground.  Those I canned.  As was my practice the last time I did this, I did not peel them.  I just cut them right down the middle after removing the stem, then used the knife to cut out the core.  Then I halved the halves, and in most cases, cut them again, dividing each pear into eight pieces.

 I have previously noted that I don't usually get as much in each jar as advertised by sites such as the NCHFP at UGA.  The UGA site says that raw pack yields poor quality, but I like the result.  In one of my previous pear posts, I mentioned that Jill Winger got good results with raw-packing unpeeled pears (she didn't use any sugar, however; I used sugar at a rate of 1:3, i.e., 1 cup sugar per 3 cups water.

 I cut up 16 pounds of pears, getting 13 pounds after trimming.  Those went into  12 quarts and 1 pint, requiring about 19.5 cups of water, 3.5 cups of sugar.  I processed them for 30 minutes in an atmospheric steam canner.

 

That required a couple of canner loads.  In all, the process took about three hours, which is better than I used to be capable of.

There were some additional pears on the tree that I stashed in the refrigerator; I may try to do more preserves.  But the main canning duty for this year for the pear harvest is done.

They also dehydrate well, but not this year... 

 

Snakes

Every summer, I find snakes in the chicken tractors.  So far, the only ones I have seen are black rat snakes.  They're fairly ubiquitous here, and since they're black. in the gloom at the back of the tractor, they're hard to see.  They can be long--three feet or more.

Usually they're  in the grass, and I see them when I move the tractor.  This year, they're proving to be more assertive--and numerous.  I have found two in a tractor on a couple of occasions.  Sometimes they have even been in the nest box.

The one pictured above was in the Delawares' tractor.  The egg at the top left is a ceramic one, but you can see that the snake has eaten a real egg--look for the bulge just behind the S-curve near the head.  I don't know how intimidating this is to hens that are trying to lay, but it is also true that on days I find snakes, I find fewer eggs.  The birds are either holding off or the snake is eating them.   This is obviously sub-optimal from my perspective, although it works out well for the snake.  An egg is an easier food source to exploit than rodents, who have to be caught and killed.  I don't think they pose any danger to adult birds; although they might be able to kill one, the birds are far too large to eat.

However, the roosters have a role to play, and they aren't stepping up.  I have never seen any indication that the roosters care about the snakes.  Earlier this week, a snake slithered out of the tractor when I opened the door, and the rooster, who was nearby, glanced at it and kept walking--he stepped on the snake, in fact, not to try to restrain or attack it, but just because it was in his way.  Another rooster looked at a snake that was slithering away in the grass, but made no aggressive moves. 

Snake sightings seem to be grouped, where I'll find a snake (maybe the same one) in a tractor several times on consecutive days, then no snakes for weeks or months.  It's a fairly low-level problem, but one without an obvious solution.  A tractor will always have potential points of entry that a stationary coop might be able to be proofed against.

 

Putting Up Dry Beans

 As I have mentioned before, beans store best in an oxygen-free environment. Buying beans in bulk may work well to hold down costs.

But they obviously can't be stored in the bag for the amount of time it will take most people to go through them, and storing them in a bucket or tub will still allow them to age while they're being slowly used up. Packing them in mylar is fine, but once they're opened, they will start to age again--and they may have aged while in storage.

Therefore, when I buy a big bag, I pack it in five-pound increments.  Five pounds is about right for a gallon-sized mylar bag.

Some mylar bags have a zip lock, but all can be sealed with a heat source (and it makes sense to seal them on top of zipping them, too).  I use a curling iron (it has to be set on high to adequately melt the mylar for a seal).

A five-gallon bucket will hold about four five-pound bags of beans (maybe five with a little bit of work).  A bucket provides extra protection against pests and damage to the mylar bags while they're in storage (although mice can get through a bucket wall--nothing short of a metal can is truly pest-proof).

 

I don't know how long beans will keep in mylar.  I don't plan to hang onto them for too long before opening them up, but as I've mentioned previously, researchers have found that they seem to keep for up to 32 years and possibly longer.  With rotation, it should be possible to keep the storage time well under that in most circumstances.

 

Fruit Fly Trap

 Fortunately, this rarely happens.  But I recently had a fruit fly outbreak when I tossed something in the kitchen trash that a fruit fly was able to use to start to establish a population.  One buzzing around the kitchen barely rates notice, but two or three gets one's attention.

This happened once before when I was house-sitting for someone during the summer.  I had some bananas back at home, and when I returned, I found the same thing--a bunch of flies in the kitchen.

There are commercial fly traps, but I decided to try something I'd read about.  It's simple: cut a plastic bottle's neck off, invert it, and put some bait in the bottom.

 

 

I used apple cider vinegar as bait with a drop of dish soap.  I had experience using water with dish soap to drown Japanese beetles.  The vinegar is how it became obvious that I had fruit flies to begin with: I use it in the rabbits' water, and whenever I unscrewed the bottle, I immediately had flies buzzing around me.  As it turns out, it's fortunate that I used the vinegar instead of a piece of banana peel.

Some sites that describe the process for making a bottle trap like this suggest that the flies won't be able to escape, because they'll run up the sides and find their way blocked.  I found that they were able to enter and exit the bottle pretty easily, which was disappointing.  So I made another trap almost immediately out of a two-liter bottle to try to make it a little harder on them.

However, then I held the smaller bottle trap up and looked at it from below.

It was catching a fair  number of fruit flies, but some that flew into the bottle and never touched the vinegar were able to fly back out.  Over the course of a couple of days, the two traps caught more flies than I realized were present.  At that point I tossed them and put out a new trap, which caught zero.  I eradicated the population, or I at least got rid of all of the ones that were attracted to the vinegar.

This was easy, cheap, and effective.  A triple win.

 

Oxygen Absorbers

 As noted previously, sometimes bad things happen with stored food over time.  Food in a sealed container that has oxygen in it, as well, can suffer from infestation and oxidation / deterioration. Freezer burn is another example of this.  So it is best when storing things for more than a short time to vacate the oxygen.

Food Saver-style vacuum sealers do this, and there are also jar attachments for wide mouth and regular mouth canning jars.  I don't know offhand what concentration of oxygen they can reduce the interior of a jar to, but they're a decent approach. They may not drop it enough to prevent insect eggs from hatching.

Another approach is to use oxygen absorbers. They are sold in various sizes to accommodate different containers.  US Emergency Supply has a very useful chart on this. In addition to canning jars, mylar bags and buckets can be used (the bags do not need to be kept in a bucket, but a bucket needs a bag in order to store food--BYU researchers found that oxygen levels could not be reliably maintained at a low enough level using a bucket alone, probably because of seal leakage).

There are plenty of resources online showing the use of mylar bags.  In addition to oxygen absorbers, dry ice can be used to drive out the oxygen.  That's a more old-school approach that fills the container with CO2 rather than sucking the oxygen out of the air and into the iron powder in the absorber.  The Rose Red Homestead has a video that demonstrates both approaches.

When exposed to air, oxygen absorbers begin to react.  It does not necessarily happen very fast, but it does happen: so opening a package of them doesn't render them all useless within two minutes unless sealed back up, but they do need to be put in either their final destination or in another airtight container quickly (a canning jar that is then vacuum-sealed is ideal).

Some oxygen absorber packages have an oxygen indicator:

The Oxyeye is pink when it hasn't been exposed to oxygen, and it soon turns purple after opening the package (or after the package leaks and allows the concentration inside to exceed 0.05%).

One caveat is that in time, the indicator will turn a faded pink, looking almost like it did when unexposed:

The above indicator is a few months old; I just clipped it to the refrigerator to see what would happen.

A usable oxygen indicator will feel like a pillow stuffed with powder, which it is when it's in its unexposed state. If it feels rigid and crumbly, it's probably no longer able to absorb oxygen.  Some vendors repackage absorbers into smaller quantities.  The repackaged absorbers are quite likely to be at least partially depleted in this process, and may be completely ruined. While some oxygen reduction is better than none, levels have to drop below one percent to prevent insect eggs from hatching.  With functioning absorbers and mylar bags, this is achievable.

The above picture shows some pinto beans, packed into gallon-sized mylar bags (five pounds in each). After a day, a noticeable vacuum effect has sucked the package down around the contents as the oxygen has been removed.

After my infestation episode, I'm trying to put my wheat into mylar, even though wheat doesn't necessarily need oxygen-free storage for quality purposes over a relatively short time frame. Hopefully the day of weevils will not be repeated.

Dark Fishing Spiders

 Outside I have a lot of wolf spiders, and on rare occasion I see one inside.  Sometimes they can be large.  Back at my old house, I recall sometimes shining my flashlight into the back yard; because of the angle of the light to the slope leading away from the house, the grass would be filled with brilliant little gem-like reflections of the wolf spider eyes.  Not always--but sometimes--particularly in late summer.

Wolf spiders are not troublesome, and they perform a good service in hunting insects.

Dark fishing spiders, on the other hand, are a bit of a different issue.  They're much larger.  I had never seen one before moving to my new house, and I've seen two or three in the house over the course of three years.

Their size can be attention-grabbing.  This is the biggest one I've seen, and it was not a welcome sight--I don't really care how many bugs it can hunt.  Something like this won't work in the house.

I go after spiders in the house routinely, mainly because if they set up a web, their droppings will soon litter the floor.  I don't always remove them immediately upon sight, but do try to keep up.  I don't see all that many, but one variety (not wolf or fisher) is relatively common.  While I might let some slide for a day or two, this one required immediate attention.

Below is a picture in better light after I dumped the body outside.

 

While one could argue it's not necessarily unattractive, relatively few people would probably like to have something like this running loose in the house.  The few who might like that would probably also be comfortable with an uncaged tarantula inside (some people have been known to do that; it was even something of a fad back in the 1980s...)

Muscadine Harvest, 2021

 I have a muscadine trellis with six plants.  They have been in the ground for several years but had been growing rather slowly, root-hog-or-die style.  Last year I harvested a few from my Ison muscadine vine, and one or two from a couple of the others.  Then last winter I did some aggressive pruning and set them up for a good crop (I hoped).

In early August, the crop was looking very good.  I started picking in mid-August, and have pulled about 10 pounds off so far, mostly from the Ison.  Ison is listed by Ison's, the nursery that developed it and where I bought my vines, as an early variety.  Two others are early-mid season, Darlene and Summit.  I have been picking Summit for a while now--its yield will be about what the Ison was last year, a couple of pounds--and Darlene is just coming into harvest now, in mid-September.  The other variety I will harvest some off of this year is Late Fry, which should be ready in October sometime.

So far I am not doing anything with them other than eating fresh and freezing for further fresh eating.  At some point I might try to do something else with them.  If they continue to grow well, I'll have ... a lot... to deal with in good years.

I'm seeing some fruit flies and yellow jackets around the Ison now that they're ripening, and I have also seen a stink bug or two.  Overall, however, pest pressure has been minimal.  Hopefully it stays like that.

Infestation!

 Last fall I got some bulk wheat.  It can be pretty cheap when bought in 25- or 50-pound bags.  I got a 25-pound bag of red and white (each).  I have been using the red, but hadn't gotten into the white yet.  Sigh.

I put the wheat into some used PETE pretzel barrels, then just put them on the shelf, where they sat untouched for about eight months.

Then today I noticed this:

At first glance, I thought it might be mold, meaning the wheat hadn't been dry when it went into the containers.  But no, as you can see, it's not mold at all.

My apologies for the small, dark, grainy ultra closeup.  My wheat is infested with weevils, who are having a great time in the pretzel barrels.  I had heard about this being a possibility, and various sites warn about it, but I hadn't had it happen with me before.  I have been buying whole berries for years, and they often sit on the shelf for several months before being used up.

I'll obviously have to deal with this.  Oxygen absorbers are recommended for long-term food storage; the removal of oxygen slows the deterioration of the food.  However, dropping O2 levels below one percent for several days also kills eggs and bugs.  I didn't use oxygen absorbers for this wheat, obviously.  Another solution (mentioned by the site linked above) is freezing. The red is fine.  But all three containers of white wheat are... alive.  But not for long.

Muscadines and Figs

For the first time, I'm getting some muscadines.  I've planted six vines (two had to be replanted when the first died).  They have been in the ground for almost three years now, but this will be the first year I'll get more than one or two grapes per plant.  The biggest crop this year is on my Ison vine, and it is the one that is ripening first:

It's only going to be big compared to previous years.  The Ison looks like it has a couple of pounds' worth on it.  The Late Fry has maybe one pound; some of the others have a couple of grapes as in previous years.

I've also picked some figs.  I have yet to get a single fig off of a plant installed by me--actually, I have yet to have one planted by me live very long, a story for another day--but there's an old fig tree planted by the previous owner that I'm getting some off of this year.  There were two originally, but ambrosia beetles attacked one and I took it out.  The other one has probably been producing every year, but I haven't gotten many off of it--as I'm learning, the ripe ones are quickly attacked by wasps, ants, and June bugs.

The harvest from the fig tree is likewise pretty modest--there are many more that are too high for me to reach or that have ripened and been turned into bug food--but it's nice to have some (I got more than the picture shows; that's just one days' worth).  I'm going to guess it's a Celeste fig, but that's only a guess.

I also have apples and pears pending...

Ants in the Plants

A few weeks ago, I brought some of the plants in my office home.  I soon  noticed a few very small ants walking around on top of the tool box where one umbrella plant was sitting.  I don't know what kind they are.  As I have noted previously, I have had the most success with ants when I've used bait.  I still have some Advion packed away in a box somewhere, but I had a tube of Optigard readily available.

I've had mixed results with Optigard.  Sometimes ants just walk by it; othertimes they go after it immediately, like the picture in the previous post showed.  This time they were initially pretty indifferent. 

They walked right by and around the spots of bait.  After a few minutes, an ant tried it, and was soon joined by some others.  They didn't take much, but I don't know how many were in the plant.  I didn't get a large number coming out of the soil when I watered it, like I have seen before with other colonized pots.

However, the baiting was at least partly successful: about three days later, the top of the filing cabinet had a number of dead ants on it.

The Optigard worked, although I had the same issue mentioned previously: it seems to be prone to separation, with the first thing coming out of the tube being close to syrup in consistency.  That's okay for a flat surface like the filing cabinet, but not so good for a vertical one like a wall.

Murine Recidivism

Trigger warning: this post discusses ways to trap mice and contains homicide scene photos.

My current house is older than the previous one I was living in, and it has a crawlspace (the other one was on a slab).  I'm not exactly sure where all of the gaps are, but mice can get into the house with little apparent difficulty.  When I was remodeling the place it was largely empty, and I was surprised to see mouse sign in the house in the fall and winter.

The picture is overexposed and out of focus, but clearly shows a mouse running around in what would become the master bedroom.  In the background, along the wall, is a spring trap baited with peanut butter that was never of any interest...that was my first (and unsuccessful) attempt at eliminating them.

Also in the background you can see long boxes: those contained blinds.  I had to replace one that the mice got into before installation; it/they snipped a bunch of the cords for use in a nest.

I then upped my game.  Maybe the peanut butter was no good the first time (I assume mice wouldn't like old rancid peanut butter any more than humans would; maybe it wasn't fresh--I got some single-serving PB containers to haul up to the house before I was living there and didn't try it on my own to see how good it was).  I got some Mini T-Rex mousetraps  (the link takes you to Shawn Woods's YouTube channel; he knows more about mousetraps than I ever will).  I got a 12-pack from Do-It-Yourself Pest Control.  The traps have mostly proven effective.  I also have set a number of Victor Tin Cat live catch mousetraps (I like the ones with see-through lids, although some have alleged the mice can chew through the plastic and escape).  I have continued to use peanut butter for bait; it does eventually go bad but seems to be palatable for some time if fresh when deployed.  Mice also like it.

I have a number of each kind of trap set out, and can go months with no mice.  Then all of a sudden, I'll get a spate of captures in one of the live catch traps.  I can catch mice in T-Rex traps in quick succession, too, but the streaks are more of a problem with the live catch traps.  Last December, I had a mouse in the same trap every morning for about five days in a row.  You can see where this is going...

I would release the mice far from the house--in some cases over 100 yards away on the other side of the road in front of my house.  Mostly I have caught deer mice.  They are supposed to have a range of about 0.5 hectares, aka 1.25 acres; a circle 262 feet in diameter is all the farther they should travel.  I thought.  You can see where this is going...

The spate of December captures ended when I released a mouse on the last day and inadvertently killed it. It started running back toward the house and I blocked it with my foot; it ran around the block and I tried to block it again, coming down on top of it by mistake.  So that was the end of that mouse and the end of the break-ins.  I began to wonder if I had a recidivism problem.

The next time I caught a mouse in a live catch trap was not long ago.  I had put one in the attic (baited with pecans) and one morning heard insistent tapping sounds, which were the mouse pushing against the box trying to get out.  I released it on the other side of the road.  A few days later I caught one in a different live catch trap and before releasing it, marked it with a magenta paint marker.  I drew a line or two on its fur and the mark wasn't very apparent, so I marked it more heavily on its left haunch, then released it and chased it into the undergrowth on the other side of the road.

Three days later I found this by the water heater.

When I took it outside, I flipped it over and saw this:

Two observations: First, it was the mouse I had caught before and marked.  You can see red streaks on its fur.  Second, I obviously caused a big problem with the heavier marking.  The mouse pulled out its fur.  My bad.  At any rate, the return of the mouse was disheartening.

It's even worse than I thought.  A mere 100 yards in no way gets it done.  I didn't read the above-linked article carefully enough.  It notes that, "Individuals that biologists have marked and then displaced have returned to their nests, on traveling 3.2 km (2 mi) in two days."  Two miles?!

This means the options are kill traps only or relocation far from my house.  I'm not averse to the latter; I can easily dump the mice out 10 miles from home.

Another option is poison, which I'm not wild about using.  I'd have to combine it with the live-catch traps, because rodents that eat poison bait and then leave the bait station to die are hazardous to predators. Compared to all of this, the kill trap is quite humane.

Another Ant-Baiting Episode

It looks like ants have taken up residency in one of my Jerusalem artichoke pots.  I noticed the ant trail, and also saw that when I watered the pot they'd come surging out of the soil.  I tried placing bait along their trail into the pot, but it was an old tube of Optigard and it had a fair amount of leakiness to it--there was some gel but also some liquid.  The ants didn't mind and rapidly formed up to get whatever they could.

There's still some activity in the pot, so whatever I did didn't take them all out.  I may try again later.

Lynx Spiders on the Jerusalem Artichokes

I've mentioned before that I have some Jerusalem artichokes I'm trying out.  Because of dire posts from other bloggers like this one, I have been growing them in pots.  I actually haven't actually gotten around to eating any yet.

This year I had a few come up in one pot--another variety whose name I forget didn't thrive and never came back--and I planted another one.  I got everything from Oikos, which seems to have the best selection I've found anywhere.

I think what I have growing are Blue Eye and Gute Gelbe, but I'm not sure.  I went for tubers that were relatively smooth and without branches, figuring these would be easy to clean.  The blogger above indicated that some say you should leave some of the dirt attached to reduce flatulence, but ... no.

I've got a decent--maybe too decent--crop this year.  The survivors did well, and so did the new ones.  I didn't get them into the pot quickly enough, so there was some mold in the bag when I opened them.  I didn't know if they'd survive at all, but they did.  I'm definitely wary of putting them in the ground with no boundaries; I can believe that they'd rapidly expand their territory.

A few things I've noticed this year:  aphids adore them.  Both varieties have been heavily-hit by aphids.  The new type is showing no signs of blooming, but the survivor variety did form bulbs--most of which were eaten by something before opening.  One bloom is open now.  Both types have resident green lynx spiders.  They seem to be doing a decent job on the aphids, or maybe the aphids are just disappearing due to other factors.

The spiders fattened themselves on bugs for a while, then one of them made an egg sac.  It was amazing to me how much her abdomen shrank.  She currently seems to be just guarding the eggs.  The one on the blooming plant probably went somewhere else to lay eggs, and vanished about the same time.

This fall I plan to harvest the tubers, then decide where to take things next.

Ants

There are all kinds of ants in north Georgia.  The most notorious are fire ants, but Argentine, pavement, odorous house, carpenter, and other types are also here.  We don't have ghost ants, thankfully.  We also do not have crazy ants.

I've long had issues with both fire and non-fire ants.  Fire ants first.

Fire ants are constantly an issue, because even if a colony is eradicated, new colonies form all of the time.  I've had the best luck with bait treatments, but baiting is iffy.  The problem is that the bait usually has an oil base of some sort, and if it isn't fresh, the ants won't take it.  Amdro is readily available and works well--when it's fresh (there are several Amdro products, but I'm referring to just the baseline type that has hydramethylnon as the active ingredient).

Non-fire ants (everything else):  Most other ants seem to go for sweet foods, although some switch between sweet and protein.  For sweet-feeding ants, I've had the best luck baiting them.  A number of companies make gel baits with a variety of slow-acting pesticides.  My favorites are Optigard and Advion.  The picture shows ants eating Advion on the exterior brick wall of my house.   They readily take it--I have never seen them refuse it, even when the bait is a couple of years old--and haul it back to the nest.  Usually a treatment or two takes care of them, or at least knocks their numbers down a lot.  Optigard usually only seems to be appealing to them the day I put it down, while Advion still gets feeding activity the next day.  I put a series of small amounts like those shown above on a trail and let them go to it.  Ideally, I locate the bait near where they're entering a nest.  There are other sweet baits; Terro is one that uses boric acid as the active ingredient.  You can also make your own boric acid/sugar/water mixture; boric acid is often sold in powder form as roach killer.  Dusted along baseboards indoors it will work on both roaches and ants.  It can also be mixed with sugar water 1 tsp per cup--or with peanut butter for fat-seeking ants.  SFGate has recipes and recommendations.  Terro has little glossy-finished cards to put the bait on; you can make your own from a similarly-constructed retail packaging box or, for indoor or outdoor use, Do-It-Yourself Pest Control has inexpensive stations to hold liquid or granular bait.

Problem ants (rare):  I sometimes have ants that don't seem to be interested in either Amdro or sweet baits; for them the only obvious solution is a non-ingested pesticide.  Orthene powder works well but it's pretty toxic.  It will work on fire ants, too--dust around and over the top of the mound and ants will track it into the nest, killing it--but that leaves it laying in the yard.  A liquid solution, like Termidor or a generic equivalent, will also work and seems less hazardous to birds and other non-targeted animals.
 

Japanese Beetles

They're here.  They've actually been around for a while now; they usually show up around Memorial Day, plus or minus a week or so.  This is the time of year when they begin to wane, typically.

When I first moved into my suburban house, I had a serious problem with them.  They swarmed and ravaged anything they were attracted to.  The picture below shows an old rugosa rose that I had that they would inundate.

I think the problem might have been that they were in the sod that was laid in the front yard (and everyone else's front yards) when the subdivision was built.  They live first as grubs; eggs laid this year will spend the next several months or so as larvae in the soil, chewing on roots, before pupating, then emerging as adults next spring.

Rain matters, too.  North Georgia had a serious drought a number of years ago, which made a big impact on the Japanese beetle numbers the next year.  It also knocked down the number of fireflies considerably, for the same reason.  Then last year was a serious drought year, but it has been a number of years since I had large numbers of beetles.

Last year I had more than this year, however--they seem most interested in my apple trees currently; they also go for peach and cherry tree leaves, and will nibble on crepe myrtle blossoms.  Roses are their BAE, but the rugosa is now gone.