Permaculture Blog

I knew a variety of people that used fishing line over their pond in order to discourage predatory birds such as egrets and herons from snatching their fish. I was really ambivalent about the practice until yesterday, when I found a large hawk with the tip of its wing tangled in fishing line swinging dead from a tree on my property. I’m bummed, it was a big beautiful hawk. So please do not use fishing line over your pond. There are better ways, in particular, one is called a Heron Scarer. It is an infrared motion detecting water sprinkler. When it senses motion it goes tat tat tat tat tat tat spraying water and it is very effective at scaring raccoons, birds, anything that is around the pond away. Even humans, but that is adjustable :-) and you don’t have the visual distraction of fishing line or netting over your pond. And it’s not going to hang a hawk out to die of exposure. As I said, until I found the hawk and realized how strong the fishing line is compared to a tangled bird I was not passionately against it, but now I am. And I would encourage anyone who has fishing line outside to strongly reconsider. The best to everyone reading.

The gopher snakes were dancing on my driveway last night. At least I think they were gopher snakes. Lets hope there was a little necking and even a little bit more. There are snake tracks, back and forth, side by side, some close some maybe 6″ apart, looping and turning. I once had to untangle two big gopher snakes from bird netting. I have since gotten rid of all my bird netting but the gopher snakes that I had untangled were side by side. One was slender and the other one was heavier bodied. I assume that when they are courting that they move side by side for at least awhile. The tracks on my driveway must have occurred over 15 or 20 minutes and a total distance of probably 50 to 100 feet. So very very cool! Bob

This bill would bar nurseries from advertising their plants as “bee-friendly” if they were pre-treated with neonicotinoids.

I’m still shaking my head. But at least Minnesota, which is where this legislation is in the process of being passed, is trying to do something.

Started to add something and just sat here speechless for 2 or 3 minutes. Mind boggling.

I once had a client spray toxic stuff and then put up signs bee friendly garden. http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/deer-park-monastery/

And for the permaculture people out there — Posting and sending around pretty pictures isn’t gonna get the job done.

http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

I don’t believe that living is a zero-sum game. I don’t believe that in order for humans to win, the animals have to lose.

The snake was about 8 feet up a wisteria vine, it ended up snaking :-) all the way out to the end to check out an empty birds nest. It is only the second true king snake that I have seen here. I have a lot of the San Diego variant which has a single cream stripe down its back. Wonderful the biology that would change the striping pattern so dramatically with apparently only a minor genetic change.

It was smaller than I first thought. I thought that the siding in the background was 5 inches wide, it’s only 4. I estimate that the snake was seven and a half lines so that’s only 30 inches — not even 3 feet, but it was a healthy well fed critter. Bob 310 429 8477 http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

It is pretty pissed at me and would like to bite me, but I can deal with that. It didn’t die of poison. I took it up and let it go on the other side of the property in a nice oak and grassy area. Oh, and an aside, I was working on a california lilac and discovered that the wood is incredibly hard and it started me thinking about why oak wood is also so hard and it maybe a gopher defense.

Other thoughts. I recently dug two holes in the ground and blocked a gopher. Actually this one :-)

The holes were about five or six inches apart which would prevent the Gopher from continuing. Or so I thought — because in one evening it dug around the first hole and between it and the second hole. Given that its tunnel was about 3 inches wide, that left less than one and a half inches of clearance on each side. And it dug straight down the middle of the gap. This is about the third time something like this has happened and I’m convinced that they can somehow sense three dimensionally where their tunnels are in the ground. Maybe they have developed a ground penetrating radar system :-)

Gophers are truly amazing little animals. Can you see in the second picture the mouth structure that allows them to use their teeth as well as their claws while digging without getting dirt in their mouths. Of course it would sure like to let its teeth dig into me at this point :-) Cool!

Destroyed in about 5 minutes. I almost feel sorry for the little buggers. The rain we got softened the faces of the trenches to where they can dig. But only about 4 inches in so that it has to stay very close to the face of the trench. This one particular gopher has figured it out and worked for about two days to go down the face of the trench across and a little bit back up the other side. I saw that it had been working yesterday, but didn’t have time to do anything. This morning I quickly found where it had gone down and across and literally broke the tunnel out with my fingers. The hardest part was taking the pictures of it :-) And it cannot just dig under the old tunnel, it has to try and find a new location. It has worked and worked and worked and worked to dig 10 feet of tunnel that I took out in 30 secs. I hope it gives up soon, I feel bad for it — but the plum tree it is heading for doesn’t. And the ground squirrel has learned to peel kumquats :-) Bob 310 429 8477 http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

So I haven’t seen the mole in a while and I was walking around looking at some of the trees and my irrigation system and noticed a little hole in the ground. The hole was just about the right size for a mole and I was curious as to where it led and where it had come from so I stuck my finger in the hole.

Now, I actually know not to do this because I’m pretty sure I got stung by a centipede one day putting my fingers in places where I couldn’t see. But I was sure that this was a mole vent so I put my finger in and lifted up the ground and cleared out the beginning of the hole to see where it went. I put my finger in further and it moved! Waaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaa.

Which is the title of this post. After I had taken a moment to take a couple of DEEP breaths and give the heart rate time to go back down to the lower hundreds, I lifted out what had moved and have the attached photos. I really like the eyes. You remember the little toadpoles I had in my pond last year? Well this is one a year later.

Western spadefoot toad. They are actually endangered and I wouldn’t have bothered it except I didn’t know it was there.

And I had hundreds in the pond last year. And have several pictures of garter snakes eating them. It’s all an ecosystem. Look at the second picture with the spade on its back foot. I didn’t really get a good angle on it, but that is a hard, sharp edged, shovel sticking out of its foot. But I really like its eyes! biology is beautiful!

>> The copper was recommended by the nursery people. My trees have been getting brown disease that … >>

Copper, oil, in fact, many sprays if sprayed in the fall to mid spring will kill a lot of beneficial insect pupa in the trees like praying mantis, ladybug, possibly predatory beetle pupa in the mulch around the tree, and certainly other insect pupa too. The pupa need to over-winter and hatch in the spring. Anything that suffocates them (oil), or any toxin like copper will kill them. In addition copper is a phototoxin that will kill a lot of the beneficial micro flora.

In my cynical opinion, the main desire of a nursery section is to sell stuff. If they sell – or give directions to spray things that kill beneficial and predatory insects — that will only benefit the pocketbook of the nursery later on. They get to sell more garbage down the road. I’m not saying it’s deliberate either it’s just what they have been taught…. “4 out of 5 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes.”

If the symptoms you see are most obvious in summer I would spray a light compost tea on it _in summer_.

Oh, BTW, are the trees on a dwarfing rootstock? Here is a bit of a post on my blog: Starts about halfway down this post. — http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/tanglefoot-stuff/ ….

So the agrocompanies graft onto a rootstock that cripples a tree and then are pleasantly surprised that the tree gets sick more often. Well the pests have just become more robust right? Can’t be that the tree they sold is sickly– exactly why is it a dwarf?

And horrors for the agrochemical companies, the homeowner has to use more pesticides to keep the the crippled tree healthy (darn!). Well, as healthy as possible with a dwarfing rootstock.

I used to smirk a little about compost tea, but it really does help rejuvenate the normal bioflora of the tree. They’ve finally figured out that the microbes on us humans outnumber our own cells 40 to 1 and I would bet that ratio is approximately the same for a tree. We know so little about biology. So we poison everything we don’t know anything about.

The study published by JAMA Neurology reveals that the levels of DDE, the chemical left when DDT breaks down, were higher in the blood of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease patients compared to those without the disease. And DDE is longer lived and more toxic then DDT but if you’re a chemical company you can say DDT is gone in x-days. And american chemical companies still manufacture and export DDT. And what in the world makes one think that DDT is the only problem out there. Bob http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

http://m.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/monarch-migration-falls-to-record-lows-according-to-new-report/2014/01/29/a34fc2b0-891c-11e3-a760-a86415d0944d_story.html

SIGH Bob 310 429 8477 http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com