The title sounds so ominous! Luckily, no living things were harmed for the posting of this blog. We have felt some of Mother Nature’s wrath this growing season.
First, we had Japanese beetles. Now, mind you, they come every year. I know it’s the grubs in the ground, but I try (and try to get my husband) not to spray anything. I have been researching things to treat with that won’t harm the environment/my bees, etc, like nematodes. But so far, my best weapons are when the chickens are free-ranging and sneak into the landscaping, trashing all of the mulch beds. It is an awful mess but boy are they happy. Normally we do not have the arrival of the beetles until July 4th and then we have them for two weeks. This year they were here for two weeks before July 4th and then ANOTHER week after. They made our plants look either black, crunchy, and brown, or like lace covered in holes. I would go out on “beetle hunts” at least twice a day squishing them or putting them in buckets of water. I read that you should not use the bag traps because that attracts more bugs, but I was getting quite frustrated. Then I read about dumping those bags into buckets of water for your chickens. I tried this and the chickens devoured the floating bugs within minutes. It was oddly satisfying. 🙂 You can see an Instagram video of it here
We then headed out on a vacation that took a little over a week. While on vacation we got videos and pictures from our petsitters that a lovely doe had found her way into our fenced garden and discovered that she could deftly leap over the 4-foot fence. See here. The deer have also discovered that they don’t need to get zapped by the electric fence, they can just work their way around to the inside of my cut flower garden and nibble away. This has greatly limited the availability of zinnias in my flower selling at the farm stand.
We have also had rabbits, groundhogs, a lack of rain, and then one night of 4 inches of rain, so there has been a little bit of everything.
However, there has been some lovely news. We have three new hives up and running after losing our productive beehive to the weird winter weather last winter. We received one hive from a friend who had a hive split and they snagged the swarm for us, and then two nucs (nucleus colonies) that we ordered, picked up, and settled in early June. We came home to find last week that our inspection had taken place and the inspector from The Ohio Department of Agriculture found that we had no mites, beetles, moths, etc, and that the hives were clean and in great shape! It is nice to know that the hard work of getting them settled, checking them for a healthy brood and an active queen, and adding frames to keep them happy is paying off!
Dragonfly Farm 