Of Mice and M&M's

You all know I struggle with pests here at Wicked Raven Farm.  I have written before about how many things I have tried to get rid of the white flies and the ants!  But because of the super mild winter this year the mice and shrews have become my biggest problems now,

But not for long!  Behold the "Cat Traps and the Peanut M&M's"!  These little beauties are easy to use, don't poison any wildlife, water or waterfowl , and although the mice/shrews do die - that's the only way I have found to rid the farm of them and they are safe to leave to for the owls and eagles, shrikes and ravens of course - a delightful snack.

I have tried a number of different baits for these traps, but the most effective one I have found so far is peanut M&M's.  Something about the peanut with the chocolate and candy coating seems to be irresistible to the rodent world!

I have set these all over the place in the little rat runs and so far this spring I have caught 4 mice!  I'm not going to sully my pages with pictures of dead mice - you're welcome - but if you do decide to take this route and you do catch some mice - place them in a brush pile or at the base of a tree and see what happens - chances are a bird of some kind will swoop down and make a meal of it - or in the case of the bald eagle - a light snack! Or you might catch a glimpse of a fox sneaking off with it!

I hope your spring is shaping up to be pest free and sunshiny bright - I have to go set some traps!

Time to get growing! More Mattress up-cycle!

Earlier this year I talked about recycling mattresses and the many uses for them.  After you have used the coils and springs for protecting your trees there are a myraid of uses for the remaining fabric and sheeting on the mattress.

One such use is to take the thin, sort of interfacing like material off of the back of the mattress and use it as a landscape fabric or row cover.  I use mine mostly to keep weeds down on the huglekulture beds.  Once you have built up your huglekulture bed, after the final layer of good soil, lay the fabric over the top and then place either more soil or bark/tree chips over the top of it.  Cut holes where ever your plants will go and plant in the holes.

This hugelkulture has sat for a year and lived this way through the winter.  It helps keep the grass from taking over and this one will have berries planted in it later this spring!

 This system keeps weeds down and reuses both the mattress fabric and the chips.  My chips came from a tree chipping that was done as fuels reduction (fire reduction) on the side of the roads here in Big Lake.  The company chipping the trees and brush allowed locals to come and pick up the chips to use on projects.  It was awesome!  If you dont have that type of resource you can buy the bark chips or if you have a lot of brush rent the chipper and share the cost and work with a neighbor.

Another use for mattress leavings is as a weed suppressor in between rows in your garden or other area that needs to have weeds kept out.  Take the blanket material from the top of the mattress (sort of quilt batting looking stuff) and lay it out between rows in the garden or even along a path.  You can then cover the material with either grass clippings, bark chips, pea gravel, or straw and it will keep the weeds out all season.  You could also use that stuff as quilt batting for projects- I would only do that if you know exactly where that mattress has been though!

Stay tuned!  We've only just begun to tear the mattresses apart!

Spring has not quite sprung!

Spring has not quite sprung here at Wicked Raven Farm.  We are still battling snow and ice, but now it’s mixed randomly with snow, ice and those dangerous patches that look like snow or ice but are really a soft mucky mud that will suck the shoes right off your feet underneath!

It’s not so much just the mud that is bothersome – it’s also the smell of the mud.  When Alaska wakes up from the slumber of winter, the smell can be downright gangrenous!  If your child falls into the “stink mud” as my children call it – and they always found some to fall into as well – just put those clothes out on your porch over the railing until they have had three or four good rains on them and maybe a freeze or two as well!  Don’t you dare put them in the washer machine – there is not enough solvent that you can put in that will get rid of that funk!  And it will also funkify your washing machine as well – even the sanitary load setting won’t help – that will just funkify your laundry room! 

But if you can get out to your garden around that soft mucky mud and you have some worm juice handy – now is a great time to pour on a good dose of pure worm juice!  As the snow and ice muck melt and meld into good spring soil, that water in it will mix with the worm juice and create a nice feeding station for your plants.  It’s a really easy, organic way to give your shrubs, fruit and berries a good head start as we go into the growing season!

I have had people tell me that it will burn my plants as there is too much going onto the plant in “raw” form, but I have been doing this for a few years now and I have not had any problems with it – success!

The above is not a fantastic photo - sorry - it is actually pouring down rain out there!  But at the center of the photo you can see a dark spot that is actually a cherry tree that I have dressed already with the worm juice and this one I actually added some worm dirt to as well.  A moose came by earlier this week and stepped into the cherry tree space and made a big deep hole there (my only consolation is that maybe it;s mother was mad at it about the stink mud on it's hooves) so I had to do some refill.  The only dirt I have that is thawed is worm dirt from the garage!  At least its a bit closer to spring and it's not snowing (yet anyway - well see how we look in the morning)!

If you don’t have worm juice and would like to know how to get some – read the blog post from January 11, 2013 at  http://wickedraven.blogspot.com/2013/01/finally-worm-one-or-growing-dirt-in_11.html  and check out a local source for worms in your area.  Or get some from a friend! 

With Easter just past it’s a great time to gather egg shells too for the garden or for the worms! 

Crush your eggshells up into a powder or into very small grind – pestle and mortar work great for this.  Spread the eggshells around the base of the plants and mix lightly into the dirt!  Great calcium addition – especially necessary for tomatoes and plants of that nature.  For your worms just throw them into the bin and they will take care of them - they dont eat them outright but they do make it so you don't have to do the pulverizing yourself - they are fine, thin and brittle by the time the worms are done with them!  Just leave them in the worm dirt and use like any compost.

I hope your spring is going well and that you too can make some sunshine out of dirt, worms, and a little rain!

Wicked Good Things!

It shouldn’t faze me anymore, but still it does!  In the school I work in, each time we have a meeting we follow a protocol that encourages people to come up with and share some “good things” before we start with the business portion of the meeting.  These “good things” can be just about anything and can involve personal or professional things, places or people even.  We usually share two or three good things at the start of each meeting or luncheon. 

My good things are usually fairly big if I can come up with one – a successful second surgery, one of the kids did something great, and so on.

A few weeks ago the High School Hockey team won the 3A State championship game and showed to the world with a resounding roar that we each make a difference, no matter how small.  Our team wasn’t slated to win it all – in fact we were seeded 4^th at the Regional tournament that we had to place first or second in to get to the State game (we won that tournament too), but we had such hard working kids and such passionate kids, coaches and parents that we took all the trophies home!  It ended up being one of my “good things” at work before a meeting and I really didn’t think much about it being a big deal – I am already on to the next season. 

This week I got a call from one of our contractors that we drill water wells for and she congratulated me on that game and for that win.  I asked how she knew about it and she said that “It was on Chad’s life list at church”.  Well – Chad is my husband’s name but he doesn’t really go to church and neither do I so I had to ask her what church and Chad who?  She said – Oh I thought it was your Chad and she told me the name of the church.  She said that winning that game was on the Chad at churches “life list” like a bucket list item!  As we talked I realized that it was our Coach Chad who had put that out on the life list and I marveled at how something that is merely a “good thing” for me was a bucket list item for him!  Win that one game.  And work hard enough with a group of kids who all have to come together into the perfect storm of a team to do it!

How many times has something that seemed a simple win for me meant so much more to someone else?  A bucket list item.  I know it was on my older son’s bucket list and he won’t get to cross that one off.  Probably a lot of the kids he skated with had that as a bucket list item and won’t get to cross that off.  My youngest son has already been able to cross it off.

Now sometimes when I am thinking of “good things” before I go into a meeting, I stop and think about what it means to have accomplished that and if it should have had more impact on my life.  Is it someone’s life list item?  How can I show that it is not taken for granted and appreciate the import of this item that is a bucket list item for someone that I know?  Or that I don’t know?

My bucket list is fairly short and probably has on it some of the usual things that most people have on theirs – write that book – see that place- meet that famous person.  For some people the bucket list includes this “Win that one game”!  And that’s a Wicked Good Thing!