Varmint Update

Well, it was skunks. We had sort of settled on raccoons, but my good friend Vern told me it was skunks. (And, Vern ought to know, being that he is Parowan's City Forester and resident Utah Master Gardener.) Vern's neighbor has chickens, and the chickens attract skunks, and his neighbor has killed six of them this summer . . . skunks, not chickens.

Vern said that the skunks on his side of town ate all his sweet corn. I asked him how he stopped it. He told me that he quit planting sweet corn.

Vern also told me that his neighbor catches the skunks in a live trap, throws a blanket over the trap, and runs a hose under the blanket: the other end of the hose attaches to the tail-pipe of the neighbor's idling pick-up truck. In Vern's opinion, that activity is somewhat inhumane, but Rural Ways is currently in the grip of shredded-sweet-corn-rage, so it doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Cooling Costs Versus Heating Costs

When the weather is hot, we often start to see news stories about how the demand for air conditioning is straining the electrical grid—during the hottest part of the day rolling brown-outs are threatened in some areas because demand for electricity exceeds capacity. These stories don’t occur during the winter, so the demand for heat must not be quite as taxing on regional and national power supplies. Indeed, my brother-in-law told me the other day that his July electric bill was the highest one he had ever paid due to his round the clock need for AC. That scared Rural Ways because our July electric bill had not yet arrived, and the thought that it could be worse than what we paid for heat was alarming. We quickly attached the Kill-A-Watt to one of our two window AC units to see how bad it was going to be.

The preliminary results are in, and they are not as bad as we feared. The Kill-A-Watt says that the air conditioning unit in the office is costing approximately $15 per month. It is, of course, not being run round the clock since the nights in Parowan are almost always cool enough to leave it off. In any case, it must mean that the unit in the upstairs bedroom—which has not yet been tested—is working for about $5 per month. How do we know? Because we got our July electric bill and it was only $20 higher than the one we paid in June, when we were not using any AC. The best part of it is that neither bill was anywhere close to our winter high. For Rural Ways, the cost of electricity for heat in the winter far out strips what we pay for cooling in the summer. In fact, the average cost of electricity for our six most summery months over the past year was only a little more than half (56%) of the average cost of electricity for our six most wintery months.

More Garden Pests

Rural Ways is thankful for all the cheap food provided by Big Agriculture. If we had to feed ourselves, there would be some lean years. This season, in fact, has not been a good one in the garden, and the orchard is almost completely bare. One bright spot, however, was the sweet corn. It was looking like we were going to a have a decent harvest. Decent, that is, until the raccoons or skunks found the corn. For the last two nights, the little marauders have been shredding a dozen ears per night. They destroy the plants, shuck the ears, and take a few bites before moving on to the next one.

What are we going to do? Shooting, trapping, poisoning, fencing, and dynamiting have each been discussed. Raccoons are vicious, rabies-infested pests in the best of cases, and eliminating them would be desirable, but they are also probably smarter than anyone at Rural Ways and more than likely to win that war. Skunks aren't quite as criminal, but who wants to risk causing them any undue alarm? "Shoo, nice skunk, shoo."

It is probably a lost cause, but I did read one internet post that suggested wrapping the developing ears in strapping tape. I'm not convinced that tape will thwart the little buggers, but it is probably the only thing we can try right now. As for next year, traps, electrified fences, guard towers, and moats are in the engineering phase.

The Science Behind Deer Jumping

Building fencing to discourage deer from feeding in the garden has been a frequent topic at Rural Ways. (See this post, for example.) We have often maintained that our efforts serve merely as a mild deterrance since we lack the resources to build a sufficiently tall barrier. This inability to foil the jumping capacity of the average deer has recently gained scientific credibility. Deer jumping has, in short, been peer reviewed.

In the latest issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management, Kurt Vercauteren and several co-authors have published a piece on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) jumping in Wisconsin. While the deer problem at Rural Ways involves mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), we are willing to extrapolate from the data. What Vercauteren found was that ALL deer will jump a five foot fence; that 86% of deer will jump a six foot fence; that 15% of deer will jump a seven foot fence; and that NO deer will jump an eight foot fence.

At Rural Ways, our fence currently stands at five and a half feet, including 18 inches of baling wire at the top. According to the data, we are probably impeding somewhere between zero and ten percent of the local deer. (My, admittedly unscientific, observations tend to place the actual impedance rate closer to the former number than the latter.) While deer proofing is not really the goal at Rural Ways, it looks like we are going to have to shoot for at least seven feet of fencing in order to have even a chance of success against deer jumping.