This has been a tough year with flies and snakes, which means that incubators and little chicks have to be in the house, and lots of vigilance must be practiced!
It is so much easier to get all the chores done during the day, and only spot check in the evenings. But those evening checks are important, and are when we catch a lot of those things that "go bump in the night."
Late last week, Wyatt was out on an evening check, after just having had one of those discussions about wearing shoes because of the bad snake season this year. He came in, and said there was something I needed to see. As he tugged me out of the chair where I was checking his math, all I said was, "Oh, no, who is it?"
When we got out to the big pen, he showed me. There were a couple bugs in the bedding of the hen in the favored nesting box. "Time for DE." So Bailey helped him clean out the bedding, and he got busy with the DE. He collected several of them, and we took them by Arbico Organics the following day, while Bailey was at Speech and Debate class.
Arianna, the rep who helped us, was wonderful. She discussed ingredients and possible treatments with Wyatt, agreeing with him as to his assessment of the bug, and said the DE was the right initial course. There is a lot of discussion as to whether DE and organic measures are truly enough in terms of pest management and worming of animals. It takes a good bit of vigilance, consistency, and more work than the other stuff, but we believe it is worth it.
In the end, she completely agreed with what had been done, and with the thoughts others had shared with me regarding the orb spiders weaving near the tomato plants. The presence of the bugs really makes me nervous especially since we are less than a month from the start of kidding season for the year. DE is great, and completely organic, but doesn't do anything when wet. That is a worry in the kidding pen for sure.
As Wyatt looked at products and asked about the ingredients (one treatment for a specific bug included dried blood), he came to one to keep the mosquitoes off of him. Arianna was so funny! She said "That's it!" And she made Wyatt feel so smart, and they agreed we could use that on the pen, and if need be even treat the animals with it so that there would be no bad bugs latching on to the animals. I might out to warn you, though, it is made from garlic juice, and by the time we got back to pick Bailey up a couple miles down the road, the car smelled, shall we say, interesting?
So far, the DE seems to be working. We are in the middle of the post monsoon season deep clean around here, so we will reevaluate Sunday afternoon to see whether we need the secondary treatment now or can continue with DE and reevaluate over the next couple weeks as we lead up to kidding day. We shall see, those special little lives that look to us with trust deserve our best.
This week, we also went through chasing the tomato horn worms again. We could spray the garlic based stuff on them too, but with the orb spiders and the like, Arianna felt that we could do just as well with black-lighting- using a black light to illuminate the works and picking them off- especially since our hens like to be hand fed the worms! Bailey and Wyatt really seemed to enjoy that chore, they volunteered and started in while I was still watering!
If you look closely, you can see them working closely as they light up the tomato plants. Below, there is also a ladybug they found on one of the pichu fruit plants. I love knowing that the system is bringing int the beneficial bugs to help the organic efforts!
We have gone in spurts lately, we will find several grown worms munching away one night, then not see any for a couple weeks.
They were so determined, but didn't find any that night. Seeing that only some bugs lit up with the black light made it even more fun for them!
We did learn about one other product we eventually want to try- I will tell you about that later in the weekend! It comes with a whole set of curiosity of its own! Hope you all have a wonderful weekend! For my fellow Arizonans, are you planting your fall gardens yet?
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