Month: June 2011

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Chicken Pest Control Report

One of my enduring pleasures this summer is picking fat green tomato hornworms from my tomatoes and feeding them to the chickens.  It sends them into a frenzy of excitement as they each try to get part of the caterpillar.  I used to heave the caterpillars over the garden fence with the assumption that they would not find their way back to the tomato patch, because they are too large for me to stomach stomping, but the chickens make quick work of them.

Unfortunately, they do not like Japanese Beetles, although they love their grubs, as I have mentioned in previous posts.  After throwing adults into their pen and watching them fly away as the chickens looked on, confused, I began knocking them into a bowl of water so the chickens could go “bobbing for beetles.”  Because I am not sadistic, even given my aforementioned pleasure at feeding tomato hornworms to the chickens, after I found them still swimming desperately in the bowl for an hour, quite uneaten by the chickens,  I added some dish soap to the water.  It kills the bugs quickly, and I presume, does not harm the chickens.  In either case, after some initial fun in grabbing the beetles, the chickens have decided they don’t like the taste of beetles, and so I have gone back to drowning the beetles in soapy water, without offering them to the chickens,  as I do every summer.  I guess the adults are too crunchy for them. 

They peck at snails and eat out their soft bodies, and they like slugs.  And as they scratch away in the ground I know they are devouring many little creatures.  They also dislike squash bugs, and adult potato beetles, I guess because the squash bugs emit a foul odor I can smell, and I presume, also taste bad. 

When the corn earworms arrive, I’ll feed them to the chickens, and I remain vigilant whenever I dig to feed any grubs or larva I find to the chickens.  I have spoiled them and they now come running to the fence, clucking away, when they see me approach, saying “What do you have for us this time?”

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Transform Junk into a Home for Your Plants

My father is an inveterate collector of junk. My parents’ detached garage housed two cars for perhaps a year before the junk took over: now there is a narrow path from one end to the other, and along the path are wheels, furniture, mailboxes, scrap metal, boards, old furniture, and fencing supplies. Of course, the debris is not junk to my father; he says someone might need it someday. To his credit, I did refinish some of the furniture to furnish college apartments and I still use some of it today. He also made money recently by selling some of the scrap metal leftover from repairing gates and building cattle trailers. I do not think he has ever purchased a mailbox.


I took an old wooden straight chair without a seat from the pile to use in my garden as a planter. Despite having numerous others which have waited decades for someone to refinish them, my father was reluctant to part with this one since he knew it was going outside where it would eventually rot. I convinced him that this one was likely to rot inside the shed before he ever refinished it, and he relented.

My chair’s seat was already missing, but if your chair still has a seat, you will need to remove the seat and replace it with chicken wire or a wire with holes no larger than an inch in diameter. Make sure you use a flexible wire you can twist over the sides of the seat support, and leave a basket shape big enough to hold potting soil and plants. Line the basket with moss or any material you want as long as water can permeate it but soil cannot.

Arrange the plants of your choice in the basket. Put the planter somewhere you will remember to water it and try to keep it out of full sun. I have to water mine nearly every day even though it is in the shade. In my planter, I have a mix of annuals and perennials: a chartreuse grass in the rear for height, wire vine and creeping Jenny in the front to trail over the lip of the basket, and impatiens and lobelia in the center for color.

I am interested in recycling and saving money, and planters made of items I obtain free of charge satisfy both needs. If you do not have a junk pile handy, look around at garage sales, or thrift stores for other items to use as planters; many items will do as long as they have holes for drainage. Possible planter ideas are work boots, toolboxes, unused wheelbarrows, and wooden packing crates.