A nice melon forming under the canopy of leaves. I grew this variety because I liked the Seed Savers Exchange description:
French heirloom listed by Vilmorin in 1885. Translates as “Delight of the Table.” Ribbed fruits have sweet orange flesh and weigh about 1-2 pounds. Very hard-to-find, almost extinct. 85-90 days.
Also under the canopy of leaves, and about a half-gopher length away from the forming melon was a gopher hole.
Seems that gophers like to feed on the fruits of melons. Much to my dismay, another loss to those underground pests.
My permaculture training suggests I don't have too many gophers but too few enemies of gophers. Should I import gopher-snakes to reduce the population? The local cats are not doing their part, and birds of prey have little chance with all the cover my garden offers to gophers.
Too many heartaches from gophers eating my garlic, onions, potatoes, hollyhocks, and pea plants (to name only a few), led me to trapping.
I have kept count of the gophers I trapped. Nineteen gophers in as many months is what I consider an infestation. I still have a few gophers working the garden, but 19 is ridiculous.
In any garden some crop loss is expected—to birds or bugs—but last year gophers took more of my garlic crop than I got and they would have taken it all if I hadn't dug it up. They destroyed an entire fig tree by eating its roots all the way to the trunk, until the tree just wilted and flopped over. They have eaten the roots of mature hollyhocks, have eaten many plants worth of potato tubers, and taken down mature leeks just at their peak.
I observe their activity, and will trap when I take too many plant losses in an area. This melon still needed weeks on the vine to ripen, and it takes such a long time to even get fruit on some melon plants. In times like this it is difficult to not get discouraged.
Eliot Coleman, in his latest book The Winter Harvest Handbook, writes about a crop-devestating problem he had with meadow voles, and how the only solution he found was trapping.
Eliot Coleman writes "Although I am a mild-mannered sort and show great kindness and respect to wild creatures in general, I admit to a strong aversion to voles in the winter greenhouse."
"I know from my records that one year I trapped over fifty voles in the vicinity of the greenhouses during August and September, and a neighbor's cat probably got almost that many. Come winter it didn't seem as if we had even made a dent."
Knowing that Eliot Coleman, the organic gardening and farming guru of our time, traps meadow voles made me feel less monstrous in my own trapping efforts.
I hope I am able to grow some of these melons to maturity so that I might taste such an old variety and also that I might participate in saving and sharing the seeds of an amost extinct food.
7 comments:
What do you do with the trapped gophers? Are they good to eat?
I feed their bodies to the soil organisms, which in time feed plants that I eat. So, yes they are good to eat in plant form.
Aah, so is the trap the executioner or do you have to do it yourself?
The trap does the job. I've had to dispatch one that the trap didn't finish off. I've also seen underground activity and started stabbing wildly with my spade, only to find I've stopped a mole. Only a couple of moles have found their end in my traps. Mostly it has been gophers. The one gopher I had to finish off, it looked up at me with its beady eyes, and I felt ill-at-ease with my job, but that was early on, before the loss of months of work and pounds of crops. I'm much less sentimental these days. I like to eat what I grow, rather than feed it to an overly populated rodent community. So it goes.
I just got my PDC in Grass Valley, CA. One of our instructors said that for gophers one could put up 15 foot tall poles or snags as raptor perches. They will strike quite a bit within 50 feet of the pole. Not sure what the actual perch part should look like. Also I am not sure how urban your setting is and how the neighbors would feel about the raptor perch!
I am enjoying your blog and all your ideas and energy. And patience. Growing wheat every year until you have enough! What zone are you in? (USDA and/or Sunset)
Julie,
Congratulations on your PDC! The more Permaculturists, the better.
Well it turns out the culprit was a little mouse gnawing at my melons. I've read somewhere to put them up on coffee cans to protect them. I'll be sure to try that.
On the gopher problem though, someone gave me a newspaper cut out from someplace that said to put juicy fruit chewing gum (in the wrapper, but give it a twist) into the gopher hole, and they'll never bother you again. I am willing to try anything that is not toxic (though Juicy Fruit gum is probably somewhat toxic). So the gopher had been excavating a new tunnel and I dug down and put half a stick, twisted, in the wrapper, down in the hole. Couple days later, the wrapper was at the top of some soil but there have not been any new excavation piles in that area since. It has been weeks now. I'm not totally convinced yet, but I'll keep trying the gum.
I have lots of perches for birds of prey, and visits from them too, have many neighborhood cats, and have witnessed an opossum tearing a mole to shreds right in my back yard one night. Our cat watched in amazed horror too.
Julie,
I think we're in a Sunset Zone 8. Based on a very old Sunset. Have they changed the Zones in the last 15 years?
Have a nice sandy clay loam. Wonderful soil. Fast drainage, pretty much flat. We get about 26 inches of rainfall per year.
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