Oh, rats

After all the trouble we went to building a groundhog-proof fence for our garden so that we could peacefully coexist with our resident groundhog, it appears that we now have a new and even more cunning garden pest: Rattus norwegicus, the common brown rat. Or at least, a common brown rat.

The first sign of it came on Friday, when Brian brought in a zucchini from the garden that had clearly been gnawed on by something. We were puzzled, because we were pretty sure we'd finally managed to build a fence the groundhog couldn't penetrate, and in any case, if he'd eaten it he'd probably have eaten the whole thing. But what else could possibly have gotten in? A squirrel? Surely they wouldn't be interested in zucchini, would they? Baffled, we cut off the bitten parts and set aside the rest, figuring the only thing we could really do was keep an eye on the garden and see if we could spot the culprit.

The answer to the puzzle became clear yesterday, as we were sitting in the back yard taking a break from the task of transferring the big pile of concrete chunks to a less obtrusive spot in the back corner of the yard. (Side note: The pieces that were pebble-sized, or not too much larger, got spread along the gap between our rhubarb bed and the main garden area, on top of a layer of weed barrier. We also threw in the remainder of the gravel left over from the patio project and the assorted rocks we'd pulled out of the ground when we planted our plum trees way back in March. We're hoping that this lot will, if not keep the weeds out entirely, at least deter them enough that we don't have to do more than an occasional weeding back there.)

Anyway, as we sat on the grassy bank, trying to work up the energy to get back to our task, Brian suddenly pointed and said, "Look at that." And there, perched right next to the groundhog hole, as bold as you please, was an unmistakeable furry grey critter. It ducked out of sight as soon as we moved, but it didn't take long for it to prove that it was, in fact, the culprit in the zucchini-gnawing incident: next time we looked, we saw one of the zucchini plants moving back and forth, even though there was no wind. And when we headed for it, a furry grey shape bolted straight out of the garden, squeezing right past the gate, and whisked down the groundhog hole.

Our reaction to this new intruder was kind of interesting. Naturally, we were somewhat concerned about having it on the premises at all, since rats, unlike groundhogs, can carry diseases that affect humans. And naturally, we were also annoyed about the loss of our veggies (including the other half of the chewed-on zucchini, which we threw away just to be on the safe side). But we also both found ourselves feeling rather offended to see this upstart intruding on the territory of the groundhog, which we had come to see as an authorized, accepted resident of our property. I actually felt kind of ticked off on the groundhog's behalf: "Who does this rat think he is, anyway, trying to use the groundhog's hole as if it were his own?" Brian, by contrast, felt annoyed at the groundhog: "Hey, what are you doing letting this rat use your burrow? We allow you to stay on our property, but we never said you could have house guests!"

So I had a look around on the Internet for information on rats as garden pests and what to do about them. I found one article on the About.com Organic Gardening site that mentioned that rats supposedly dislike the smell of mint, so I decided as a first step to spray the plants with a solution of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Oil Soap and see if that deterred the little rodent. Brian also shimmed out the garden gate, which had become a little loose-fitting near the bottom—still plenty tight enough to keep out a groundhog, but easily wide enough for a rat to squeeze through. However, within half an hour after applying both of these remedies, we took another look out the window and saw the zucchini plant wiggling again. Then, as we watched, the rat took off and squeezed straight through the fence, chicken wire and all, not even bothering to go near the gate. So far, the score was Rat 2, Amy and Brian 0.

So we decided it was time to bring out the big guns. Two separate articles I found on rat control (one from the University of Illinois and one from UC Davis) confirmed that no repellant, whether smell-based or sound-based, will deter rats for very long, so if we wanted this thing out of our yard, pretty much our only option was to kill it outright. Based on the article, a trap seemed to be the best choice; unlike poison, it would pose no hazard to humans and most other critters, and it would also ensure that the rat died in a spot where we could find it and dispose of it, rather than leaving a rotting (and, eventually, stinking) carcass in some hard-to-reach spot. The article advised against using the humane type of trap that catches the animal alive, since you really don't want to release a disease-carrying critter into the wild, so we figured we'd have to go for the traditional snap trap, which would (we hoped) kill the rat as quickly and painlessly as possible.

At Lowe's, we found two types of rat traps: the old-fashioned wooden type, with a metal pin on a spring, for two dollars, and a fancier plastic one called a Tomcat trap for five dollars. We opted for the latter, as it looked like it would be much easier to bait and set without injuring ourselves, and also less likely to inadvertently trap some harmless animal just passing by, such as a bird or a stray cat. The trap was in two pieces: a hinged set of plastic jaws, and a removable cup for the bait. Setting it was indeed quite easy: Brian filled the little cup with peanut butter, snapped it into place, carried the whole trap out to the garden, placed it against the side of one of the beds, and stepped on it to pop it open. Unfortunately, I can't give the trap equally high marks for effectiveness. When Brian went out to check on it this morning, he found the trap had been sprung, turned upside down, and dragged to another part of the garden, and the cup that had held the peanut butter was not only empty but completely gone. Rat 3, Amy and Brian 0.

However, Brian is not one to give up that easily. Since the main part of the trap was still intact, he went down into the shop and made a couple of modifications to it. First, he rigged up a board with a short length of dowel to stick up through the hole where the cup used to go. Since we're using peanut butter, we don't really need a cup for it; we can just smear it on the dowel. Then he screwed the body of the trap itself onto the board, which should make harder for the rat to flip over. The trap is a little more difficult to set now—you have to hold it open with one hand while using the other to spread peanut butter on the dowel—but it is definitely heavier and more stable, and it no longer flips over when you set it off. (Brian actually managed to close it on himself at one point, but fortunately it wasn't fully open to start with, so it didn't cause any real damage. I just hope that from a fully cocked and loaded position, it's powerful enough to kill the rat right away.)

We're waiting until nightfall to deploy the modified trap, since rats are more active at night, while birds and other critters we'd rather not harm are less so. If the rat manages to get the bait out of this one without setting it off, I'm not calling an exterminator; I'm calling a science lab, because this rat is obviously some sort of rodent genius who needs to be captured and studied.

Garden gadgets

About a year ago, Brian and I discovered that our eggplant crop was being poached by squirrels. The stupid rodents weren't even eating them; they were yanking the tiny fruits off the plant and then, apparently, realizing that they weren't nuts and discarding them. So we realized that if we hoped to harvest any eggplant this year, we'd need some way to keep the little varmints' mitts off them. We tried pepper spray last year, but it was kind of a hassle to deal with; because it washes off whenever it rains, which happens pretty frequently in the summer, we had to keep reapplying it several times a week (and it turned out to be too late to save any of our eggplants, anyway). So this year, we figured we'd see what we can do about creating some kind of physical barrier.

Introducing the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder. Basically, it's just a cage constructed of chicken wire, large enough to fit over two eggplants planted side by side. It's not foolproof, because the holes in the mesh are still small enough for squirrels to fit their paws through, so any eggplant that forms right next to the edge of the cage will be within their grasp. But my hope that they're either to dumb to figure out that they can reach through the wire, or smart enough to figure out that even if they did, they wouldn't be able to get the eggplants out. The plants are just beginning to form fruits, so we'll see how it does. If we can manage to protect the eggplants until they reach the size of an actual egg, I think we'll be okay; surely the squirrels should be able to identify them as not-a-nut by then.

And talking of makeshift gadgets for the garden, check out Brian's other new device: the Hudson SQ-SL Squash Sling. Our butternut squash plants already have good half-dozen healthy-sized squash on them (much better than what we got last year), and they were getting big enough to weigh down the vines and pose a risk of pulling them loose from the trellises. Mel Bartholomew, of Square Foot Gardening fame, actually says this hasn't been a problem for him—the stems just get bigger and thicker as the squash do, so they have no trouble holding up their weight. But Brian doesn't like to take chances, so he fashioned some sling supports out of something we already had a plentiful supply of: the mesh bags that onions come in. We'd been saving these up in a cardboard box, figuring that all this tough but loose netting was bound to be the ideal material for something, sometime, and now it's finally being put to use. So even if the slings aren't strictly necessary, they've at least served to justify our months if not years of bag hoarding.

Now all we need is some sort of system to keep the birds from eating all our new bush cherries, and we should be in good shape.

Two piles down

What you see in this picture is something you couldn't see in this part of our yard for most of the past three years: the ground.

Ever since that fateful day in March 2010 when I answered a posting on Freecycle offering a load of cement pavers, this part of our yard has been home to a stack of bricks about three feet high, six wide, and two deep. After a while we got so used to it that we more or less stopped noticing it was there; it just sort of blended into the landscape. And even after most of the pavers finally made their way into our new patio a month ago, the pile didn't entirely disappear; in fact, it actually spread out more, as the bricks we'd rejected due to defects of various kinds formed a secondary pile, much untidier than the first, next to what remained of the original stack.

But no longer. As of today, the pavers that we've decided are still usable (for some potential future project as yet to be determined) are neatly stacked against the back wall of our shed, forming a pile four bricks deep, five wide, and nine high. The ones that we've deemed too badly damaged to use are in a smaller stack next to our trash barrel, where they can be added by ones and twos to each load of garbage as we put it out for pickup. And the ground where the brick pile once stood is ground once again—a bit bare, perhaps, since nothing green could have survived three years without seeing the sunlight, but at the rate the weeds in our yard spread, the bare patch will be covered over in no time.

So that's two of the four piles left over from our patio project gone, and two still left to deal with: the big pile of dirt excavated from under the patio, much of which will no doubt go into smoothing out the new slope we built up around its edges, and the pile of concrete chunks left over from the demolition of the old concrete slab, which will...well, we'll think of something. But bit by bit, our yard is finally starting to look like a yard again, rather than a recently abandoned construction site. I actually have hopes that before fall comes, we may get it to the point where the whole yard finally looks better with the new patio than it looked without it.

Zucchini waffles

The midsummer zucchini-fest continues. We picked one a few days back that had rather sneakily hidden itself under the leaves until it had grown to, if not the size of a baseball bat, at least as large as a bowling pin. We managed to nip another in the bud while it was still fairly small (smaller, in fact, than the largest of our cucumbers, which was picked the same day), but both the large and the small one came on top of what we already had in the fridge that didn't get used up in our zucchini binge last week. So we needed to come up with a use for some of these, pronto.

So on Thursday night, we looked up "zucchini" in the back of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and found a recipe he calls simply "Vegetable Pancakes." Based on the name, I was expecting something rather like a potato pancake, with shredded veggies loosely bound together with egg and fried. But these were actually  more like a traditional breakfast pancake, with a flour-based batter into which the grated veggies are stirred. They cook up on the griddle into thick, puffy cakes, rather like crumpets. These didn't have a lot of flavor by themselves, so we tried them with a huge variety of condiments, including ketchup, mustard, barbecue sauce, applesauce, pancake syrup, and lingonberry preserves (the traditional accompaniment to Swedish pancakes). The ketchup and the lingonberries seemed to work best, as their combination of sweet and tangy flavors perked up the blandness of the cakes. However, I spent much of the meal meditating about what would really be the ideal compliment to this dish, and also about other possible ways to make them. (Winter squash cakes with apple butter, perhaps?)

All this must have continued percolating in my subconscious for the next day or two, because when Brian asked me this morning what I'd like for breakfast, what popped out of my mouth was, "How about zucchini waffles?"

The idea of cooking the zucchini pancakes in the waffle iron was actually Brian's, though we decided not to try it the first time we made them. And the existing recipe needed very little modification to make it a breakfast dish; all we really did was leave out the onion. Then, since we happened to be out of pancake syrup, I cooked up the idea of an orange syrup to serve them with. (Well, I cooked up the recipe; Brian cooked up the actual syrup.) Since the tangy-sweet condiments had worked best with the savory zucchini cakes we had for dinner, I thought an orange-based sauce might be the ideal topping for them at the breakfast table. I based the recipe on the cider sauce that accompanies the Rosewood Country Inn's "Oven Apple Pancakes" (I forget where I originally found this recipe, but you can see it here).

The combination was...well, I would say surprisingly good. The recipe might still need a little tweaking, as the zucchini makes the batter very moist, even with no added milk, so the waffles don't really stay crisp even in a warm oven. But they were still tasty, and the orange syrup was indeed an excellent foil for their mild flavor—and in early August, any recipe that uses up extra zucchini without being too obvious about it is a good recipe.

So in case you're at all inclined to try this yourself, here is our newly created recipe for Zucchini Waffles with Orange Syrup (with acknowledgements to Mark Bittman and the proprieters of the Rosewood Country Inn):

ZUCCHINI WAFFLES

1 medium-large zucchini, peeled and finely grated (about 2 cups)
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp. baking powder
1 egg
2 Tbsp oil

Combine everything in a bowl to make the batter. Add milk as needed to thin (we didn't use any). Cook on the waffle iron on medium to high heat. Serve with Orange Syrup.

ORANGE SYRUP

1/3 cup sugar
1 Tbsp. corn starch
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1 cup orange juice

Combine in saucepan and bring to a boil. Continue to cook, stirring, until thickened (about 1-2 minutes). Remove from heat and stir in 1 Tbsp. butter.

Bon appétit, or as we say in New Jersey, Eat Your Zucchini!

Veggies of the Month: Chocolate Beauty pepper and Moreton tomato

The Veggies of the Month for August are special in two ways. First, there are two of them, and second, they're the first veggies/fruits of the month to come out of our own garden.

As you may recall, my Gardeners' Holiday post a week ago included a picture of our first full-sized tomato of the year, a Moreton. This is a variety developed at Rutgers back in the '50s that eventually fell out of favor because it was too soft for commercial use. A few years ago, however, Rutgers resurrected the breed as part of an ongoing quest to revive "the old time Jersey tomato." The attached article refers to it as "the July 4 tomato," but that sounds like a bit of an exaggeration to me; ours first started producing right around the end of July, which is still plenty early. Since then, we've harvested a total of three.

Then, just a couple of days ago, we harvested our first pepper of the season. It's a variety called Chocolate Beauty that we picked up at the Rutgers plant sale last May after determining that the pepper plants we'd attempted to start from seed just were not going to make it. You can see from the photo where it gets its name, as it does indeed have a rich, chocolately brown hue with just a hint of red. (This one is more of a beauty in the photo than in real life, however, as we turned it so that the tiny insect hole on one side isn't visible.)

But never mind how they look; how do they taste? Well, both the tomatoes and the pepper went into a small pot of chili on Tuesday night, so their particular flavors were a bit hard to discern in the mix. However, I made a point of snitching a small fragment of each one to taste before they went into the pot. The Moreton tomato tasted...well, tomatoey. I really can't think of a better way to describe it. It wasn't particularly sweet, or particularly acidic, or particularly anything; it just tasted like the basic, Platonic essence of tomato, through and through. And the Chocolate Beauty pepper, despite its appearance, didn't taste a bit like chocolate: it tasted like...bell pepper. Really, I do wish I could come up with a more vivid description, but that's the honest truth; it just tasted exactly the way you expect a bell pepper to taste.

On one level, it's a bit of a disappointment that these two notable breeds—an heirloom pepper and a vintage hybrid tomato—don't have more distinctive flavors that I could wax lyrical about. After all, what's so exciting about home-grown produce if it just tastes like what you could buy at the supermarket? But on the other hand, I guess there is something to be said for consistency. True, this may not be an extra-special tomato or an extra-special pepper, but it is just what you expect from a tomato and just what you expect from a pepper. They may not be more striking in any way than a supermarket tomato and a supermarket pepper, but they can give you everything you'd want from a supermarket tomato or pepper, with the added bonus of being fresh-picked and free.

So would I grow them again? Well, it's too early to say. Since neither of these varieties seems to have anything special to recommend it in terms of flavor, it's a question of yield—of quantity rather than quality. The Chocolate Beauty has given us only one pepper so far, and it did suffer a bit of insect damage, so I'm not sure it will end up being a great producer. But the Moreton tomato is producing sound, unblemished fruits, and producing them well ahead of our Brandywines and Ramopos—so if it can keep on giving good yields throughout the rest of the season, I think it's well worth keeping in our tomato lineup.

The Patio Project, Stage 8: Furnishing

The night we finished (or nearly finished) work on our new patio, Brian hauled a card table and a couple of folding chairs out there so that we could use our new space right away. However, it was clear that this makeshift furniture wasn't really going to work for us over the long term; to enjoy our patio properly, we'd need some real outdoor furniture. And as I observed last year, this stuff doesn't tend to come cheap. A quick Google search just now on "patio furniture" popped up a sponsored list of hits ranging from $500 to $2500 in price, and even the sets we saw on sale on our last trip to Home Depot were marked down to between $300 and $600.

Fortunately, there's always IKEA.

Within a day of completing the patio, we had already checked out the patio sets on IKEA's website and narrowed our choices down to two favorites. The 4-piece Äpplarö set, priced at $220, was solid acacia wood with a nice dark-brown finish, and all the individual pieces could be folded up for storage. The Askholmen set was also solid acacia, had a lighter finish, and was even cheaper—only $120 for four pieces—but it wouldn't fold up. We were leaning toward the Äpplarö, thinking that folding pieces might be worth an extra $100 because we could store them inside during the winter, but we figured it would be best to see them at the store and try them out in person before making our decision.

This turned out to be a good idea, as we found to our surprise that the cheaper Askholmen set (a name that Brian promptly changed to "afikomen") actually felt sturdier and more comfortable to sit on. The table was also wider and shorter than the Äpplarö table, making it a slightly more convenient size for dining. And the Askholmen furniture, though it didn't fold up, was still lightweight enough that we figured it wouldn't be too much trouble to carry it inside if a hurricane was forecast or something. In fact, there was only one problem with it: it was out of stock at our local store. So looking at it one way, we'd just made a decision that would save us $100 on our patio furniture; but looking at it another way, we'd just spent 10 bucks on gas and tolls for a wasted trip, since we'd have to come back a second time to get the furniture once it was in stock again. (Actually, we spent a bit more than that, since we ended up buying a few odds and ends while we were there—a drying rack, a pair of scissors, a couple of jars of lingonberries, and some coffee and chocolate bars—but we figured we would have bought those things anyway, even if we'd made only one trip.)

Fortunately, the furniture was back in stock within a few days, and since we took the 25th off for our anniversary, we took the opportunity to go back and get it. (The trip was just as expensive on a weekday, but the traffic conditions, both on the Turnpike and in the store itself, were much better.) It was a few days before we could get around to assembling the pieces, but once we did, they went together very easily with just a screwdriver and an Allen wrench, which was thoughtfully included in the box (we've now assembled a fairly large collection of these, since for some reason we can never bring ourselves to throw one out). We were also grateful that IKEA provided instructions in an easy-to-follow pictorial form, rather than a set of inscrutable directions translated from Swedish.

So here, at last, you can see our new patio in its more-or-less final state. Along with the furniture, there's been one other addition that you can see at left in the picture: a new rack to hold our garden hose. This used to hang from a hook suspended on a metal post stuck into the ground, but the post had to come out when we started to dig the patio, so we picked up a simple $10 hose hanger at Home Depot to take its place. It only came in green, which I thought might look odd against our blue house, so Brian gave it a quick coat of black spray paint before attaching it to the foundation with a couple of masonry screws. And there you have it, folks: a finished, furnished patio. Just for the sake of completeness, I'll throw in a cost breakdown for the project like they do at "Young House Love":

Demolition: $0 (thanks to the generous loan of a jackhammer from our awesome neighbor)
Wheelbarrow: $37.43 (this will probably be used for other projects as well, but we bought it for this, so we'll count it for this)
Gravel, stone dust, ground cloth, and staples: $278.68 (including delivery)
Pavers: $0 (thanks to a great find on Freecycle, which was what started this whole project off in the first place)
Tamper tool: $32.08
Two-by-four for screeding: $3
Sand: $7.85
Furniture: $123.16 (with tax, which is only half the usual rate because the Elizabeth IKEA store is in one of New Jersey's special "development zones")
Hose hanger: $10.69 (no charge for the spray paint, since we had some left over)
TOTAL: $492.89

Spending a whole week together, covered in dirt and sweat, building this thing with our own hands: priceless.

Gardeners' holidays: Squashmas

Of all the quarter-days and cross-quarter days in the calendar, August 1 is probably the easiest to assign a Gardeners' Holiday to. In fact, this is actually the one date that already sort of was a gardeners' holiday, since it used to be celebrated as Lammas, which is short for "loaf mass," a celebration of the first grain harvest. In our yard, however, we don't grow grain: we grow zucchini and tomatoes. And right now, we're growing a lot of zucchini and tomatoes.

Everything you see here was picked in the past week. The little yellow tomatoes in the bowl are Sun Golds, which are always the first to ripen; in addition to being early bloomers, they're immensely productive, and so sweet you could almost eat them like grapes. (This isn't even all of them we've picked in the last week; at least another pint went into the salad we had for dinner on Tuesday, and we used still more in a salsa last Sunday.) The one larger tomato is, I believe, a Moreton; that's an early-season variety we bought at the Rutgers plant sale for the first time this year, so I don't know yet how it tastes. And those five monster squash you see all came off just two plants, both of the Raven variety.

In theory, this gardener's holiday could be tomato-centric, but I have three reasons for choosing to focus on the zucchini instead. First, our zucchini production is currently at its peak, while tomato production is just ramping up; we're getting a lot of those early little cherry tomatoes, but the Moreton is the first full-size one we've harvested this year. Second, there's already a precedent for holding a zucchini-based holiday in early August: August 8 has been celebrated for some years now as Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day (or, more properly, Night). And third, we've got even more zucchini to use up than we have tomatoes.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of ways to use this versatile squash. (Hey, we wouldn't devote 9 square feet of our precious garden space to it if we didn't have lots of uses for it.) One of our standard summertime recipes is Linguini Aglio Olio with Zucchini, from Nava Atlas's Vegetariana; basically, you just sauté a whole bunch of garlic in olive oil, then add thinly sliced zucchini and cook until tender; then toss it with the pasta and season it. We've also tried, and enjoyed, the Disappearing Zucchini Orzo from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (you can get the recipe on her website). Kingsolver also has a Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe that we haven't tried yet, since we usually prefer to stick with our traditional zucchini bread, which we know will always be a hit.

For tonight's festivities, however, we're trying something new. One of our finds at this year's library book sale was a copy of The Starving Student's Vegetarian Cookbook, and while it didn't turn out to have that many recipes that looked interesting, we did find a promising one for Zucchini Parmesana. This is very much like the classic Eggplant Parmesan, except you use zucchini, and instead of breading it first, you just layer it in the pan with onion, pasta sauce, and cheese, and then add the seasoned bread crumbs on top. You repeat these layers twice, then drizzle with melted butter and bake for an hour at 350—which shouldn't be at all unpleasant, since the weather today is an unseasonably cool 70 degrees. The recipe calls for pasta sauce out of a jar (in fact, it says to use the entire jar), but since we don't have any in the house, Brian is currently whipping up a batch of homemade sauce, which will have the advantage of using up a few stray tomatoes and mushrooms we had sitting around. Then we can just add some homemade bread to round off our zucchini-based dinner.

Then, just to make sure we celebrate the occasion to its fullest (and use up those monster squash), we'll probably top it off with a zucchini-based dessert. We're signed up to bring baked goods to the Minstrel concert tomorrow night, so we'll most likely whip up a couple of loaves of zucchini bread, cut up most of it for the hungry concert-goers, and then snag the remainder for ourselves. And if that still doesn't use up all those zucchini, well, maybe our neighbors would like some. Or maybe they'll get some whether they like it or not. ;-)