ANDRE JORDAN’S DOODLE up top is funny, but I don’t have much sense of humor about mice (because of their strong link to the chain of Lyme disease transmission) or voles (who are relentless chewers of bark—as are mice). How I work aggressively year-round, but especially in fall, to reduce the garden’s population of mice and meadow voles.
As with any animal or insect pests, the work starts with reducing habitat—especially places they can overwinter. Close-cutting the entire lawn here is one of the final things I do in late fall, lowering the deck to 3 inches to reduce places to hide in general.
For mice and voles, it’s essential to install fine-gauge hardware-cloth collars (or heavy plastic ones) around young trees, in particular, though these and other rodents will chew wood young or old if hungry. It’s especially to make sure that the immediate area at the base of trees is clear. Friends with orchards do not allow turf to grow right up against their trees, for instance. Mow low around woody plants that are planted in grassy areas, or remove the immediate circle or strip of turf, and also remove weeds so there’s a ring of bare soil or at most a little mulch around the base.
I trap all year in areas around the house, and in spots where I see evidence of activity. Then starting late August each year, I accelerate my trapping of these rodent pests before everyone looks for winter digs. I have some tricks—including an idea for a box built to enclose mousetraps that I borrowed from the sustainable farming expert Eliot Coleman—who recommends baitless traps for voles. I use peanut butter. I never use poison bait, known as rodenticides; releasing that into the environment is anything but natural or organic, and represent a danger
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HE READ IT IN MY DECEMBER CHORES LIST: Make the last mowing before winter a short cut, way down low. And even though the snow fell before he got to that task, the guy in the doodle (is that you, Andre Jordan?) didn’t want to skip a single to-do I’d suggested, apparently.
I KNOW A THING OR TWO ABOUT DIBBERS, and this one looks perfectly fine to me. Not sure what master doodler Andre Jordan, our Thursday columnist, is talking about.
APPARENTLY MRS. ANDRE’S TOMATOES succumbed to “tiny insect things that will not leave our garden alone,” we hear this week from Himself, who very sweetly shared the actual sympathy postcard he drew for Herself on the occasion of her lost tomatoes.
I AFFECTIONATELY CALLED ANDRE JORDAN A BIRD OF A FEATHER last Thursday, when his new weekly doodle debuted here. Apparently this is the migratory Englishman-turned-Nebraskan’s response.
SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT.Andre Jordan seems to keep hoping for the best, despite a few well-documented cases of rejection (as in, loc. cit., The Girl I Love With All My Heart. Caveat emptor: Deliciously not PG!).
No, I have still not met Andre, though we’ve been in contact for more than a year. But we grow a little closer every week when the latest stash of doodles-in-progress arrives, and I get glimmers into the thought process that is behind them, just like I did when I read his memoir, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” (There is no better book to give your shrink; it should be on the curriculum of psychoanalytic institutes and departments of psychiatry in teaching hospitals and schools of social work, I swear. Insurance companies should mail it out to all patients using mental-health coverage, so they know they are not alone.) Some week
“And so I said very little,” his email continued, “and hoped (as I tend to do with my more serious doodles about depression) that people such as yourself would understand the enormous thing I did not try to say. If that makes sense?“I shall get back to my slightly passive aggressive doodling now. Ha. I am currently drawing a ladies bottom. I am as yet unsure how this will eventually become a garden doodle.”Stay tuned, dear readers. Next week promises to be a doozy. (I love my Andre emails almost as much as my Andre doodles, frankly. Well, except ones like this Quantum Physics Diagram, which actually does relate to gardening…and about 500 others.)Thanks for being Andre, Andre. And yes, of course it mak
THANK GOODNESS WE HAVE ANDRE JORDAN to warn us of the dangers all around us in this hazardous hobby of ours. I confess that even though I tried to exhibit restraint in this year’s seed orders, a few extra things have found their way into my stash.
WHAT BETTER WAY TO START OUR NEW ERA as a nation than by sowing seeds of hope? Thanks to a recent transplant to America, doodler Andre Jordan, for a perfect message for this historic week.
I was trying to repair a failed de-icer in the pool. All that’s missing from his latest doodle: the flashlight I had in one hand, and the hammer (to crack the ice and save the frogs from suffocating) in the other. (Not the same tools I’d used earlier that day to dislodge ice dams from the roof.) I repeated the hammering periodically throughout the night to protect my beloved amphibians; who needs beauty sleep, when potential princes are at risk? A girl must be versatile, well-equipped, and ever-ready.When does spring begin?Tagsandre jordan
BESIDES OUR SOMEWHAT OFFKILTER HUMOR, Andre Jordan and I have another thing in common: We not so long ago each headed for the hills. (Wait, are there even hills in Nebraska?)