Erin's land journal

I haven't been writing about my garden much, and that's because going into the garden and looking around is as much a part of me as anything else. I don't report on my nails growing, my hair dye fading, the cracks in my heels filling with ground-in dirt. I don't report on the gaspe corn plants growing with variable heights that betray their genetic diversity, thickening their ears as the tassels brown. I don't talk about the way my seven manual crosses are growing fruit: how KARMA purple x sweet cheriette grows a cheriette-style octopus vine with what look like grape tomatoes, pointed and bigger than I expected as they betray the concept of the smallest size being dominant; how mikado black x uluru ochre makes plants that look dwarf despite dwarf supposed to be recessive and they have nice big tomatoes swelling; how everything with silvery fir tree seems more reliable; how different crosses do well in different situations, from pots to hydroponics to soil. I haven't mentioned how the potatoes were up late and have a fun array of leaves, and some look like they're going to flower. The asparagus I planted next to the apple trees, the way some apples from seed have taken off and some have died, the way the new orchard is growing well but needs pruning, all that has done unmentioned as much as the way my nose is sunburning more than usual while leaving my cheeks and arms untouched. Some things are working, some are not. It's my garden. My manual crosses especially are an extension of me and so somehow cross into that private inner space. The garden lets my soul rest, be content, and just live here where it supports me in being myself.

It's very good.

Lotta people complaining about fireworks, but no one in our half of the province is doing fireworks -- or even parking on dry grass. The fires are slowly blowing up here, we have more 30C on the forecast, and the long-term forecast for July/Aug/Sept is 100% above average. We even have some 13C nights forecast! There's no sand coming out of my well. I am so so deeply grateful for it.

My favas are flowering, my garlic is not yet scape-ing (though other folks in the neighbourhood are), the tomatoes are starting to take off. I feel glad to have planted that extra corn the other day and figure I should be planting greens once a week or so at this point. And maybe one extra set of corn this weekend, just in case?

I have sprinklers set up for the lower garden and a lot of drip hose for the upper, though some will still need to be garden sprinkler/hand watered. I'm trying to do a little bit of that every day, rotating.

I'm waiting for some tree-friendly straps to arrive for my hammock, and I finally dug out the hardware to put my porch swing up (I'd put it away because the deck was falling off) though I haven't finalized where. This year my space really feels like it extends into the back, the now-orchard, and I want seating and places to sleep out there.

I'm in debate with myself over whether to plant larches and pines in square formations, so I can easily hang hammocks or beds from them, or in natural curves. I guess a double row would solve that?

For the first time I counted ducklings and found an extra instead of one fewer. I'd rescued a little duckling from the big turtle pond (they can't climb out on their own) and brought it to the mother who'd natural-hatched 8 ducklings a few days earlier-- and it turned out to be #9. That was nice. They have their own little water and food are inside, with the water in a paint tray so they can climb out. Hopefully they stick inside until they're a little bigger. I should also start putting rocks/floats in the ponds again.

Solly is trending towards settling down a little, maybe because I have a bit of a routine now. Thing is I'm away at work in the field so I can't take her out back every couple hours. I was expecting her to be explosively energetic but I think the routine is stabilizing for her. She's also got more used to the food I'm feeding her, her stomach has stabilized. She's quite a chewer right now, which is about right: I still have my baseboards chewed from when Thea was little. I would give her chunks of 2x10 about a foot long. I need some things like that for Solly, since I'm sure chewing up a bunch of plant pots wasn't great for her (she didn't seem to eat them though).

Walking slowly in the field seems to be good for me, but I'm making a lot of mistakes around thinking. I'm enlisting the summer students to double-check things, showing them how, and it's both a useful skill and hopefully keeps me on track. I have them all this month and the goal is to get most of the fieldwork done before those areas catch on fire. At the same time if I keep making mistakes I'll have to pull myself off and really look into something like disability. There are significant legal and safety ramifications if I make the wrong mistake. I've been enlisting the summer students to drive, so that takes a ton of pressure off my concentration, and there are two of them so they can trade off if there are issues.

Found a moose head by the side of the road in town, very fresh. Must have been first nations folks-- they're allowed to harvest whenever, and this had just been harvested. Bad time to be dumping meat in town right by the rez though: we've had a lot of bear sightings lately, and one back bear that's limping after it got into a fight with a grizzly and it's been getting skinnier.

Mornings are very very hard, wobbly and blank-minded and queasy, and nights are some weird pain and night sweats have started again (both of those seem to be mitigated by the birth control pill so I'm gonna start it again). Seems like if I stay out of the office I'm kind of ok though? Fingers crossed.

I was invited to infodump about my favourite topic today. I responded with this:

I like plants, especially edibles, and especially temperate and cold/temperate edibles, especially growing in ways that genetics and combination on the landscape contribute to carefully-chosen system goals, especially heterogenous varieties eg modern landracing (or old landraces, I'll take 'em all!), especially if those goals are non-conventional (eg not 'how much land can we farm with the fewest people but the most gas and tractors' but more to optimize for human power or climate or the particular site's water or soil or aspect or or), especially if animals are involved in that small human-designed ecosystem, especially if it's allowed to evolve through propagation and selection over time, especially if the surplus that humans take from that system is optimized for local community use including aesthetic preferences and values as well as flavour, comfort, etc, especially if those surplus foods (but also fibre etc) is aligned with cultural use and preservation practices, plus I enjoy learning those use and preservation practices including charcuterie, brewing, canning, drying, annd fermenting. But sometimes I go on a kick and grow a monstera or my grandma's spider plant or fifty kinds of hot pepper just for fun and I keep a bunch of geese and cats and dogs and an old hen around as pets even if they're not contributing to my system. Oh, and I love love love plant variety trials; I live where the only domestic plants that grow reliably are from the old Siberian breeding programs so I need to trial and breed my own varieties (it's super cool here over the summer so nothing ripens, and it's -40C in winter so any perennials die).

Last year I trialled 24 varieties of corn including my heart-corn (gaspe) and discovered some new ones that do well here and I'm going to landrace them, and I made a a surprisingly successful squash grex, and I'm growing a bunch of tomatoes that a collaborator outcrossed to wild relatives to try and get the flowers to cross-pollinate more and thus allow more natural geneflow within the population so I don't have to make a million hand-crosses (tomatoes don't naturally cross much). I was asked in the group this evening about what kind of plant breeding I was into and kind of saved this up for a more appropriate spot. 🙂

Gaspe corn is knee-high and comes from the gaspe penninsula in Quebec, it's one of the shortest season corns in the world; it's a grain corn and grows about knee-high and fills me with absolute awe and gratitude that so many hands cherished corn from the time it was a grass in south-central mexico, and with love and attention they slowly selected and planted and selected and planted until it was corn, and then selected and planted and selected and planted and it spread into myriad forms across north america, slowly, going at the rate of friendship and sharing and at the rate the plant could adapt over so much time, through forms 20' tall with aerial roots, and then eventually spreading up to Quebec where it was so cold and short-season that it was basically unrecogniseable from not just the original plant but from the intermediate forms. All those people, all that persistence, that cooperatively created this plant that now can come live with me where no modern corn can grow. I love it so much. Also if you want to try growing some grain corn and are serious about it, I have seeds to share. (imagine a sea of green heart emojis)

I wrote this up for the short-season corn group, posting it for reference:

The crows left me some plants this spring, though not nearly as many as I planned to trial. It's been a late year, a cold spring, and I got everything planted very late in roughly mid-June, though the end of August has been warmer than is typical. Here are my thoughts so far, I haven't harvested anything yet:

Gaspe has been more-or-less reliable for me for three years now. This year the plants ended up relatively large, in the past transplanting them has stunted them, and some had as many as 4 ears that look well-shaped. It's more prone to weird hormonal things, like an ear that sticks out the top where the tassel goes, but even those were well-shaped. Planted June 10th, tassels showed up roughly July 18. I'm anticipating maturity shortly. My seed is from Great Lakes Staple Seeds, John Sherck, and Heritage Harvest Seed.

Saskatchewan rainbow is a hair taller than gaspe, and it is less than a week behind it. It also has the multi-ear form and looks happy and healthy. I'm anticipating a harvest before frost from this one. Seed from Heritage Harvest Seeds, does anyone have more information on this one?

Atomic orange & Saskatoon White are in the mid-range, maybe 5' tall. 1-2 ears per plant. Both tasseled in early August. My Saskatoon White is the only one the crows left alone; it ended up being quite densely spaced, comparatively, while the Atomic Orange was hit hard and thus very widely spaced but it did fill in some. These might squeak in to seed viability for next year but it'll be touch and go. My atomic orange was from two sources, Baker Creek and a friend in California; Saskatoon White is from Adaptive Seeds.

Painted mountain and what I understand to be selections from it, Montana Morado and Magic Manna/Starburst Manna, will squeak in under the line in most cases or at least some ears from each planting will. Starburst Manna is the earliest of the bunch, Painted Mountain is uneven as expected in such a diverse mix, Montana Morado is last and may not quite make it. My Painted Mountain was sourced from 4 locations and there was a significant difference in germination and emergence speed between all 4, then the crows ate all but two types. The Glorious Organics source came in earlier than the Sweet Rock did. Magic Manna is from Adaptive and self-saved, Starburst Manna is from Snake River seeds and self-saved, Montana Morado is from Siskiyou Seeds and I expect would have done well if planted early into cool ground.

Cascade Ruby Gold Flint (Adaptive?) is going to be just too late for me, and Open Oak Party (Adaptive) will be a hair after that.

Early Riser (Yonder Hill), New York Red and Homestead Yellow (Great Lakes Staple Seeds) are only now starting to tassel. They have maybe three weeks till frost. So, the trial weeds them out for future plantings.

Open oak party is starting to tassel, though not to drop pollen. So is Early Riser, though it's a little behind.

I noticed with the gaspe that a couple weeks difference in planting time led to less time difference between maturities (I think, need to pull out all the relative dates and crunch them). I wonder if I'd got open oak and early riser into the ground three to four weeks earlier if it would have made a difference? Four weeks and there would still be the ghost of frost some nights, but probably gone by the time the seeds got above ground. With corn the growing tip stays underground in the seed for awhile anyhow, so frost is unlikely to kill the plant, but since they're so heat-activated they may not do much until it warms up.

Cascade ruby gold is dropping pollen happily but I don't see much silk. Saskatoon white looks like proper corn, full tassels, full silks, just kinda miniature (maybe 4' tall). Gaspe never quite looks like corn because it doesn't get tall enough to have that rows-of-stalks effect.

Harvested what I'm almost sure is a minsk early tomato from beside the corn and squash beds, and the spotted promiscuous tomato from beside the first promiscuous tomato.

I'm still intrigued by the super multiflora tomato volunteers. They don't seem to be setting fruit still but they sure do have huge clusters.

I need to get my fall grain and favas in soon.

My spring favas do have some pods, but it's really only some that do. Super interesting. I wonder if they needed frost to trigger pod formation and I planted them too late and missed it, if it's a water issue, or if it's something else. Hopefully the pollen from the podless ones got into circulation though.

I guess it's time to take the ducks out of the greenhouse area and clear both it and the south slope for those winter crops. I ended up with a bit of an issue since the corn and tomatoes and squash won't finish until a little later than the grain needs to be planted, so I don't think I can put things above in the big garden for winter. I could probably do a barley or fava and gaspe or saskatchewan rainbow rotation if my grain will overwinter, but I can't do full-season corn or tomatoes. And there's not time to run the pigs in for long in between, that's for sure.

The greenhouse is a cloth pop-up greenhouse, the first I ever bought, and the cover is worn out so I need to take it off for the winter. This will leave me without any greenhouses again and no money to replace the cover. I might be able to sort out a roof on it from odds and ends anyhow. I thought I'd have a big greenhouse by now, a 10-20' x 40-50' or something, in my 5 year plan.

That's life I guess. I have more garden space than expected anyhow, and keeping grain etc around my perennial plantings while they establish isn't the worst thing.

Tomatoes are almost all up from the micro plantings. My own F1s all have at least one plant, which is exciting. I'm interested to see how the cross between the dwarf sweet baby jade and the micros go, both Hardin's mini which has unusual foliage (I think it's reduced by different genes) and the aerogarden seeds which have standard mini growth.

Waiting to see which corns actually produced seed before frost, and which crossbred, is so difficult. There's nothing to be done about it though. I wanna see!

I've stopped hand-pollinating the corn because the saskatoon white is in full flower and cascade ruby gold and the glorious organics painted mountain (and some of the sweet rock painted mountain) and atomic orange and even a little of the assiniboine flint corn are in full bloom, dropping pollen everywhere. I assume there's enough in the air that it'll get where it needs to be at this point.

A couple gaspe and saskatoon rainbow have four(!) ears, though I'm not sure what's inside the husks, maybe just nubs.

I can't wait to open the ears at harvest, corn is one of the few plants that you can tell if it's cross-pollinated by looking at the seeds.

I don't think cascade ruby gold is going to make it before frost, it's really only starting to put out silks now. It's magnificent though, super tall. Maybe next year? Maybe if frost holds off till mid-sept? Magic manna, by the same breeder, is much shorter and has its silks out earlier despite being planted later.

It's really beautiful out there. Gonna need to water again though.

 All three Zestar! apples are in the ground now, along with the two Valiant, one La Crescent, and one Marquette grape. I haven't finished guilding the other two, but the first has its black velvet gooseberry and cinnamon rose and some asparagus to start. I need to flatten more cardboard to mulch a bunch of the guild plants when I put them in. The last apple is pretty cozy with some raspberries and a comfrey plant already. Maybe I'll give it a sentry rose?

I just noticed many of my guilding plants have thorns - gooseberry, rose, raspberry.

This morning I went up and collected pollen from the first atomic orange and sakskatoon white that were pollinating, and put it on some of the gaspe corn that was tasselling over in the Early Riser underplanted bed -- early riser is nowhere near tasselling or silking so the gaspe that were interspersed there needed some additional pollen. I also moved around the morden, saksatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, and gaspe pollen in the main garden.

The gaspe looks fabulous.

Tomatoes are blooming very heavily, especially some of the minsk early and taiga and the peruvianum. Lots of little green tomatoes in the promiscuous bed and in the minsk early and zesty green plants especially, though the northern mixed bed also has many. The taiga on my deck is the one I want to save seed from, it's super floriferous to the point that it looks like a multiflora a little. I want to snip a cutting from it for hydroponic crosses for sure.

Lucinda is a much slower-to-bloom plant than silvery fir tree, and it seems to be less prolific.

Mikado black has beefsteakier blooms than I remember. Corrie in town has some of my minsk black seeds and she's saying one plant in particular has super beefsteaky flowers compared to the others, I'm interested to see how the fruit present. They are both potato leaf so I don't think it would likely be a cross?

Lots of bumblebees on the tomatoes in the morning.

Some of the first female fruits on the squash shrivelled up, they those plants better get moving if they want to produce before fall. They're sure vining a lot, though, and the melons are flowering like mad so I'm interested to see if either of them make it.

Of the corns, I'll definitely grow gaspe, Saskatchewan rainbow, Saskatoon white, atomic orange, magic manna, and painted mountain again. Probably also cascade ruby gold, though it's just starting to think about tasselling and may not make it. I think open oak party, oaxacan green, montana morado, and maybe early riser aren't going to be fast enough though early riser is going super fast right now.

Of the tomatoes, I'm really enjoing the mixed northern patch. The promiscuous patch is kind of uniform seeming right now, but I absolutely cannot guess at what's going on with the mixed northern one. Note to self: next year only do 6 max each of the standard minsk early, moravsky div, and silvery fir tree and 2 each of named varieties. I want at least 150 or so unknown plants to play with. The dwarves: saucy mary, bundaberg rumball, and uluru ochre are opening buds soon but not quite yet, I'm really hoping they ripen in time. Meanwhile a ton of very, very floriferous volunteer tomatoes are filling the saskatchewan rainbow and assiniboine flint holes left by the crows with a sea of yellow. I think there's also a patch in one of the bean beds that's very friendly looking.

Next year I am definitely planting out some gold nugget and sundream and red kuri squashes to do deliberate pollinations with. I am just not certain that anything that's out there now will actually ripen. If it does there are sure lots of fathers to choose from though.

The bouchard peas have set a nice crop of pods, turnips are sizing up nicely, I remain in love with brassica carinata though it's becoming more of a sauteeing green, and my scattered gai lan is growing nice thick juicy stalks.

I wish I could spend all my time out there. Maybe next year.  

Last night I took most of the floating row cover off the garden. I left it on the new gaspe, on the montana morado/gaspe, on one patch of early riser/gaspe, and on the oaxacan green/gaspe beds: they still had young gaspe in them and I wanted them to be safe.

On the other hand, I took it off of my bouchard peas (interplanted with a brassica I'd forgotten about... maybe turnip? I don't think radish?) and they're looking nice in there, short (my other soup peas are a couple feet tall, these are a couple inches, but they're a dwarf variety so they never get that tall in the end). The turnips or whatever they are have some pest damage but the peas themselves are pristine.

I uncovered the painted mountain and it is gorgeous. There are two beds (actually three, but I didn't give my deep attention to the third) and they were both crow-picked and interplanted. They're on a south slope but they get some midafternoon shade for a bit and they are big and fast and robust. The seeds I added have grown in quickly. The surviving original plants are beautiful, and especially the seed from glorious organics produced very robust stalks.

Magic manna had poor germination, perhaps as expected, but some of the plants are tillering nicely.

I also planted a bunch of seed last night. I tossed some mixed brassica seed in with open oak party corn. I put in rows of a lettuce mix: lettuce, some mixed chicories, a little arugula, and a couple diakon seeds. I put in amarant cabbage seed which will hopefully head up over frost, it's supposed to be aphid resistant. I put in napa king F1 seed, just a few, for kimchi. I also should put in some more beets and turnips, another cabbage, some more napa cabbage, the orach I was given, and maybe some fall peas?

Up on the horizon I should figure out when to plant my barley, oats, and favas. I'd also like to fall seed tomatoes, brassicas, parsley, and just see how they'll do.

The benefit of growing my own seed is that seed is no longer a scarcity. I can put a couple thousand tomato seeds in the ground in fall and still have plenty left for spring sowing indoors in the traditional way. I can plant some favas to overwinter and if the plants don't make it, well, I can replant in spring without it costing a million dollars in wasted seed. It's a relief; money is tight right now and will be in the forseeable future.

The acorns I planted are not yet up, a couple may be peeking through the soil a little. I planted them a little deeper than acorns naturally grow, normally they fall on the ground, get covered by a couple leaves, and send their roots down from there. These I actually put in the soil to keep them a little away from squirrels, so it may be a bit before they come up.

There are zestar apple trees in town - a kind I've wanted for awhile - but I'm out of money. I've been hoping they'll be marked down but I suspect they'll instead go into the garbage. That makes me sad.

Still not within my budget but a little less time-sensitive, I've been looking at fruit seeds: sea buckthorn, buffalo berry, crossed sour cherries, mongolian cherry, maybe some interestingly-bred saskatoon, linden, and ash (I know, not fruit, but useful). Those can be fall planted with my apple seeds and they should pop up in spring.

Alright. So it's my job as a land steward to create a system that fits into the larger ecosystem. Sometimes that's fun and easy. Sometimes it's challenging. With the crows, obviously, it's challenging.

Here's a first brainstorming run:

Like with coyotes, crows are smart and it makes sense to cultivate a resident population that has behaviours that help me and that don't harm. My friend T had a raven issue (apparently where they are ravens are territorial, here I get a ton of them) and they killed the problem ravens, then had a pair of ravens move in that didn't do those behavioural issues. Having crows here does keep ravens away, which helps for not having farrowing pigs eaten but causes obvious crop problems.

So categorically, options seem to be trying to keep all ravens away through killing them or scaring them (this seems unlikely to work long-term since if I kill them more will move in, and scare-based stuff tends to loose effectiveness over time unless I get a bird-chasing dog or something); training them not to go after my corn; or making my corn inaccessible somehow. A fourth option, giving them something else nicer to eat, isn't a real option because of how population dynamics works: they'll just keep multiplying until they can eat both my garden and my offered decoy food.

I suspect what works will be a combination of these things. I definitely prefer less infrastructure and inputs, and will be working towards breeding corns that the crows tend not to bother (taste? strong roots before a shoot comes up so they can't be pulled? who knows what the plants will figure out) but I need enough seed for heavy selection to make this work.

Right now cost is a bigger issue for me than amount of input, I think. I also like to reduce plastic use, especially short-lifespan plastics.

Killing/Scaring

Killing the current set *might* cause a different set to move in that doesn't have the learning that pulling up corn is fun.

Keeping the pig and bird food extremely tightly controlled so they can't eat any of it ever might help keep the population low and the level of interest in my garden commensurately low. This would involve a bunch of infrastructure: each field would need an enclosed pig feeding structure (or maybe only in winter and early spring, since that's when I'd expect the most starvation to occur). Birds are easier to make an enclosed feed structure for but harder to exclude crows from that structure since they are also birds. There is almost always some kind of food the birds get at when I do grocery pickup at the store, grocery pickup might be a casualty of this or I'd need additional indoor shed space to store the food plus the garbage it makes.

Scaring crows involves movement, noise, and things that look like predators. A dog that chases crows would be great, though keeping it out of the garden would be important and I have trouble imagining how to keep it hostile towards them instead of acclimatizing over time. It's possible that a radio and some gunshot noises or something that sounds like people and bangs, if deployed only during the seeding window, would help keep them away for a season or two before they figured it out. It might be a helpful layer of control but certainly not dependable.

Almost everyone recommends killing one and hanging it up to scare them, or getting "halloween crows" to hang up, whatever those are.

Training

Maybe it makes more sense to call this "convincing" the crows.

If there's something that makes the corn taste bad maybe the birds would stay away from it. Since I do a pre-soak anyhow it wouldn't be difficult to soak it in something. I see there is a commercial repellant called "avipel" that I would need to look into.

The crows aren't eating the kernels at this point, but it's possible that if I low-level poisoned some and set them out (think stomachache, not death) then the crows would leave the corn alone in future, or maybe if I set some out each year before seeding. That has some drawbacks: dose so as not to kill anything is important, I'm neither looking to kill them nor to get bad stuff into the food chain, I'm not sure what would produce that effect, if the poisoning agent had a scent maybe the crows would just not eat whatever smelled like that.

I have limited water pressure and power up there, but there are motion-activated squirting devices that are supposed to also deter deer etc. I'm not sure how well they work, or whether the crows could outsmart them, and they're not cheap, but I've been considering them for a couple years now.

Maybe running an electric fence wire right over the row of corn might shock them if they couldn't avoid touching it when they pulled the corn up? Not sure how well grounded crows are and this would take infrastructure.

Removing Access

Floating row cover is working best for me this year, but it's a consumable plastic item (lasts a couple years) that also costs money. It does make the corn grow faster and protect from frost. They do seem to try pulling the corn up when it comes off but there must be a size where they give up on that. I have 5' wide strips right now, square blankets that would cover most of my garden at once would make it easier to keep bird out from the edges. This costs money.

Piles of twiggy branches may help keep the crows from getting at the beds, or if they can make their way into the twigs (they do move through trees no problem, after all) it can keep them from flying away quickly so maybe they will feel unsafe/I'll be able to get one with a pellet rifle and then they'll feel unsafe.

Netting over the field would also help with harvest time, since I suspect I'll have an even bigger battle there even if I bag each corn ear. This would involve a lot of posts for infrastructure, and I think there are some downsides for small birds (they can get caught in the mesh?). Posts are something like $15-20 apiece right now, this isn't a cheap option.

Polytunnels, either high or low tunnels, with either mesh or actual poly on them: these are expensive, they'd mess with my breeding a little bit (if I used poly they'd be warmer so I'd get better crops), they'd need irrigation inside. On the other hand they'd do the job, they could function as barriers to cross-pollination so I could control that better, high tunnels might be good overwinter spaces, I could grow way more stuff, they're generally great. These would also need irrigation if they have poly on them.

Hilling, which I did this year, involves pulling soil up against the stem once the corn is a couple inches tall. If only the leaves are sticking out, the birds can't grab the base of the stem to strategically pull out the roots and the plant is less likely to be injured, plus they just don't seem to go after them as much once hilled. This is cheap, a little labour intensive, and only works once the corn is a couple inches tall so it needs to be got to that point to start (maybe through row cover or a bad smell/taste).

Deep planting is what I tried doing this year, putting the seed in deep and tromping the soil down around it fairly firmly so it's not easy to grab the seedling and pull up the root but instead the top just breaks off. The crows wait until rain/watering when the soil is soft to pull, but it seems to still help and allows for some regrowth at least.

Mulch isn't precisely a barrier, but I tried putting fresh green mulch down in the hopes the crows would have trouble seeing the new sprouts to pull. Because they slowly walk across the field from one end to the other this didn't help much; they're not just flying over and spotting things that way. Also I know the infrared on dying plants (like ones cut for mulch) is much different than on healthy ones and I'm not sure how crows' vision is.

It's possible a deep straw mulch would be helpful at obscuring the seedlings until they were too big to pull. It would soften the ground, making it easier to pull. On the other hand it would add organic matter and retain moisture so it would be good for the plants, and big bales of straw are relatively cheap, though they're labour-intensive and need to be bought the fall before.

Someone mentioned that they plant into their weeds, making a little 8" wide opening and putting in several kernels of seed, then only weeding the rest of the weeds when the corn is a foot high or so.

I've noticed that two plants growing close together are less likely to be pulled up than plants evenly spaced. Maybe put 2-3 kernels together per foot, instead of spacing 4-6" in the row?

The crows didn't really touch my Saskatoon White. I wonder if that was a fluke or if it means I should just grow more Saskatoon White?

Dents are coming up: open oak party, early riser, and oaxacan green. They're coming up more unevenly, I'm not sure if it's a quality of the seed (viability or genetics!) or because they're in heavier, clumpier soil which is both harder to get the furrows even and introduces more variability in each individual plant's journey to break the surface. I went to look because I got spooked by the crows making food-calls in that field but so far it seems to be ok.

I do love the corn names.

Soon the flours should be up. We have a good slow rain today. Tomatoes are starting to root in.

In a couple hours I go pick up Tucker for solstice.