To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] japanese beetles and avian predators
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:56:03 -0500
Betsy, Oh yes, the poultry will eat your tomatoes. We wound up making
little fences of chicken wire where we really wanted to protect things.
They mostly leave beans and crowder peas alone, the muscovies liked to eat
pepper leaves, and my tomatoes are grown in "Japanese tomato rings so a lot
of the fruit are up out of reach anyway. We lost a certain amount to the
ducks, less to the guineas, but we gained a lot from bug and weed control.
The first spring we had muscovies they went around and ate all the dandelion
seed heads. We looked at each other and said, this is really going to
change the ecology of the garden. They ate most of the seed of the little
smartweeds that don't taste good to Jap beetles. They apparently ate enough
grasshoppers to dramatically cut the blister beetle population. This has
been a wonderful side effect. They ate nearly all our chicory, which I'd
planted years earlier from Italian seed and which seeded itself like a weed
and fed us for much of the year. There was enough inside our little fences
to replenish the population.
Poultry can be used like any tool. You can keep them penned up all
summer and only let them roam in winter when the garden is done. That way
you throw them all your bugs and scraps and either haul the manure to the
garden or rotate their pen as part of the garden or have moveable cages in
the garden. We used to move the chicken cage onto any area that we wanted
to plant, to let the hens eat all the weeds and scratch the ground up. The
thing is that poultry are all different, so they are used differently. We
have not found the guineas to be as much use as others, but that may be just
us. Donna