CATS INDOORS

The Challenge  

There is no question that birds are better off when cats stay indoors. Exact numbers are unknown, but scientists estimate that every year in the United States alone, cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, and more than a billion small mammals, including rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks. Feline predators include both domestic cats that spend time outdoors and stray cats that live in the wild, sometimes as part of a colony.

Life for outdoor cats is risky. They can get hit by cars; attacked by dogs, other cats, coyotes or wildlife; contract fatal diseases, such as rabies, feline distemper, or feline immunodeficiency virus; get lost, stolen, or poisoned; or suffer during severe weather conditions. Outdoor cats lead considerably shorter lives on average than cats kept exclusively indoors.

Free-roaming and feral cats also pose a health hazard to humans from the spread of diseases such as rabies and toxoplasmosis. In April 2010, the Volusia County Health Department in Florida issued a rabies alert for 60 days following two unprovoked attacks on humans by feral cats within a month. Two cats had tested positive for rabies in the area. The CDC states that “Unvaccinated dogs, cats, and ferrets exposed to a rabid animal should be euthanized immediately.” Even in ‘managed’ colonies all cats cannot always be vaccinated, and infected animals may be even harder to catch in a timely manner before they infect other animals or humans.

ABC Conservation Framework   ABC's Cat's Indoors Program Aims to reduce the threat to birds from cat predation and falls under the category of Eliminating Threats in ABC's Conservation Framework

Eliminating Threats

Primary Birds Impacted
 

• Millions of common songbirds, such as the Cardinal, Blue Jay, and House Wren and long-distance migrants such as Indigo Bunting, Blue and Yellow Warbler.
• Rare and endangered species, such as the Piping Plover, Florida Scrub-Jay, and California Least Tern
• Birds that nest or feed on the ground, such as the California Quail

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Solutions  

Cat owners should keep their cats indoors. There are a number of ways that people can help their cats adjust to an indoor lifestyle, and ABC provides a wealth of resources to help them. Many veterinarians and animal welfare organizations support keeping cats indoors for their own safety, as well as to prevent them from killing wildlife. Outdoor cat colonies, sustained through the practice of Trap Neuter Release are also bad for birds, do not help reduce the overpopulation of feral cats, and are inhumane for the cats, who lead short, harsh lives. Instead, feral cats should be kept in enclosures, trapped and adopted to loving homes, or euthanized.

ABC Results
 

	In 1997, American Bird Conservancy (ABC) launched the Cats Indoors!Campaign for Safer Birds and Cats to educate cat owners, policy makers, and the general public that cats, wildlife, and people all benefit when cats are kept indoors, confined to an enclosure when outdoors, or trained to go outside on a harness and leash.
	ABC has been an outspoken opponent of the practice of Trap, Neuter, and Release (TNR), turns cats loose so they can continue to kill birds. In December 2009, a superior court judge ruled in favor of a coalition of conservation groups, including ABC, to halt the controversial practice of TNR of feral cats in the City of Los Angeles, pending environmental review.
	ABC has produced a wealth of resources to inform the public about this issue. Materials include fact sheets, posters, the popular Cats, Birds, and You brochure, the Cats Indoors Educator’s Guide for Grades K-6, print and radio Public Service Announcements (PSAs), and more. See all the materials ABC offers for download or purchase.
	ABC also produced the video Trap, Neuter, Release - Bad for Birds, Bad for Cats which dispels some of the myths perpetuated about "managed" cat colonies and the harmful practice of TNR. Watch the Video Here.

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What Next?

We need your help to spread the word on the Cats Indoors program in your community. Use the brochures and fact sheets to create a local Cats Indoors campaign, and get your local bird club involved. Take Action Work for cat control ordinances in your city or county. See Get the Facts About Cat Laws and City of Aurora, Colorado Cat Restraint Law). Link your organization’s website to ABC’s. Run an article on the issue in your organization’s newsletter. Ask your state wildlife agency to adopt the Cats Indoors Campaign and distribute materials. http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/cats/index.html

LAURA AVERY: DOWN TO EARTH

Patt Morrison Asks:
By Patt Morrison
July 2, 2010

The way this story usually works, an unassuming youngster from a placid little farm finds his way, or hers, to the big city and makes a splash. Laura Avery's story is the switcheroo. She's a big-city girl -- well, Cleveland -- who winds up in a job one step removed from being a farmer herself: nearly 30 years as supervisor of Santa Monica's farmers markets, which now number four. In 1982, when the city's first farmers market was in its infancy, Avery trundled her child's stroller among the stalls as a buyer. Before the year ended, she had been hired to run the fledgling program. Now she can shoot the breeze about fertilizer and late frosts, and sounds less like she grew up in the hometown of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and more like she grew up in 4-H, beach chapter.

Farmers markets as we know them have only been around for a generation -- how did they come about?

It was a direct-marketing program in 1977 which allowed farmers to sell their produce, to get the middleman out and let farmers and consumers meet face to face. It had to be run by a municipality, a farmer or a nonprofit. Big Ag and retail growers were against it because they had control over the packinghouses, and this allowed farmers to go directly to the public and sell. But [then-Gov.] Jerry Brown signed [an executive order] to start certified farmers markets. [Farmers] would come down here and people would buy everything on their truck and they would go home with a pocketful of cash. The cash flow kept them going, they got to meet happy customers; they weren't just shipping stuff to a packinghouse and waiting two years to get a payment or sometimes a bill.

A bill?

They'd send their fruit to a packinghouse and then a year later the packinghouse [might] go, "We had to pack, we had to store, had to refrigerate, we didn't sell it, so you owe us $10,000." That's why farmers markets were a good idea. Clearly it was something people were ready for.

Why did you need the governor?

The [state] Department of Agriculture [had] all these packing and container requirements. It was literally not legal to sell fruit unless it came from a packinghouse in a standard-pack container, standardized so it could be shipped anywhere and buyers could know exactly what they were getting. The direct marketing program exempted growers from standard-pack requirements, because they were selling to the person who was going to take it home and eat. The county ag department had to go to the farm, look at what the farmer was growing and [issue] a certificate. And with that [the farmer] could go to a certified farmers market.

In spite of farmers markets opening early on in communities like Compton, it seems like it's hard to keep them going in inner cities.

It is. You've got to look at it from the farmers' point of view. They've got to load up their trucks, drive an average of 175 miles, stand behind a table for five hours, pack up, drive 175 miles back. And if they're not making $1,000, they're losing money. We were invited to open a farmers market in Panorama City, across from a Food 4 Less. The [farmer] was charging $1.50 for tomatoes and the customers were saying, "Hey, I can get tomatoes at Food 4 Less for 49 cents a pound. Why am I paying you $1.50?" There are other models that would work better, like market basket programs, to get food to these food deserts. Gardena, the first [Southern California farmers] market, was started by the Interfaith Hunger Coalition. A lot of early markets were started by groups trying to bring food into low-income areas.

Do farmers markets take food stamps?

Yes, they do. And WIC [California's Women, Infants and Children vouchers].

You go out in person to the farms and make sure people are growing what they're selling. Have you caught any cheaters?

We have. People get produce they don't grow, and show up at a farmers market and sell it. The hardest ones to catch are the ones that grow a little bit of stuff; they have a certified producers' certificate [that] says, "We grow apricots [or] peaches [or] beans [or] carrots, blah-blah-blah." Wait, you've got a quarter-acre of carrots and you go to 10 farmers markets? How are you getting all those carrots? Where do they come from? I want to come see the ground that's producing all these carrots. We did catch one guy selling the machine-harvested ones, like horse carrots, the tops whacked off, all scarred. I said, "OK, dude, you've got a quarter-acre of carrots. These are commercially harvested [by] a machine that's about a quarter-acre long. We don't think these are your carrots." We put them in a box, shipped them to the [ San Luis Obispo County agriculture] inspector, and said, "Would you please go find out if these carrots are growing on the farm?" The ag inspector went out, showed the farmer the carrots and said, "Where are you growing these? I'd like to see your field." And the farmer didn't have a field.

You're really vigilant.

And you have to learn. The big knock in the early days about farmers market managers was, What do you know? You're just a college kid. Or you've never been to a farm. It's true, we'd never been to farms, so we learned a lot. Every time I go to a farm and see what they have to do to raise this food and bring it to market, I am so profoundly grateful and appreciative of how hard it is.

The name "farmers market" has become such a valuable brand. How else are people abusing it?

As long as there's one farmer, you can call it a farmers market. I think a lot of people have their token farmer, just so they can run a swap meet. I think that's too bad. To quote David Karp, "You can get everything from condoms to car batteries at a farmers market."

Incidents like the salmonella-spinach scare -- does that freak out people at farmers markets?

What freaks people out is how tenuous their relationship is to where their food comes from. They traced [the source of the salmonella] to runoff from a salmonella-infested feedlot, animals creating salmonella in their intestine because they're fed grain that they can't digest. [The tainted spinach] was [from] big aggregating facilities that take spinach from hundreds of producers and stick it in a bag. It never came from a farmers market. Customers at restaurants would say, "I don't want any spinach." The restaurants would say, "We get it at the farmers market," and people said, "We don't care. We don't want it." But at the farmers market, the farmer could say, "Look, you know us, we don't grow near a place where there's commercial runoff."

How about making you secretary of agriculture?

I'd be so anti-Big Ag. Look at the farm bill -- guess who's calling the shots? There's been a small gain for fresh produce, non-industrial [produce], but it's a constant battle and the entrenched interests are so big. I think farmers markets are going to be the only way to maintain genetic diversity of crop material and diversity of land use. We need to start valuing farmers and the land they grow on as something that needs to be protected. There needs to be legislation to preserve farmland and farming as a way of life. The more we lose diversity, the more we lose farmers, the more we're concentrated on mono-cropping and genetically modified seeds. If we only have one kind of corn and that becomes infected, we have no food.

The low point for the Santa Monica market must have been the 2003 crash, when an 86-year-old man plowed his car through the market and killed 10 people.ƒo

It took place 15 minutes before the market closed, so the crowds were definitely not at their peak, thank God. We were just talking about it -- the amazing thing is how quickly the farmers wanted to come back. [Three days later] they had a kind of interfaith [blessing], the mayor came out, and we welcomed back the farmers and the customers.

What is the biggest threat to farmers markets now?

The threat of Big Ag imposing quote "safety practices" that apply to all farmers in the wake of the salmonella debacle. This legislation [would] basically mandate how all produce is grown. It will be very damaging to small farmers. We're trying to exempt farmers who make less than $500,000 a year from having to comply with these ridiculous quote "safety standards." If the regulations apply to him, a little farmer in Ventura is not going to be able to have any natural habitat for beneficial insects. He's going to have to cut down tree rows because an owl might crap in [the] field. [No] water habitat, because a frog might hop through. They don't want any animals, any insects. They might actually make this pertain to everybody, not just the big [growers] it should pertain to. It's terrifying.

What was the first thing you bought at a farmers market?

Probably peaches. I just had a peach for breakfast. I like a good, meaty yellow peach. A June Lady is one of the best.

patt.morrison@latimes.com
This interview was edited and excerpted from a longer taped transcript. An archive of Morrison's interviews is online at latimes.com/pattasks.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-newmorrison-avery-20100703,0,2352503.column

My Plant Died

Some important lessons this "new garden customer" could have learned from this interaction and also even more helpful information this customer could have obtained had he allowed the gardener to share:

1. Plants are living beings who need to be cultivated and nurtured, especially when young (just like a child). 
2. Learn about the individual plants needs in the way of sun and watering. Google it and/or ask someone.
3. A plant that likes full sun by the ocean may immediately be burned and shrivel up and die when planted in hot desert like conditions. Utilizing taller plants or trees to shade (and cool down) some less hardy or more light sensitive plants during the hotter parts of the day is helpful.
4. Plants need to be taken out of starter pots and "planted in the soil" as determined by #2 (setting on top the ground or putting the little pot in the ground does not mean it is planted in the soil).
5. More is NOT better. Fertilizers are not needed when planting new plants. Chemical fertilizers act on the plants like steroids do with people. Chemical fertilizers will also burn tender new roots. Plants are feed by the activity of the microorganisms in the soil, not by fertilizer. We want to feed the soil not the plant. Compost and/or mulch are good additions to new plantings after they have been established for a few months or few weeks (if needed to protect from drying out and baking during hot weather).
6. Watering, changes with the condition of the plant and the weather. Any new start will need to be keep moist (not drowning) during the first few weeks after planting as new roots establish themselves and grow into the soil surrounding the initial root ball. When the plant has matured, it will have more roots that have spread wider and deeper in the soil and that can draw on the water from the soil, ie. you don't need to water as often. But individual kinds of plants have different water needs. Some need continual moisture, some need to be allowed to become a little dryer between waterings and some would die from continually moist soils. Weather conditions affect this too - as when mother nature is watering, you don't need or want to over-water.
7. Lastly, growing plants are part of life's ever-changing learning system. By watching, nurturing and enjoying the development of plants we gain knowledge about the natural world and are rewarded on many levels.

Cover Crops: Options, Tips and Advantages for the Home Garden

 

Planting cover crops is a traditional technique that will solar-charge your soil.
By Barbara Pleasant  -  October/November 2009


 







ILLUSTRATION: ELAYNE SEARS

You can choose colorful cover crops, such as bachelor’s buttons and crimson clover, to build your soil and beautify your beds.

There are three main ways to improve your soil — grow cover crops, mulch the surface with biodegradable mulches, and/or dig in organic soil amendments (such as compost, grass clippings, rotted manure or wood chips). All have their advantages and none should be discounted, but cover cropping is the method least likely to be practiced in home gardens. There is a reason for this: Information on using cover crops is tailored to the needs of farmers who use tractors to make short work of mowing down or turning under cover crops. But when your main tools for taking down plants have wooden handles and you measure your space in feet rather than acres, you need a special set of cover crop plants, and special methods for using them.

How Cover Crops Help

A cover crop is any plant grown for the primary purpose of improving the soil. Since the early 1900s, farmers have used cover crops to restore fertility to worn-out land. In addition to helping bulk up soil with organic matter, cover crops prevent erosion, suppress weeds, and create and cycle soilborne nutrients using the power of the sun. Recent advances in soil biology have revealed two more ways cover crops can improve soil.

Rhizodeposition is a special advantage to working with cover crops. Many plants actually release sugars and other substances through their roots. They are like little solar engines, pumping energy down into the soil. With vigorous cover crop plants, this process goes on much more deeply than you would ever dig — 6 feet for oats and rye! If you are leaving your garden beds bare in winter, you are missing the chance to use cold-hardy crops such as cereal rye or oats to solar-charge your soil. Thanks to this release of sugars, the root tips of many plants host colonies of helpful microorganisms, and as the roots move deeper, the microbes follow.

But so much for scientific talk. If you’ve experimented with cover crops, perhaps you have dug up young fava beans or alfalfa seedlings to marvel at the nitrogen nodules on their roots, or watched a stand of buckwheat go from seed to bloom in four weeks flat. Or how about this one: It’s April and the soil is warming up and drying out. After loosening a clump of fall-sown wheat with a digging fork, you pull up a marvelous mop of fibrous roots and shake out the soil. What crumb! The soil’s structure is nothing short of amazing! These are the moments an organic gardener lives for. 

Bio-drilling is what happens when you use a cover crop’s natural talents to “drill” into compacted subsoil. For example, you might grow oilseed or daikon radishes as a cover crop where their spear-shaped roots will stab deep into tight subsoil. Bio-drilling action also takes place when deeply rooted cover crop plants penetrate subsoil and die. Then, the next crop grown may actually follow the rooting network mapped out by the cover crop.

ILLUSTRATION: ELAYNE SEARS

Maryland researchers were able to track this process using special camera equipment (a minirhizotron), which took pictures of the interactions between cover crop (canola) and crop plant (soybean) roots. As the canola’s deep roots decomposed, soybean roots followed the trails they blazed in the subsoil, hand in glove. In addition to reduced physical resistance, the soybean roots probably enjoyed better nutrition and the good company of legions of soil-dwelling microcritters, compliments of the cover crop.

 Dozens of plants have special talents as cover crops, and if you live in an extremely hot, cold, wet or dry climate, you should check with your local farm store or state extension service for plant recommendations — especially if you want to use cover crops under high-stress conditions. Also be aware that many cover crop plants can become weedy, so they should almost always be taken down before they set seed.

How to Take Cover Crops Down

Speaking of taking down, this is the sticking point for most gardeners when it comes to cover crops, which is why it’s a good idea to start small with your first cover crop plantings. Traditionally, cover crops are plowed under, but most gardeners chop, cut or pull them, and use them for mulch or compost. Or you can assign the task to a flock of pecking poultry. All are sound methods, and it is possible that composting cover crop plants produces a more balanced soil amendment compared to chopping raw-crop residue directly into the soil. Pulling plants saves time, too, because you don’t have to wait three weeks (or more) to plant, in order to avoid possible negative reactions between rotting plant residues and the plants you want to grow. For example, the cover crop known as sudex (a fast-growing sorghum-Sudan grass hybrid) produces gargantuan amounts of biomass (leaf, stem and roots), but fresh sudex residue in the soil inhibits the growth of tomatoes, lettuce and broccoli. Oats, wheat and other cover crop plants also produce allelopathic substances that can temporarily hinder the germination and growth of other plants, too, but not in quantities sufficient to cause serious disturbances in the garden. If you chop in fresh cover crop residues, just plan to wait two to three weeks before sowing crop seeds.

Top Cover Crop Options

The following cover crops work well in a wide range of climates and situations, and they’re not hard to take down, as long as you do it at the right time and in the proper way. We’ve selected these six because they are easy to manage using hand tools, grow during different seasons and provide multiple benefits in the garden.

During the summer, buckwheat (Fagopyron esculentum) is in a class by itself as a cover crop. Seeds sown in moist soil turn into a weed-choking sea of green within a week, with many plants growing 2 feet high or more and blooming in less than 30 days. Should you need to reclaim space that has been overtaken by invasives, buckwheat can be your best friend. In my garden, buckwheat has been a huge ally in cleaning up a spot overrun by dock, bindweed and other nasties that grow in warm weather. For two years, each time the noxious weeds grew back, I dug them out and planted more buckwheat. Throughout the battle, the buckwheat attracted bees and other buzzers in droves. Fortunately, even mature buckwheat plants are as easy to take down as impatiens — simply pull the succulent plants with a twist of the wrist, or use a hoe or scythe to slice them off at the soil line. You can let the dead plants die into a surface mulch and plant through them, gather them up and compost them, or chop them into the soil.

In late summer, while the soil is still warm, you have a fine opportunity to try barley (Hordeum vulgare), a fast-growing grain that’s great for capturing excess nitrogen left over from summer crops, which might otherwise leach away during the winter. Barley often suffers from winter injury in Zone 6, and is often killed altogether in Zone 5 and above. This is good! The dead barley residue shelters the soil through winter, and dries into a plant-through mulch in spring in cold zones.

 




ILLUSTRATION: ELAYNE SEARS

Oats are a good cover crop option. 

Mature oat plants will grow 2 to 3 feet tall, but their roots can extend up to 6 feet into the soil.

 
Early fall is the best time to grow the dynamic duo of soil-building cover crops — oats (Avena sativa) mixed with cold-hardy winter peas (Pisum sativum). When taken down just before the peas start blooming in spring, an oat/pea combination cover crop is the best way to boost your soil’s organic matter and nutrient content using only plants. Both make a little fall growth when planted in September, and in spring the peas scramble up the oats. On the down side, one or both crops can be winterkilled before they have a chance to do much good north of Zone 5, and in more hospitable climates it will take some work to get the plants out of the way in spring. Do it by mid-April, because the job gets tougher as the plants get older. Cut or mow them down first, and then pull and dig your way through the planting. A heavy-duty chopping hoe works well for this.

Hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) needs a good head start on winter, too, but it’s hardy to Zone 4 and gives a huge payback in terms of soil improvement, and saved time and labor. Unlike many other cover crop plants, you can quickly kill hairy vetch by slicing just below the crown with a sharp hoe. When hairy vetch is beheaded about a month before it’s time to plant tomatoes and peppers, you can open up planting holes and plant through the dried mulch — no digging required.

Late fall is not a lost season for cover crops, but in most climates you’re limited to cereal rye (Secale cereale), the cold-hardiest of them all. Rye will sprout after the soil has turned chilly, but be sure to take it out early in spring, before the plants develop tough seed stalks. Or let your chickens keep it trimmed; leave the birds on the patch longer in spring and they will kill the rye for you. If you’re looking for a cover crop you can plant in October for cold-season poultry greens, cereal rye is probably the best choice.

In any season, you may find many more great cover crops in seed catalogs, or among your leftover seeds. As you consider possibilities, think about plants that quickly produce an abundance of leaves and stems, but are easy to pull up or chop down if you decide you don’t want them. Bush beans, leafy greens or even sweet corn can be grown as short-term cover crops, along with annual flowers such as calendulas and borage in early spring, or marigolds and sunflowers in summer. Teaming up a flower with a cover crop plant is always fun, whether you’re planting sulphur cosmos with cowpeas in summer, oats with dwarf sunflowers in late summer or bachelor’s buttons with crimson clover in the fall. Whatever you do, just don’t leave your soil bare or you’ll be missing out on a chance to capture solar energy to recharge your food web.


To locate mail-order sources for cover crops, go to the MOTHER EARTH NEWS Seed and Plant Finder.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/Cover-Crops-Soil-Nutrients.aspx?utm_content=11.05.10+FG&utm_campaign=FG&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email