Sheryl: “… A dark shadow that looked like an alien head.”

When staff aren’t giving tours, answering the Compost Hotline, or talking to the media, they are gardening our 1/4 acre ‘office’ in Vancouver. Our front garden is landscaped with native British Columbia plants that we don’t have to water in the summer.

This week Sheryl was doing some Fall clean-up out front on an attractive bush. “It was quite the feeling to be pruning away and then to reveal this dark shadow that looked like an alien head, but upon closer inspection it was a beautiful, perfect, huge wasp nest.”

Sheryl turned the job of removing the nest over to our Bug Lady, Maria. “It is the most massive one I have seen in a while. I cannot believe it was so close to the sidewalk all summer!”

The wasps are gone/dead and the Queen has hidden herself somewhere nearby awaiting a new season.

We’ve hung the beautiful nest up to dry – a perfect welcome to those Halloween visitors who have a fear of wasp stings.

Watch Heidi catch a Wolf Spider!

I spotted a rather large Wolf Spider in the compost toilet shed yesterday and knew that the gardeners wouldn’t be happy to come across it unexpectedly. Heidi volunteered to move the unwanted eight-eyed Arachnid and I caught the daring act on video.

During my 30 years at the Compost Garden, various staff have shared with me their fear of the spider, a great insect hunter. Theirs is a common phobia, some feeling it more than others.

I asked Sheryl, one of our City Farmer gardeners, why she is unnerved by the Wolf Spider.

“Is it a mouse or a spider? Is what I ask when I see something dark move out of the corner of my eye. Wolf spiders are big and move fast. And it seems (to me) that they are always running at me, which is why I’d prefer it to be a mouse because at least they always seem to be scared and run away. Wolf spiders also appear when you least expect it, opening a door, under a blanket or towel, behind things hunting for their prey.”

And Farhat our wormshop instructor says:

“There are always quite a few them in the tool shed along with many of their nests. I’m always a bit worried one is going to land on my head while I’m feeding my worms or getting the supplies for a wormshop out.” )

And from Laura, a long time City Farmer gardener:

“Wolf spiders: they are not like wolves at all. They are not regal, fluffy or dog-like – all things I can admire in an animal. Instead they are long-legged, fast and menacing. They look like they could outrun me. Okay, that also sounds a bit like a wolf, but still they give me the creeps. I can deal with small spiders, but somehow when they get big enough to warrant their own seat at the dinner table, that is my cue to freak out.”

And Sharon, our head gardener, remembers one spider incident 40 years ago:

“We were remodeling the house and the floor in the living room was the subfloor, which had lots of cracks. I was walking in my bare feet when I stepped on one of these spiders. It didn’t get squished, but was trapped between my toes and was frantically trying to escape. I was frantically trying to shake it free! I was hopping around the living room, screaming! Finally, it fell out. I can’t remember what happened after that!”

Sharon’s spider tale #2:

When I was quite young, we lived in a house that my Dad was building, so some of the floors were not finished. Spiders would come up from the crawl space. During the night I would dream that a spider was walking across my pillow towards me, and I would wake up screaming! Mom would come in and turn on the light, but I wasn’t convinced all was well and as soon as she turned the light out, I would sit up until I finally fell asleep.

Sharon’s spider tale #3:

When I was just married in the early 60′s, we lived in an apartment. Sometimes, a spider would come in the window. One night as I turned the blankets back, I saw a spider. I couldn’t catch it, lost sight of it, and immediately panicked! There I was in my baby doll pj’s, with my big fluffy slippers (Laverne and Shirley style!)… so I quickly put my husband’s work boots on in case the spider was somewhere on the floor. I pulled every blanket off the bed without finding the beast, but as I put everything back, I found the spider in the last blanket where it had been hiding all along. I attacked with fury! Poor thing never knew what hit it.

And our “Bug Lady”, Maria, has a spider story:

I moved to Vancouver in 1996 and lived in a typical Kitsilano rental house with 5 other transients. My room was in the basement with 2 others and we shared a bathroom. We always used the shower upstairs and the tub in the basement was only ever used by one of my roommates who enjoyed a good soak.

On getting to know him, me being a “Bug Girl”, I learned he had a a fear of spiders. I asked one day how he could take such longs baths knowing that the broken corner tile of the tub had a deep dark hole where a huge spider lived. He looked at me in shock and replied he never noticed it. He always took his glasses/contacts out when soaking.

The next day I came home after work to a chemical smell in the basement. It seemed my roommate couldn’t bare the thought of an eight-legged tub mate and took matters into his own hands by scouring the cleaning cupboard and pouring a chemical cocktail down the hole, which included, but was not limited, to a foaming oven cleaner!

I was so mad at him. I knew he didn’t realize that random household cleaners, when mixed, can be lethal. I had to do something to get him back. So while he was out to work at his night shift, I visited a local dollar store and purchased the largest most realistic plastic spider I could find and strategically placed it just underneath the side of his pillow. I went to bed snickering, that will show him. I worked days and would be gone before he was up.

Later that night around 3 am when he got home from the club he worked at, I was awoken to a loud cry, a whack and a grunt, a whack and a grunt over and over again. Seems that plastic spider was killed by a skateboard in the middle of the night!

Bug Trapper

An ideal device for trapping flies, wasps, spiders, etc.
You simply place the transparent pyramid over the insect on a wall or window, rotate it 180° (causing a door to slide closed), carry the insect outside, rotate the pyramid 180° again (letting the door slide open) and release the captive.

Find here at Lee Valley Tools.

More on the Wolf Spider here.

Sundews (Drosera): These sticky plants are great for trapping fruit flies and fungus gnats.

At City Farmer, we get a “horde” of calls about fruit fly problems on our Compost Hotline. The staff have a variety of answers and some of them were reproduced in the Globe and Mail newspaper last week. (See below.)

Our Bug Lady, Maria Keating added one more excellent suggestion, a small Sundew, a plant trap, that can be kept in the kitchen right next to your food scraps bucket. It’s sticky tentacles are ready and hungry for those annoying insects, which often show up on rotting food.

International Carnivorous Plant Society says: “The carnivorous sundew plant, botanical name Drosera, has about 130 species. All of the species of the sundew plant are beautiful and many look like fireworks, but they are deadly to the insects that fly near to them.

“One thing that all carnivorous sundew plants do have is the gel like substance at the tips of the tentacles that cover the leaves. This gel is a sticky substance that the insects that fly too near the plant get stuck on. The plant can then eat it.

“The plant is called sundew because of the gel like substance on the tentacles. The gel makes the plants look as if they have morning dew on them all day long, especially when it glistens in the sun.”

Pops Predatory Plants here.

International Carnivorous Plant Society here.

Five steps to a kitchen free of fruit flies

By Vivian Luk
Globe and Mail
July 16, 2011

Filling an indoor organic-waste bin with fruit peels, coffee grinds and meat scraps is one way to do right by the environment, but it is also a recipe for a fruit-fly problem. Fruit flies are, as the name implies, attracted to ripe fruit, and often the produce you bring home from the grocer contains fly eggs that may hatch in a matter of hours. In the summer, when compost can become stinkier than usual, fruit flies are all the more attracted to those rotting banana peels and will breed by the hundreds. Here are some ways to keep those pests out of the kitchen.

Minimize waste volume: Hold only one to two days’ worth of food scraps in a tightly sealed bin. Less food equals fewer flies.

Freeze them: Toss the contents of the organic-waste bin into the freezer before you dump the material outside. The cold temperature will kill any fruit-fly eggs.

Layer them: Place a used paper towel or brown paper bag over the scraps to soak up moisture and keep odour at bay. Food rots more slowly when there is no liquid.

Take it outside: Wrap up scraps in pieces of newspaper, paper towels or an old pizza box and take them directly to the outdoor green-waste bin.

Trap them: In a small container, combine half a cup of fruit juice, two drops of vinegar and two drops of liquid dish soap and seal the container with plastic wrap. Poke holes into the wrap with a toothpick and place the container beside or on top of the bin. The fermenting vinegar and fruit juice will attract adult flies and the soap will kill them. Empty the container every three to four days.

Link to story here.

‘Bees Please’ box is in harmony with its surroundings in Vancouver BC

By Chloe Bennett Design
May 2011

From her blog:

Life has been busy since the last post. This April, we finally installed the ‘Bees Please’ Mason Bee Box in the roundabout at Yew & 6th in Kitsilano. The design process was fast and furious, as we raced to meet Mother Nature’s deadline (mason bees emerge from their cocoons late March / April). Thanks to Doug Patterson, Landscape Architecture professor at UBC, for his support and guidance.

Michael and I bought the materials, and built the structure from scratch. I’m glad that I wasn’t aware of how much work this would be, because had I known, I probably would have chickened out, considering the pressure we were both under at school, etc. However, I have learned sooooo much from this experience. A huge thank-you to Michael, who is simply wonderful for helping as much as he did.

The ‘Bees Please’ box is in harmony with its surroundings, under the city’s height restrictions, and most exciting of all, the bees have stayed!!!!!

See Chloe’s blog here.

Third Millennium Farming - Farmers have returned to the city transformed – a mix between biowaste engineers, biologists, and botanists – managing high tech farms integrated into our buildings’ systems and city infrastructures.

By Jakub Dzamba
Masters of Architecture Studies
University of Toronto
Dec. 2010

This project proposes an idea named third millennium farming (3MF) that is about harnessing the abilities of micro-organisms (algae and phytoplankton) and micro-livestock (insects) to rapidly reproduce, for the purpose of food production. A detailed research project that resulted in the publication of a research paper indicates that 3MF food production strategies have a significantly SMALLER FOODPRINT than current crop farming and livestock rearing methods. Additionally, these new farming operations could be fed with certain types of city bio-wastes creating a new, and more sustainable, type of food chain.

In this vision of the year 2050, the 3MF revolution has swept away the antagonism between city, agriculture, and wilderness: grafting farming onto built form, while simultaneously allowing nature to creep back into our metropolises and daily lives. Farmers have returned to the city transformed a mix between biowaste engineers, biologists, and botanists – managing high tech farms integrated into our buildings’ systems and city infrastructures. Toronto is leading the way in the world’s 3MF revolution – its multi-cultural population pumps out the world’s most diverse culinary solutions for utilizing insects, insect flour, and 3MF micro-crops in new and innovative ways.

The city glows green at night as building’s photo-bioreactors grow algae 24 hours a day – thriving off the nutrients found in city wastewater, eating the CO2 and re-oxygenating the city’s polluted air, all while producing feed for the micro-livestock farming operations. In the suburbs, farmers work to maintaining chemical-free lawns and parks, using the vegetation’s overgrowth to feed micro-livestock. The CITY IS A FULLY SUSTAINABLE, FOOD-PRODUCING, ECOSYSTEM. The Ontario Place Experimental Community stands at the center of Toronto’s 3MF revolution serving as a radical test bed for decreasing the city’s foodprint, utilizing city wastes in farming operations, and creating a popular image for this new lifestyle.

See the thesis website here.

“People are really curious about what the heck we could possibly be doing”

By Mark Ferenchik
The Columbus Dispatch
July 18, 2010

Excerpt:

CLEVELAND – Insects are everywhere. In the country and the city. In your mulch bed and your garden.

And they’re all over the sticky pads Mary Gardiner and her team have placed in community gardens and vacant lots in what was once Ohio’s largest city.

Gardiner, an entomologist at Ohio State University’s Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, is leading a team trying to determine the best uses for land that thousands of people once called home.

Should these lots covered with chicory weed and clover become community gardens? Would they be better used for stormwater runoff? Or would they better serve residents if they were natural habitats or parks within the decaying city?

City leaders here and elsewhere are trying to decide these questions as they are faced with more and more vacant houses and lots. Insects will help provide some direction.

In late June, Gardiner’s team met up with researchers from Cleveland State University in downtown Cleveland and headed to a large, grassy and muddy vacant lot at the corner of Ivy Avenue and E. 70th Street.

It’s a desolate residential area once home to blue-collar workers who toiled in nearby factories, steel mills and warehouses. Now, it stands testament to decades of industrial and residential flight. Tires lie on the lot that is littered with bricks and tiles.

The area is just northeast of Slavic Village, a neighborhood that some have called ground zero for the nation’s foreclosure crisis.

And it is here where Gardiner sets her traps.

She’s looking for the hunters and the hunted, pollinators and pests. She and her assistants, Scott Prajzner and Kojo Quaye, set up small cages on the ground. Inside, they plant flesh fly pupae to lure hungry insects.

The cages keep animals such as raccoons out while letting in insects and spiders.

They set cards that hold eggs from caterpillars, specifically corn earworms, hoping to attract insects that eat these pests, Gardiner said.

They lay small pan traps with liquids to attract bees and put out the sticky boards to trap predatory bugs such as ladybugs and syrphid flies.

“There’s a whole bunch of land like this that could be used for community gardens,” Gardiner said.

But she’s trying to determine whether the conversion from lots to gardens reduces the number of beneficial insects.

The rest of the article here.

Officials look to urban gardens to combat decay in Cleveland

By Mark Ferenchik
The Columbus Dispatch
July 18, 2010

Excerpt:

CLEVELAND – Amid acres of vacant, abandoned buildings and debris-strewn lots, flowers rise within the ruins of 20th century industrial America.

So do tomatoes, kale, corn and carrots.

Here in Cleveland, urban gardens flourish while the city founders. Neighborhoods once teeming with immigrants who toiled in factories and African-Americans who headed north in the last century searching for better lives now go wanting for people.

What to do? Other American cities facing the same problems are turning themselves back to nature, recreating and repositioning themselves for the 21st century.

“There’s a lot of vacant land in Cleveland and Ohio cities,” said Mary Gardiner, an entomologist at Ohio State University’s Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster.

Gardiner is studying vacant lots and gardens in some of Cleveland’s most downtrodden neighborhoods.

“I’m excited about how people are reclaiming this land,” she said earlier this month while touring a number of the city’s empty lots.

Officials in cities including Youngstown, Detroit and Flint, Mich., have discussed or are bulldozing city blocks so they don’t have to provide them with costly city services.

They’re talking about turning entire city blocks into green, pasture-like settings or parks. And in some cases, small produce farms.

The question is whether these ideas are just short-term, trendy solutions to urban woes or something that will become part of urban landscapes everywhere, including Columbus, which now has 200 community gardens with a goal of 500 by 2012.

See the rest of the article here.

By Jakub Dzamba
University of Toronto
Nov, 2009
Email: k.dzamba@utoronto.ca

Excerpts:

The purpose of this living document is to add clarity and factual depth to a concept called micro-farming; where the remarkable ability of micro-organisms and insects to rapidly reproduce is harnessed for the production of food.

Third Millennium Farming (3MF) is about using species of micro-organisms (algae and plankton) that are much better converters of sunlight into plant biomass than even our fastest growing crops, and similarly using species of micro-livestock (insects) that are much better converters of plant biomass into edible meat than even our fastest growing livestock.

These organisms are not only vastly more efficient for farming food, but the actual processes that will be involved in this type of farming can play key roles in making the function of our cities more sustainable.

There are over 1400 known species of edible insects, and its estimated there are several times this amount of undiscovered edible insects. Many of these species can thrive under very different environmental and physiological conditions, but most importantly on a much more diverse range of food than traditional livestock. As a result several new strategies for farming feed for micro-livestock can now be considered. Micro-livestock’s ability to utilize alternate feeds is equally central to the idea of 3MF as is the farming micro-livestock itself, but is even more powerful in decreasing the end foodprint of 3MF.

Micro-livestock can be fed traditional fodder crops, the same ones we use to feed livestock (usually cereals). They can also be fed some plant species which posses an ability for achieving rapid growth rates like algae, sugarcane and phytoplankton; or they can be fed using industrial/agricultural waste products that aren’t ordinarily considered edible such as paper, wood pulp and non-usable lumber.

Industrial/City Waste: The wood and paper industry ends up with various types of waste products that have no other use than being incinerated for energy. Examples of this are wood pulp, recycled paper, and even lumber destroyed by pests such as the B.C. Mountain Pine Beetle. These waste products are could be used as feed for some species of insects.
Considering the above mentioned plant species and city wastes could be used to feed micro-livestock farming operations it becomes easier to picture how 3MF could integrate with our cities. Imagine algae-culture operations that harness both: waste water treatment plants, as a source for nutrients, and fossil fuel power plants, as a source of concentrated CO2. Or micro-livestock farms integrated into industrial operations, using the biomass waste as feed and converting it into a viable source of food and perhaps (using termites) hydrogen as well.

Maybe the antagonism between city and agriculture, core and periphery, would fade away, allowing for one to be grafted onto the other, while simultaneously allowing nature to creep back into our metropolises and daily lives. Farmers might return to the city transformed – a mix between engineer, biologist, botanist and scientist – managing high-tech farms integrated into our buildings’ systems and city infrastructure.

Read the complete document here.

Food Production: Kwantlen lab on cutting edge of pest control. Langley university to work on process that uses predators, parasites and microbes to fight destructive insects

By Randy Shore
16 Oct 2009
The Vancouver Sun

A new biological pest control laboratory opening today at Kwantlen Polytechnic University will place B.C. at the forefront of a global revolution in urban food production.

The lab — the first of its kind in North America — will develop insect-and microbe-based pest control systems for use on small-scale farms and in areas where farming and housing share space.

Cities all over the world and here in B.C. are integrating farming into the urban environment, from smallacreage market gardens to green-roof food production and community gardens in parks and sustainable housing developments.

But for people and commercial food production to coexist in a densely populated urban environment, alternatives must be found to replace chemical pest control, said Deborah Henderson, director of Kwantlen’s Institute for Sustainable Horticulture.

So it’s time we made better friends with bugs, viruses and fungi.
“In this province, only four per cent of our land is arable and we all live on it,” Henderson said. “We have to find a way to grow our food on it too.
“With the pressures of climate change and the price of oil, shipping produce from all over the world is not going to be a viable option,” she said. “We have to produce our food close to where we use it.”

In B.C. that means that skyscrapers and strawberries will stand shoulder to leaf, cucumbers and condos will live as neighbours.
Since you can’t spray chemical pesticides where people live, the Institute’s lab will harness the predatory powers of insects and microbes to defeat the pests that dine on our vegetables before we do.
The lab is a complex of insect-rearing rooms, plant-growth chambers and incubation facilities for fungi and insect viruses.

“We think that these products can be used not just in the urban environment, but also on large-scale farms in the Fraser Valley,” Henderson said.

The institute is seeking partners in agro-business to develop markets and conduct testing with an eye to producing commercially viable products. Agro-businesses have not pursued biocontrols with much vigour because the bio-control products are more perishable than chemicals, so customers have to be lined up before production can begin, Henderson explained. Many of the products are likely to be useful only in a particular region during particular times of year when the pests they are designed to target are vulnerable.

The Kwantlen researchers are employing a vertically integrated research and market strategy rather than a traditional supply chain. They will identify the technologies, test them in the field, register the technologies and market them.

“We can already get insects that are predators, parasites that can get into other insects and microbials like fungi and bacteria,” Henderson said. “These are all naturally occurring with no genetic modification involved.”
“We just need to get them into the lab and find out what they do best and how best to use them and how to turn them into products,” she said.

Kwantlen’s urban agriculture experts are already working to create potential markets for their products, consulting with local municipalities about how to approach development to integrate local food production into new communities in the same way as sewers, parks and schools.

Food production on urban fields and green roofs can help municipalities manage storm water, reduce heating and cooling costs and reconnecting people with where their food comes from, Henderson said.

The lab was built with a $2.23-million grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a matching grant from the B.C. Knowledge Development Fund and $2.6 million raised by Kwantlen and the Kwantlen Polytechnic University Foundation.

Link to article here.

Once again Maria takes us up close to insects at the Compost Demonstration Garden. In this video she captures honey bees drinking nectar from Borage
flowers.

More on Borage here.

Maria uses her macro lens to close in on our Fava Beans, which are covered in black aphids. Instead of reporting a bad news story, she points out all the beneficial insects dining on the aphids and shows us a bucket of ripe beans that survived despite the pest attack. Later she turned the harvested beans into a delicious Fava Bean humous.

More on Fava Beans here.

Nematodes Control the European Chafer Beetle

The European Chafer Beetle pest is attacking lawns on the east side of Vancouver. Soon these pests will migrate and destroy lawns on the west side too. In an attempt to control the beetle, it is recommended that residents apply nematodes to their lawns in the third week of July. Maria, City Farmer’s Bug Lady, describes how to do this.

See our previous video showing lawns upturned by crows looking for chafer beetle grubs.

European Chafer Destroys Lawns in Vancouver

European Chafer in Vancouver from Michael Levenston on Vimeo.

Lawns are being dug up all over the east side of Vancouver by birds and animals looking for the fat grubs of the European Chafer Beetle. Maria goes out to look at a boulevard where crows are having breakfast on someone’s no-longer-perfect lawn. She makes some suggestions for homeowners – they can use nematodes to help control the pest, or find an alternative to grass. How about vegetables?

Published in Malaria Journal, 4 August 2008
By Eveline Klinkenberg, PJ McCall, Michael D Wilson, Felix P Amerasinghe and Martin J Donnelly

To investigate the impact of urban agriculture on malaria transmission risk in urban Accra larval and adult stage mosquito surveys, were performed.

There has been a resurgence of interest in the problem of urban malaria in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. Urban malaria is likely to increase in importance as rapid urbanization will result in the majority of Africa’s population living in cities in the near future. It is commonly assumed that urbanization leads to a decrease in malaria prevalence because it results in fewer Anopheles breeding sites, reduced biting rates due to the higher ratio of humans to mosquitoes, better access to treatment and better (mosquito-proof) housing.

However, there is a concern that areas with rapid, unplanned urbanization, typically associated with low income, poor education, poor health care and poor housing/sanitation, may not experience such marked decreases in malaria transmission.

Urban malaria epidemiology will pose different challenges to those in rural areas. One concern is that urban agriculture, promoted to increase food security and alleviate poverty might, especially when irrigated, increase the urban malaria risk by creating breeding sites for the Anopheles vector. Several studies have recorded breeding of Anopheles in urban agricultural sites, but few studies have investigated the impact of urban agriculture on entomological and epidemiological indicators. In urban Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire, higher vector densities were found in rice growing areas than market garden areas, although sporozoite infection rates were lower and the impact on malaria epidemiology was not quantified.

Robert et al suggested that the market garden wells in urban Dakar, Senegal, might not be the most important mosquito breeding grounds as the presence of larvae in the wells did not coincide with the vector density peaks. Matthys et al found that urban farming created additional breeding sites for anophelines in the city environment and that malaria risk was affected by the type of farming present. However, in a recent study in two cities in Kenya, Keating et al found no association between household level farming and vector breeding sites. Entomological studies in Kumasi, Ghana, found higher Anopheles biting rates and significantly more reported malaria cases in urban areas with agriculture compared to urban areas without agriculture, though later epidemiological studies indicated that living near urban agriculture was not associated with malaria parasitaemia in young children in Kumasi.

Read the complete paper here in the Malaria Journal.

Gretchen LeBuhn, Associate Professor at San Francisco State University writes:

“I’ve just launched the Great Sunflower Project, a citizen science project designed to learn about how bees are doing across the North American continent and how the pollination of our garden and wild plants are being affected. We are especially interested in finding out what is happening in urban gardens. As you probably know, we know very little about bee activity in home and community gardens, but we do know how important they are for food production.

“The project is simple. We’ll send folks some free native sunflower (Helianthus annuus) seed and twice a month, we’d like them to time how long it takes for 5 bees to visit one flower on that sunflower. This information will give us an index of pollination that we can compare across the continent. Once we know where bees are in trouble, we can start developing a plan to help them.”

Find out more about this important project here: “Great Sunflower Project”.

Photo by Ginny Stibolt

Maria Keating, Bug Lady at City Farmer, has created two comix-style flyers from photos of insects at the our Demonstration Garden in Vancouver BC. Maria teaches kids and adults about the almost invisible life that takes place in every backyard garden.

See the full-sized document here.