Sure, it's been a crap Spring. 

Obviously, I've had the dread black cutworm. But it's not just me. Potato growers are complaining of low sunlight hours, failed crops, and a poor year for spuds. Vintners are stressing over a perfect season for powdery mildew. There's been uncommonly aggressive rusts on the garlic and on the broad beans around the valley....

And the worrying is set to continue into what is forecast as a wet and warm summer.

So there's nothing like the timely birth of a stunning Jersey girl-calf to lift the spirits. She was born 24 hours ago, and she's already on her feet, shepherded around the paddock by by her mother, Florence. The calf was a bit slow in getting onto the teat, so I had to clasp her hips between my knees, push her head down and squirt warm colostrum from her mother's udder onto her nose until she sucked, sucked, sucked to get her fill.  If Flo' is not letting down enough, the calf butts her nose into her mother's udder hard, once, twice, thrice. 

Jerseys produce far more than a calf can drink, so we have to milk out the rest of Flo's colostrum every day until she's into milk. Then we will start sharing the milk with the calf. She needs up to six litres a day, and the rest is for us.

Real cow's milk is different to what you get in a plastic bottle or paper carton. It is cow-ier. It tastes like the smells of a living cow breathing, farting and shitting. These smells are not unpleasant. They are grassy and real.  They are part of leaning your head against the warm cow and squirting long streams into the pail, for as long as it takes to milk her out. It's a kind of meditation.

You get up in a mild daze. Your hands smell of milk. There's nothing like it.

So this is what it feels like to run the rotary hoe over the corn plantings. Weeks of work and thousands in potential income tilled away to nothing. Hopefully I tilled away some of those bloody cutworms too.

But on the way back to the house, I saw the platypus out on the dam. I managed to get this close...

Beautiful!

Come December I'm looking at sowing my last succession of corn. I've been sowing weekly since late October/early November, so now it's a cinch to measure out the rows with bamboo stakes, top and bottom. To run a taut string line down the row, and poke each seed-kernel around 4 cm into the earth with my thumb, at about a 20 cm spacing (tip of my pointer finger to just past the base of my wrist). Then I run an 'indicator' of sawdust down the row so I know where to walk and till and fertilise and water until the seedlings come up.

The thing is, unlike last year, when I ended up with almost 100% germination and coverage, this year the corn plantings are looking very patchy (you can see the gaps in the photo at top). In fact, every time I look, there's less corn seedlings in every row. Sad little corn plants lie parched, severed from their roots at ground level. Whole rows are bare.

With a corn crop this is doubly disastrous. Not only am I losing seedlings = plants = corn ears = income; I am also losing pollination.

When you grab an ear of sweetcorn and peel away the outer husk, all those silky strands represent a direct link between the male and female parts of the plant. Every golden kernel needs to be pollinated via it's individual silk. The pollen falls onto the silks from the flowers that ripen above the ears on each plant.

To achieve perfect (or even good) pollination, lots of corn plants need to grow close to one another, so the pollen from the flowers falls rich and thick on the silks of the ears. This is why corn is planted in blocks rather than long rows.

So to have a 13 by 10 metre planting of corn that now contains 150 plants instead of 500 represents not just a loss of plants, but a danger of poor pollination for the remaining crop. And this is happening with the second and third plantings too.

What is going on here? Is it the native hens? Ducks? Or something more sinister?

So I start to scratch around the base of one of the fallen seedlings. And find a curled black grub. Some kind of cutworm.

Next seedling, nothing. Next, grub. Grub. Another grub. Oh shit, they're everywhere.

I return to the house in a blue funk. I don't have the time to gently scrape around each corn seedling and squash grubs individually. I've got to get on to planting beans, because the first two plantings were hammered by something, and also beets, which looked sturdy enough for the first few days but have been wilting and dying in droves over the last week, just....like...the....corn.....

Oh double shit. Back in the main patch, a little scraping reveals the reason the beets and beans are failing. And the Anatolian capsicums I was so looking forward to. Triple shit.

Type 'black cutworm' into google. First hit: Dark Sword-Grass Moth. There's a picture of a grub: that's my guy.

Second hit the very helpful Illinois College of Aces, displaying a photo distressingly similar to the one above. 

The bad news is that the black cutworm is a widespread and damaging agricultural pest. There's little I can do for the current plantings, short of spraying lots of noxious chemicals (there's a handy calculator on the website to help large-scale farmers decide whether chemicals would be economically advisable at this point; not an option for me, being happily organic).

The (kind of) good news is that the main vectors for black cutworm are weedy patches over winter, and late tilling. This is raising red flags for me, as both patches being damaged by the worm were very weedy over winter, and I didn't turn them over until the ground was dry.

 So with good agricultural practice I can (hopefully) avoid a repeat next year.  This year I cop a loss.

And now? I'll do the things I normally do when things go wrong: Shake fists at sky. Kick stuff and hurt toe. Grumble at Wife. And do better next time.

Also, I think I'll till over and replant some of the corn. Could be a long summer...

I had just finished this week's succession planting of corn. I stood and stretched my back, looked  over at the potato patch and thought 'those Pinkeyes were bigger yesterday'.

Sure enough, when I'd walked over to the spud patch, I found about a third of the Pinkeyes badly chewed.  

The culprit is the Rufous Pademelon (picture at top), a wallaby that thrives in the Cygnet area, especially if there's a bit of bush close by to sleep in.

Opinion is divided on whether you need to fence potatoes from wallabies -- most of the blokes on my road just string up some electric tape to keep the cows out and off they go. A friend up the hill grew spuds unprotected for twenty years...until the twenty-first year. Now he has to wallaby-proof his patch annually.

So it was a bit of a gamble to leave the fencing 'til later and just plant the potatoes. In fact, my plan was to fence the patch next week, but as I examined the chewed plants that were so vibrant the day before, I knew the time had come.

So there goes my week of garlic harvesting, bean and beet planting, cucumber mulching and bed preparation in the main patch. Instead I got out the spade and began digging post holes....

Two and a half days later I emerge from a world of posts and wire, strainers and snips, netting and clips...

You can see the chewed Pinkeye plants in the foreground. You can also see the enormous tracts of hilly land we've left for the pademelons to live good lives, eating their fill of fresh green grass.

I love the pademelons, they are indigenous to Tasmania, and they look like a cross between a mainland wallaby and a wombat. At night you can hear them hopping, 'thump, thump, thump', heavy and slow, but not satiated on my potato plants... anymore.

Because cute doesn't grow spuds.