Work In Progess Wednesday: Toad Abode
SOS = Save Our Squash!
Toad Abode!
After having taken a sabbatical from veggie gardening last year, this year I am installing a new raised bed (30’ x 6’) and have been merrily planting seed flats with pumpkins, acorn squash, cukes and melons—and of course some hardshell gourds to use as pottery scrapers! Trust me, the seed flats are a lot more fun than manhandling concrete blocks and the-clay-that-is-supposed-to-pass-for-soil-around here. (An archeogeologist that I used to work with got bent out of shape whenever anyone would talk about ‘soil’ at a site. “This is New Mexico! We don’t have soil, we have DIRT!”)
One of the perennial annoyances I’ve had in my non-sabbatical years is squash bugs. I’ve tried pretty much everything—knocking them into buckets and feeding them to the chickens, sucking them off with a vacuum cleaner, hitting ‘em with horticultural soap. I still manage to get a few pumpkins and a melon or two most years–plus a truly awesome crop of super-sized squash bugs.
About a year-and-a-half ago I found a Woodhouse’ toad stranded on the sidewalk out front of my house after a rain. I boosted him up over the retaining wall into the safety of the yard and he apparently set up housekeeping, since I saw him a couple of times last year. I decided that I need to find out a way to lure him down to Squashbug Central, and to encourage him to stick around. The drip irrigation on the veggies might help, though he might decide that he liked the goldfish pond even better (but hopefully not the goldfish). I decided that what he needed was some shelter set up right by the squash patch—a toad abode!
No doubt you, too, have seen the cute little “Toad Abodes” sold in garden catalogues, etc., and gussied up to look like little mushrooms or fairy cottages and the like. I immediately knew that something like that just wasn’t going to cut it. There is nothing “cute” or “little” about Woodhouse’ toads. (“Cool,” yes. “Cute,” no. “Little,” definitely not.)
Woodhouse’s Toad
Photo courtesy of Matt Reinbold
(OK, maybe they DO qualify as cute. Sometimes.)
The first time I saw one was in my headlights one rainy night, hopping across the road in front of me. My first thought was “Why does that rabbit not have enough sense to get in out of the rain? And what happened to its ears?” Then it dawned on me that the hop was wrong, and it must be a toad. A toadasaurus. I had no idea they got that big! (It’s a good thing I’m not prone to nightmares.)
I avoided him, and then swung around so I could see him in my headlights. I don’t know why the toad crossed the road, but I picked him up and got him across to the other side. He wasn’t quite as big as a cottontail, but he was definitely a two-handed load of toad.
The toad I boosted into the yard wasn’t quite that big, though if he starts noshing down on my squash bug collection, it won’t take long. So, a serious toad is going to require a serious abode. I figured I could make one out of clay, and started paging through image after image online, but nothing struck my fancy. I thought of using one of my black-on-white Ancestral Puebloan (“Anasazi”) replica failures, but didn’t have any that would be quite large enough. (I did find a replica of a Chacoan cylinder jar that I might put in the garden in a secondary spot near the melons—it might work if he finds a smaller friend.)
I thought about deliberately making an Anasazi black-on-white toad abode, but it takes an awful lot of wood—to say nothing of an awful lot of work—to pull off a successful trench firing, and it would certainly be overkill for one little pot for one not-so-little toad. I settled on doing a surface firing, and kicked around various ideas, until it dawned on me that a squash-shaped pot would be the perfect match for the squash patch.
I had some commercially-purchased micaceous clay and so used that to shape a somewhat recurved bowl about 9” in diameter. I flipped it over onto its rim, and then gently indented the top and six equidistant lines down the sides to create a pumpkin shape.
I had recently levigated some Recapture Red (native clay collected near Recapture Reservoir in Utah) to make a slip and had a layer of brick-red sand left at the bottom afterwards, so I worked that into some greyish raku clay, and used that to make the stem. I formed a little cone out of cardboard, and shaped a six-sided stem around that, leaving the bottom open. Before I attached the “stem,” I used the skewer to put an additional hole through the top of the “pumpkin,” where the open part of the bottom of the stem attaches. I didn’t remove the cardboard cone—it’ll burn out when the pot is fired. Then I attached the stem to the pot with each one of the points on the stem lining up with an indented line on the pumpkin, and pierced a hole in the top of the stem with a skewer to help keep it from exploding when it is fired.
Since no abode can be very welcoming if it doesn’t have a door to get in, so once it was slightly more than leather-hard I added the door, and once it had dried a bit more I gave it a good burnishing.
Like my Salado polychrome pot, this one will have to wait a while for my lungs to heal up a bit more before I tackle billowing clouds of wood smoke. No rush…it will still be another 30 days before it will be warm enough at night to plant out my squash, melon, etc., and it will take the squash bugs at least another 30 seconds after that to find them and start gnawing on them, so I still have a little time before my Toad Abode has to be move-in ready.
Sweet Dumpling squash–one of my favorites!
I can’t wait to try out a new soup recipe!
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