The War Against Pests

Everything is growing vigorously and healthily (mostly), problem is, it seems that every creature that walks, crawls, creeps, or flies wants to take a bite out of the profits. I've been spending a lot of time doing pest control. My three major problems thus far: deer, slugs, and caterpillars.

Currently, deer have been less of a problem. They have not eaten anything that I painted with my deer repellant. They were continuing to trample beds every night, but now they've been coming to the garden less and less frequently. I'm still not taking any chances though, I continue to reapply the repellant every few days.

The slugs have destroyed a few plants, and seem to prefer seedlings or new transplants. They've destroyed most of the small tomato seedlings I planted, as well as a marigold, some lima beans, and they're nibbling on the new pepper plant. I go outside at night sometimes with sissors and a flashlight to cut up any that I see. I also tried putting slug traps out last night. These are small jars with water, yeast, and sugar in them. I didn't drown any slugs, but I cut up a few that were heading towards them.

Caterpillars are invading my broccoli. :( I've been picking them off, but it seems that more arrive to replace the ones I squish. Now they've infested the new heads. It's not so fun to pick a head for dinner, only to have to spend 20 minutes removing all the caterpillars. I knew someone once who sauteed and ate some big tomato hornworms, but I'm not that angry yet. I went down to the local garden store to pick up some BT (bacillus thuringiensis), a natural bacteria that causes caterpillars to sicken and die. The owner of the store also suggested that I just eat the caterpillars, lol. They had sold out of BT (guess everyone else is having the same problem), but he did find a two year old bottle in the back room. It might not work, he said, so he gave it to me free. I dumped a load of it in a watering can (with water), and doused the broccoli with it. We'll see if that does anything.

One pest that hasn't happened so far is weeds. An hour or two of weeding per week has been all that's necessary to keep them down. None of them get larger than seedling size. Since the soil is so soft, they're very easy to pull out. However, the old garden is a different story. Seems like I weed it, and suddenly there's a new batch of weeds, fully grown. I'm not going to tear my hair out over it, though.

Onto the pictures!

Daylillies seem to be at their height. This is about two weeks earlier than usual (like the rest of the season has been).

Some little tomato and basil seedlings that I repotted. Will they ever get big enough to set fruit this summer? Probably not, but I can try.

  

My pumpkin volunteer.

Massive, bug eaten broccoli.

Sunflowers, growing quickly. 

Lush, happy chamomile. It's producing faster than I can harvest it. The chamomile plants I brought back from Maine are looking much healthier. They used to be yellowed on the bottom, now they are green throughout. My soil must be healthy!

Pole beans and squash in the old garden. There's also a massive bunch of mint.

Tomatoes. One of the plants has blossoms. Most of the others are still recovering from deer.

Corn is growing pretty slowly. Some of the leaves are also turning red/brown. Not sure what's up with that. I also planted an entire bed full of corn next to it. This new patch took four days to sprout, which is much faster than usual, because I soaked the seeds for a couple hours before planting.

Slow growing sweet potatoes. Not too sure how successful these will be. The biggest, healthiest plant got chomped by deer, and has since completely shriveled and died. :(

Carrots and onions. I cannot wait to harvest these! I also figured out a better method of sowing carrots. Instead of putting the one seed in a tiny little hole and covering it, I drop seeds two at a time right on the surface of freshly cultivated soil, and very lightly cover over that, and lightly mulch. I've had a much higher germination rate by doing this. It helps that I have tiny fingers to more easily handle the little seeds.

I got tired/lazy and did not double dig or compost this section of the garden (I ran out of aged compost anyway). Instead, I quickly turned over the soil to loosen it, shaped it into mounds, and planted various different types of squash seeds, along with nasturtium seeds and transplanted mint from the old garden. Supposedly, squash can do well in poorer soils anyway (not that my soil is at all poor, it just needs to be worked more).

Gorgeous and tasty lettuce. It's almost too pretty to eat! I'm looking foward to planting a fall crop of these under a row cover.

Oh, Deer!

 So last weekend I came downstairs at 4:30 am to eat breakfast (had to go to work early that day) , and suddenly there's this HUGE thing flying around the kitchen!! Scared the crap out of me. Judging by the shape of it's wings and it's flight pattern, I realized it was a bat. It flew into another room, where it flew around a few times and then disappeared. I left a note by my parent's door before I left for work, so they wouldn't freak out if they discovered it. Hours later when I got back, no one had found it yet. My dad finally found it nestled in between the screen and glass of an opened window. It refused to budge when we tried to prod it outside. Apparently it was SOUND asleep.

Here it is, just "hanging out". It stayed in this spot until after dark, when it finally flew away. Looks a lot smaller asleep than it did when it was flying around the kitchen.

















Anyway, it's been a somewhat frustrating week in the garden. The deer have returned almost every night, nibbling on some things, and mostly just trampling and leaving big hoof prints everywhere.  The cardinal rule of bio intensive gardening is: never step on the beds! They are stepping all over the soft soil in the beds, damaging and killing plants. I looked up homemade deer repellent recipes on the internet, and found one that seems to work. I mixed up 3 eggs, several cloves of garlic, and a whole lot of pepper in a blender, and then diluted that with about a half gallon of water. I've been basically painting that on everything, and they haven't eaten anything I've put it on, yet. But they're still coming back. Putting up a large fence is just going to be too expensive. So it looks like I'll be putting deer repellent on everything once or twice a week. Maybe I should set up a tent and start sitting outside all night? In addition to the damage I listed in my last post, they also ate the tops off several of my tomato plants. =(

I harvested broccoli! Yum! The heads aren't huge, but I didn't want to wait for them to get larger and risk having them bloom, like they did last time I tried growing broccoli. I was weeding in the garden yesterday and noticed a fair amount of insect damage to the plants. So I practiced some organic pest control: squishing all the caterpillars that I could find on the leaves. They're already growing side shoots, and I'd like to be able to harvest them before the bugs destroy the plants.

 


Corn! Deer haven't gotten to these.... yet.

Sunflowers. They lean back and forth every day, following the sun. The deer ate two of them.

A healthy pumpkin volunteer growing on the edge of the strawberry bed. Deer don't like squash plants, because they're prickly. They also haven't touched my onions or broccoli.

What's left of my tomatoes.

Chamomile from Maine, which I've already harvested numerous flowers from.


This is my vertical frame contraption, the idea of which I got from the Square Foot Gardening book. I've hung string from it, which hopefully the tomatoes can be trained to grow up.

Beans. Some of them have been chomped by deer.



Nom nom nom nom... that is the sound the deer make as they nibble my garden every night! Midnight snack, yum yum yum!

Corn, beans, and deer.

I went to Maine over the weekend. While I was there, I got two large containers full of fresh, slimy, smelly seaweed off the beach. I mixed that in with the new compost pile today. When I was living in Maine last summer, I kept a small garden which had some German Chamomile in it. I was happy to see that it had re-seeded itself this year. I was sad that it would go to waste, because someone has to harvest it every week in order to collect enough flower heads to make tea. So my Mom had the idea, why not dig it up and take it back to Connecticut with us? And that's what I did. I left a few plants in Maine though, just in case. Now I have to find room to put the eight or so plants that I brought back with me.

Today I finally caved in and bought a six pack of basil plants. My basil seedlings are still so tiny, and they got leggy over the weekend because I had to bring them inside. I'm considering planting some basil seeds outside, just to see how they do. Maybe next year I'll really be able to start them from seed successfully indoors.

Apparently the deer noticed that no one was home over the weekend, and one of them decided to use my garden as a buffet table. No wholesale destruction, just a nibble here and there, and hoof prints in the beds. It did the most damage to my swiss chard, which I admit needed to be cut and used anyway. Most of them should grow back, hopefully. It missed the chard that was hidden underneath the broccoli plants. It also lopped off a few marigold flowers, and a few stems from my chamomile.

On a better note, all of the beans and squash planted in the old garden have sprouted and are growing rapidly. The corn I planted last week also sprouted! :)