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.