Pests!

This year I'm dealing with a couple garden pests for the first time.

First we have Mr. Bunny.

 He's super adorable, but he's eating all my  plants!

I started some cabbages from seed and plunked them in the garden in late April. The next morning, gone! He's also been nibbling my lettuce. I could deal with that, but now he's taken it too far. He's eating my peas. Snow peas are a favorite veggie in this house. Dude, do NOT mess with my peas.

Nibbled Peas

Here's a shot of the pea bed. Notice how the plants on the right are much bigger and happier looking, and the plants on the left are smaller and sparser, especially in front? That's rabbit damage, people! He's been going to town.

According to my neighbor, the bunny lives in the bush next to my pea and garlic bed (he's eaten a few of my garlic stalks too). Googled tonight to figure out what to do. Scarecrow? Big plastic wolf-like fake dog to scare him away? As it turns out rabbits are very sensitive to smell. Someone on a message board  recommended circling your garden with Bounce dryer sheets.  So tonight I ran out and did just that. I don't have a picture yet because it's dark out (and it looks kind of silly!). Hope it works. Rabbit be gone. :/

The other new pests I'm dealing with are cutworms.

They eat the stalks of tender seedlings in your garden - basically mow down your baby plants by cutting right through the stem. They're moth larvae/caterpillars that burrow under the soil by day, and come out and eat your plants by night.

Lovely Critters

The first thing they ate were my ground cherry seedlings. My GC seedlings this year are a lot smaller than my GC seedlings were last year. I got a late start on them so they're a few weeks to a month behind. Which means they're tender and tiny and the perfect size to be eaten by cutworms.

When a cutworm's been there, the seedlings are reduced to a pile of leaves.

Before Cutworm

After Cutworm

After I found the leaf pile I rooted around in the soil by the plant remains and found him.

Isn't he cute?

I smooshed him right after taking that picture. No mercy.

The best defense against cutworms is making cardboard collars for your plants. For some reason if a cutworm is moving across your garden bed and encounters a cardboard wall, he won't attempt to go under or over it. He'll  just move on.

Sooo, I outfitted that area of my garden with lots and lots of collars!

Toilet Paper rolls cut into shorter segments work great. So do cereal boxes cut into strips and taped into collars. Looks like the one above is starting to come apart. I need to get out there and remedy that! Although from what I've seen so far I *think* they prefer plants that are smaller than this.

I didn't think of collaring my leafy greens, and cutworm ate one of my kale seedlings yesterday. Same thing. Pile o' leaves, and I found him just under the surface of the soil, circling what was left of the plant stem.  Lettuce and kale were directly sewn in the garden and were a lot less work, so I'm not going to bother doing the collar thing with them. I smushed that guy too, so I think they're safe for now.

Dang pests.

Late Spring Happenings

This morning my eight year old asked how long it would be before we have fresh tomatoes from the garden. I checked my garden blog from last year and apparently we didn't have grape/cherry tomatoes until late July, and weren't eating fresh full-size tomatoes until mid to late August! Pretty sure we usually have ripe tomatoes before that. Maybe it was a late year? Or maybe it was because I planted all heirlooms last year?

But his question made me realize it's been weeks since I updated my garden blog. So I thought I better check in!

I feel like my garden's kind of a mess right now. I've been moving things around and digging and building.

The first thing I did was build a new 4'x4' raised bed, which is the new home for my strawberries. I built it in the dry wasteland on the left (north) side of the house. That area of the yard gets full sun all day, but for some reason grass refuses to grow there. Or a lawn (more like weeds!) does grow there, but not until mid summer, and it always comes back dead in the fall. I think it's a combination of grubs and the ground being chock full of roots from what we call "the weed trees" that border our property. In future years I'm hoping to put 3-4 more raised beds over there to take advantage of the sun and grow something in lieu of a lawn.

Anyhoo, without further ado: My new strawberry bed!

Baby strawberries growing in the bed:

In a blog post from mid June last year I had pictures of ripe strawberries and said we'd been picking them for the last 2-3 weeks, so I think they're later this year than usual - either because of the Polar Vortex (we had a chilly spring!) or because I set them back when I moved them from their old place in the garden.

The raised beds in the backyard where the strawberries used to live were 7 years old and were falling apart. They also had as much grass/weeds as strawberries, so I decided to completely scrap four of my old 4'x4' raised beds (two of which used to hold the strawberries) and create a new tilled garden area there instead.

Old bed falling apart:

The old garden layout (pic from last May):

I got rid of the 4 raised beds in the rear in this pic. The two front beds are also falling apart. I think I'll keep them as raised beds and eventually somehow replace the wood. That's a project for another day!
New tilled garden:

This is a different angle. You can see the two raised beds that were in the front in the other pic in the rear of this pic. If you look hard you can also see my other tilled bed in the rear. I like to split my tilled beds up into three sections separated by boards to walk on.

So quick tour of what's growing now.

In the old tilled bed we have peas and garlic:

In old raised bed #1 we have asparagus. We've harvested enough to eat with dinner (for our family of four) twice, and for me to eat on my own at lunch 3-4 times, and it's still coming up!

It's a little blurry - but trust me!

Asparagus bed with the pear tree to the right:

There are lots of baby pears all over that tree right now!

Baby lettuce:

Baby kale:

I had some larger lettuce and cabbage, but an evil rabbit ate all of it! In fact, as soon as my lettuces start to get big, boom. They're nibbled and gone. I need to get some netting to keep that guy away.

Toad friend:

 

He lives under the board between the peas and garlic.

In my new tilled garden area I planted tomatoes (Whopper, which is a big beef variety and Sweet Million, a cherry tomato). I have 15 plants all started from seed. I almost always buy my tomato plants. A few years ago I started some grape tomatoes on my own and last year I grew one of my own plants, but got the rest from the nursery. So we'll see how this goes! Looking at my garden blog from last year my nursery plants were much larger than these, but I've heard that if a tomato plant is blooming (those were) it's likely to become stunted, since it's putting its energy into the blooms/fruit instead of expanding its root system. Also, the plants I got last year were all heirlooms, and these aren't - so yields might be better? I'm hoping!

My little tomato plants, interplanted with eggplant (in the middle - also started from seed!). I also sprinkled marigold seeds throughout that section of the bed:

In the section in front of that I planted my three remaining tomato plants, my 5 ground cherry plants, and a section between them with onions, interplanted with beets and Purple Haze carrots (couldn't plant full size carrots in my six inch high raised beds! Excited to see if they grow well here!).

In the back section not yet planted I think I'm going to plant cucumbers, beans and nasturtiums. Maybe a zucchini or two? I'm also going to add pumpkins to the middle of my old raised bed where my lettuce and kale is.

That's about it! I feel like it's not too impressive, but it should get a lot more lush and productive as the season goes on!

Oh, and while I'm posting pics, I finally finished my first garden chalkboard to sell on Etsy. I made the stencil template for the words myself! I'm in the process of making a second one with regular individual letter stencils (different font) which will be (mostly) identical to the one I made for my own kitchen.

I still don't have anything listed for sale on Etsy yet. Waiting to have at least two boards to list. But I'm getting closer!