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!

Now Picking: Asparagus!

The latest big news in the garden is that we're harvesting for the first time this spring. We're picking asparagus!

 

Trimmed and ready to cook!:

I think I've finally figured out how to cook these guys. I steamed them for 2 1/2 minutes and sprinkled them with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Yum! Everyone agreed it was the best asparagus we've ever had.

In other news, I added the cabbage and lettuce plants that I started inside a month and a half ago to the garden, and... they were promptly eaten by rabbits. Grrrrr. Thebunnies wasted no time. I added the plants to the garden at 4pm on Friday, and by 7am Saturday morning they were chomped. This was my first time starting lettuce inside and planting cabbage at all. My garden's never been bothered much by critters. Lesson learned. Must protect baby greens with netting.

Chomped lettuce

 

Chomped cabbage

Around what's left of my lettuce and cabbage, I planted beet, kale, arugula (my favorite!) and more lettuce seeds. I'm kind of excited to see what happens with the beets. I've never had much luck with them, so I haven't tried to grow them in a few years. Last year I met a guy at a garden seminar who said he experimented by putting an inch or so of grass clippings on top of his garden bed and planting the beet seeds *in* the grass clippings. He said that was the first time he's had *giant* beets. So I did one square foot of beets in grass clippings and three square feet sowed directly in the soil, as usual. Stay tuned to see which beets win!

See the square in the far corner covered in grass? Go beets, go!

I also finally got around to planting my peas. They're in the section of soil on the far left, below. That's garlic in the other two sections. I plant peas differently than most gardeners. The traditional way is to plant a thin row or two of them next to a trellis. The thing is, we like *lots* of peas, so instead of doing the trellis thing, I fill up an entire bed with them. I try to get a variety with a short vine (this year I planted Dwarf White Sugar snow peas from Park Seed). The pea plants use each other as trellises, and it seems to work out OK. For more, see my This is How We Plant the Peas entry from last spring.

One of the best parts of having a garden blog is looking back to see what was happening last year at this time. It definitely seems like we're a week or two behind as far as flowers blooming and how green/big everything is this year. Dang you, Polar Vortex!

Snowy Garlic and Seedling Update

After days of temps in the 70s, we had snow last night. Luckily the garlic doesn't seem to mind too much.

 Meanwhile inside, the seedlings seem happy.

Cabbages!

One Giant Cabbage

That one cabbage that's bigger than the rest was moved out of the little peat pots and into a big red cup two weeks before the others. I'm learning that if you don't plant up the little seedlings (cabbages, tomatoes, or whatever ) as soon as they get their first set of true leaves, they wont' grow as quickly as they could.

Whopper Tomatoes

Cherry Tomatoes - ready to be moved to the red cups!

Romaine Lettuce- a little leggy and also ready for the red cup treatment. Kale at the top of the pic will be ready for up-planting in a week or so.

My ground cherries finally sprouted!

Baby Ground Cherries

 I just looked back at my blog entries from last year at this time. My ground cherry seedlings were slightly bigger but my tomatoes were a lot smaller. I started everything later than I did this year, but the ground cherries sprouted on my first attempt last spring.

According my my gardening books I can plant my peas and add my cabbage plants to the garden five weeks before the last frost - which is Monday!  Hopefully we'll be done with snow by then. :/

Seed Starting 2014!

 I'm baaaack! It's been a while, but it's springtime, and that means I'm starting my seeds!

About two weeks ago I planted ground cherries, tomatoes, lettuce, kale, eggplant and sweet peppers.

Last year I grew Aunt Molly's Ground Cherries for the first time. They ended up being my favorite plant in the garden and were insanely productive (we still have ground cherry jelly in the pantry!) so I thought I'd try two varieties of GCs this year.

 

 On the tomato front, I decided to go with a couple hybrid varieties to see if they produce better than the heirlooms I grew last year.

I also thought I'd try starting lettuce and kale inside for the first time (Territorial Seed Company's packets are so pretty!).

Incidentally Territorial Seed and Park Seed are my two favorite veggie seed companies. Their catalogs are insanely easy to read with amazing photos, descriptions and planting instructions, and I've always had great luck with their plants and seeds, even though neither is New England based.

The pepper and eggplant seeds were free from an awesome event I attended at the beginning of March: the Growing Places Gardener's Gathering.  If you live in north-central MA, and you garden - this event is a must do in the spring! They had a seed exchange table with lots of free seeds for the taking. Unfortunately I forgot to label all the seeds I picked up and had to guess when I got home...

Two weeks later, this is how everything is looking:

In the above pic, left to right we have one row of kale, two rows of romaine lettuce, a row of eggplant, a row of what was peppers (whic never germinated - so yesterday I planted more ground cherries), a row and a half of big beef tomatoes, a row and a half of cherry tomatoes, and two rows of ground cherries (which aren't doing so well yet... see below).

Kale and lettuce are growing like gangbusters!

Happy Little Tomatoes!

Not so happy ground cherries... If you look hard you can see a few little sprouts - there's also this weird mossy mold stuff that seems to be doing better than the ground cherries...

My one and only fully sprouted ground cherry.

So yeah, I think my mistake with the ground cherries this year was planting just two seeds per square. The seeds are incredibly tiny. Last year I planted a clump of about 10 seeds per square. That gave me much better odds. In a lot of my squares the seed seems to be stuck on the end of the little plant stalk, and is too hard for the leaves to break through. This kind of thing happens with tomatoes pretty often (ground cherries are in the same family). I always end up with a few duds whose leaves never do emerge from the seed shell. They just get stuck in there and the plant eventually dies.  Ground cherries do have a longer germination period than tomatoes... so I'm hoping a few manage to break through.  Just to be on the safe side I planted big clumps of GC seeds in the row where the free pepper seeds never grew. Last year I had four big ground cherry plants and that was more than enough for our family to eat fresh and can, so I really just need four of them to survive. Go Ground Cherries! Go!

The awesome thing about Ground Cherries is once they make it through this semi-difficult baby stage, they grow like gangbusters. They're much easier to grow than tomatoes. They're basically very weed like and can take over sections of your garden (which I see as a good thing because I love them so much!). I wish I could find seedlings locally...

I also started some cabbage seeds I snagged at the Gardener's Gathering. The cabbages are living in the family room window right now, with some flower seedlings  my eight year old planted in Cub Scouts, lots of matchbox cars, and the cats.

Cabbages!

 

A well used window