Contech Scarecrow; many uses in the garden!

My previous post was partly about all of the animal pest problems I have here in rural Kentucky. Although I didn't know it yet, as I was writing that post my newest animal problem was beginning. Squirrels are stealing my apples! I surprised one sitting in the apple tree and while running away, he dropped this apple from his mouth:

My previous post was also partly about my new garden gadget, the Scarecrow from Contech. This got me thinking that I remember seeing something on their website called SquirrelStop. Contech has many neat products but SquirrelStop is a bird feeder that spins rapidly when a Squirrel hangs from it. It would be pretty funny to see a surprised and dizzy squirrel get spun off of a bird feeder. In my case the Squirrel Stop would not help. How could I keep the squirrels from eating my apples?

Of course my answer was right in front of me. I was going to wait and use the Scarecrow water sprayer to defend my corn but why not try it out on the Squirrels first? They had already eaten almost all of the apples in the tree closest to the woods, but they haven't touched the next tree yet. I set up the Contech Scarecrow next to that tree but couldn't wait to see if it worked. My daughters were picking tomatoes in the garden so I called them over to the apple tree.

It works!

This is a fun gadget. The apple tree limbs blowing in the breeze do not set it off so I guess it isn't a simple motion detector. It seems to only go off if a living thing approaches. It nearly knocked a poor sparrow to the ground! The range of the detector is pretty far as well. It "saw" me working in the garden 50 feet away. The spray doesn't shoot that far but the noise would probably scare animals away even before they get wet. You can also set the radius on how much it sprays. I've got it trained just on the apple trees, but you could make it spray nearly 360 degrees. If I got one more of these I could probably guard my whole garden. Cool!

Defending the Strawberries!

When it comes to the garden plants, my cat isn't the only animal that I need to be worried about. Outside there are raccoons, groundhogs, skunks, opossums, foxes, deer, and many birds that are watching my garden to see what is ripe and ready for the taking! Last year, the critters ate a lot of my garden! The first major front that needs defending this year are the strawberries. It looks like it is going to be a great crop!

We planted these strawberries last year using the hill method. The hill method for strawberries is not mounding up the dirt, or planting on top of small hills. We planted one long row of strawberry plants and then meticulously cut the runners back as the plants sent them out. We didn't let any daughter plants form like you would in a matted row system. So much energy stays in the main plant that the plant grows twice as big as they would with the matted row method. The plants grow to be two feet tall! Since there is only a single row of plants, the plant "looks like" a hill, which is why it is called the hill method.

So now that last year's work is paying off and I have many green strawberries ready to ripen, there is no way I'm going to let the animals have them! Tonight, as it was getting dark I gathered up some scrap wood, a hammer and nails, the roll of flexible fence that I recently bought, and the garden shears (for clipping back the runners) and got to work.

I built a little wood trellis down the center of the strawberry bed.

I then stapled the flexible fence to the landscape timbers on one side and stretched the fencing up over the wood trellis. On the other side I stapled the fence to removable scrap boards. This formed a little temporary A-frame fence.

I attached the fence in three foot sections, overlapping the sections as I went along. The removable boards can be lifted up a section at a time to reach in for harvesting.

I'm pretty sure this will keep the animals out. The only thing left to be concerned with are slugs. I haven't seen any on the strawberries yet but I have found some on the lettuce. I plan to put out saucers of beer to attract the slugs when the berries ripen.

It is crazy how defensive you have to be with food gardening. I am looking into what it would take to put an electric fence around the entire perimeter of the garden. That would take care of everything but the deer. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself with this though. Tonight, I can sleep a little easier knowing that my strawberries can now ripen in peace. I can hardly wait.

I'm off to bed to dream about....Strawberry Shortcake!
mmmmmmmm!

Organic Gardening Techniques Don't Always Work

I have not written about garden insects much this year like I did last year. Largely it is because last year's menaces did not repeat this year. I guess the Tomato Hornworms really were killed by the braconid wasps and the Blister Beetles really were chased away by their dislike of the horseradish plants. In both cases nature ran its course and I benefited from natural organic remedies without using any unnatural chemicals or poisons.

I really do believe in gardening organically. There is no room in my garden for chemical pesticides or fertilizers - Period. However, I'm not one to preach about it and I don't pretend that if you stay organic you will never have any problems. Sometimes it is quite the opposite and you have to be willing to lose an entire crop at times. That was the story this year with my broccoli.

Cabbage worms by the dozens destroyed all of my Spring broccoli, and it looks like my Fall broccoli will suffer the same fate. We only planted two plants this spring since we had so much last year that we couldn't eat it all. Since there were only two plants, I thought I could control the worms by hand-picking every day. After all, if you've ever looked up what to do about insects in an organic gardening book, most of the time it says to simply had pick them and destroy. This seemed easy at first because many of the worms are large and easy to see.

Of course, hand picking them all is easier said than done! The problem is that they start out so small and grow so fast. They are also very good at hiding right in front of you. Here's an example; how many cabbage worms do you think are on these two plants?

Would you believe 15? I know that it is too hard to tell from a little picture so lets zoom in and look at only 1 plant.

Now how many do you see? Seven, right? Does this help you see them?

And this picture was taken after I had already removed five or six worms! I thought I was finished until I looked closer.

Notice that I'm counting one that I already squashed on the raised bed wood on the lower left. I know it is a bit gross to discuss, but it was very interesting to see what happened when I distingished the worms in this way. As soon as I would kill a worm on the wood, an ant would come along and take the body.

It was fascinating to watch. Every cabbage worm carcass was dutifully carried away, each by a single ant.

That is a good illustration as to why I don't want to spray poisons on the plants to kill the pest insects. In this case, the spray would have killed these ants too. Chemical pesticides are not only bad for us to consume, but they kill or drive away earthworms and beneficial insects. To me, even though I lost this battle and got no fresh broccoli, it is worth it to maintain a safe and healthy soil and micro-climate.

As for the Fall broccoli, they too are infested with cabbage worms. Usually Fall broccoli is safe from the cabbage butterfly and worm but this year it is still hot in October - a record high 90 degrees as I write this! Next year I will cover all of my brassicas with poly-spun row covers to keep out the butterflies. This year I will continue to fight a losing battle and keep hand-picking the worms. At least it feeds the ants I guess.

It's really too bad that I have to kill these worms. They are actually kind of cute.

What am I saying?! They are garden pests and they are killing MY organic broccoli! That is a punishable offense indeed.

Now it's personal; Waging war on the groundhog!

I was feeling sorry for the groundhog because of the drought and heatwave that we are suffering with. There is very little water or food available in the wild. I had almost even forgiven him for eating all of our bean leaves, all of the cucumber leaves, some tomatoes and zucchini and all of the zucchini leaves. But now he has gone too far. He has crossed the line! He has begun eating my beautiful pumpkin plants!

Come on Mr. Woodchuck, at least let a man grow some big pumpkins for his children to enjoy at Halloween. I haven't even gotten around to putting a post on about the pumpkins.

I purposely started them late so they wouldn't get too big too soon. They are at the end of the garden and I am letting them grow out onto old carpet and tarps.

Things were growing along great and we had a dozen or so baby pumpkins.

Many of them had grown much bigger that that photo, but now Mr. Groundhog has eaten them and some of the leaves! It's time to declare war. My Have-a-heart trap was loaned to my in laws and I am getting it back tomorrow night. At the rate the groundhog is going though, that's too long to wait.

Sometimes a gardener has got to do what a gardener has got to do. I must sit out in the garden all night and all day tomorrow and make sure the groundhog doesn't eat anything else!

Of course I can't really do that, so my daughters and I whipped up a quick likeness of me, set it next to the pumpkins with a 24-hour-a-day talk radio station loudly playing. My wife added soap to the scarecrow to add more "human smell". I hope it works.

Tomorrow night we will set the Have-a-heart trap and hopefully on Sunday Mr. Groundhog and I will take a nice long drive to his new home.

Get ready Mr. Hog, soon it will be moving day!

More Garden Destruction; The Culprit?

More and more of my beloved veggies have disappeared! The beans, sweet potatoes and cucumbers have lost ALL of their leaves. Tomatoes and zucchinis have been munched, along with all of the watermelons and cantaloupe. The only thing that hasn't been eaten is the squash from my last post!

I correctly blamed the melon destruction on the raccoons, but now I know that THIS is who ate the rest!

In this picture, he is eating clover but I can safely say that a groundhog's favorite food is anything from the vegetable garden! From the looks of the one we saw in our garden, they can get pretty fat on veggies!

This weekend we were making more salsa and needed a few more tomatoes to finish the batch. So my daughter and I walked up to the garden to pick some where we saw the fattest groundhog of all time finishing off the last of the bean leaves.

"Hey! What are you doing? Get out of here!" I yelled at him. He seemed to understand me perfectly and ran as fast as his little legs could take his big fat body in to the woods.

I don't usually talk to (or yell at) animals like this. Groundhogs are easy to talk to I guess. Now I understand the post that Kenny from Veggie Gardening Tips wrote about his groundhog. It is titled Conversations with a Woodchuck, and is one of the funniest bit of writing I've seen in a while.

Kenny caught his culprit. I hope I can do the same!

Learn From My Mistakes - Don't Let This Happen to Your Garden!

We live out in the country, which is really great. With a country setting comes lots of animals; hungry animals. We see many raccoons, foxes, opossums, and deer. This winter we went walking in the woods behind the garden and was amazed at all of the animal tracks we saw in the snow.

It looked like all the different animals got together and had a party.

So even though I know that there are so many animals surrounding my garden, I foolishly wrote this in a post just four days ago:

"For the most part I have been lucky over the years to not have much of a problem with pests in the garden. I have an occasional loss to a deer or some other animal and I have a few minor bouts with insects. None of the pests really make much of a difference in the overall outcome of the harvest."

What was I thinking? Writing that was my first mistake. My second mistake was spending all day Friday cleaning up the garden. I weeded and used the weed-eater on all of the tall grass around all of the raised beds. I watered everything thoroughly. The whole vegetable garden looked better than it has all season. My third mistake was deciding not to pick all of those almost ripe heirloom tomatoes. "I can get them in a day or two", I said to myself. "Besides, I want to get some pictures of them still on the vine since they look so good now", I added to put the final nail in the proverbial coffin.

I'm sure by now you know where this is going. I didn't visit the garden Sunday morning and then we were gone all day. Last night just before dark, I walked up to the garden to admire my work.

OH NO! WHAT HAPPENED HERE?!

To my horror and amazement, the entire vegetable garden had been attacked! The animals that got together for the party in the snow must have had another party. This time it was an all-you-can-eat buffet!
All of those almost-ripe heirlooms, - gone.
All of the leaves on the sweet potatoes - gone.
Many of the cantaloupe - done for.
Half of the bean plants - almost bare.
Many of the cucumber leaves - eaten as well.

This was the single worst attack my garden had ever seen. Here are some painful pictures of the carnage:

They took a bite out of six cantaloupe and completely ate the ripest two. Everywhere I looked there were half eaten tomatoes lying on the ground.

Many of the green bean plants lost most of their leaves:

And the most painful of all is what they did to my sweet potatoes. This was the first year I have tried growing them. I only planted one 4'x4' bed.

This is what the sweet potato bed looked like last week:

And this is what it looks like now:

I don't know much about sweet potatoes, but I would guess that this spells doom for this year's crop.

So what does one do when your garden is so severely attacked? My 10 year old daughter was with me when we discovered all of this and she was pretty upset. So we did the only thing we could do to boost our spirits. We began talking about next year's tall fence and harvested everything we could find that wasn't eaten. The animals left plenty for us:

Not a bad harvest from such a ravaged garden. We can still count our blessings and know that some animals are well fed.

Tonight - we make salsa!

They're Baaaack... Blister Beetles Attack!

For the most part I have been lucky over the years to not have much of a problem with pests in the garden. I have an occasional loss to a deer or some other animal and I have a few minor bouts with insects. None of the pests really make much of a difference in the overall outcome of the harvest - EXCEPT FOR THE BLISTER BEETLES!

Last year they wiped out my Brandywine tomatoes. They are the nastiest of garden insects. I don't even want to go into the details about how awful they are in this post. If you are interested in learning more about the Darth Vaders of the garden you can read about them from one of my previous posts.

In that post, I wrote about how I was going to grow horseradish next to my tomatoes to keep the blister beetles away, which I did. You know, I think it actually works! You see the important thing is not were the beetles are in the garden, its where the are not! I found the beetle in the above picture on my early tomatoes which is on the other side of the garden from the horseradish. The heirloom tomatoes next to the horseradish are doing great, with no signs of insects on them.

So even though this post appeared to be a negative report, it actually is a positive one. I only found (and extinguished) three blister beetles on my Early Girl tomatoes and my Brandywine and Prudens Purple tomatoes that live next to the horseradish are doing well. Having those two kinds of tomatoes together look odd. Both of them have the unique potato-leaf look to them. Here is a leaf from the Prudens Purple:

So at least for now, I guess I'll say thank you to the horseradish. The odd thing is that the horseradish is there to deter insects from the tomatoes but the horseradish itself is taking the worst damage from insects out of all of my plants. There are some new bugs on them that I hadn't seen before. I will be writing a whole post strictly about the new insects. For now though, I will leave you with a picture of my Super Hero Horseradish plants.

Keep up the good work guys!

Excited about identifying Garden Insects!

Last weekend I bought a new book called "Garden Insects of North America: The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Bugs".

It is by Whitney Cranshaw and has 656 pages of useful pictures and descriptions of the insects you are likely to encounter in your gardens. It shows every stage of the bugs as well as what kind of damage the cause to plants so you can figure out what insect you are dealing with even without seeing the insect. It also tells which ones are beneficial insects in the garden. That is something I have always been interested in. One of my posts last year on this blog was called Garden Insects: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly where my daughter and I set out one August afternoon to find and photograph every kind of bug we could find in the tomato garden. It was astonishing how many we found and how many of them were actually good for the garden!

The coolest insect we found was the Tomato Hornworm. It is bad for the garden, but attached to it was hundreds of Braconid Wasps, which are good for the garden because they kill the Tomato Hornworm and many other harmful worms and caterpillars. I wrote a whole post entitled Tomato Hornworm or Space Alien which described this and also showed it in a photo montage. The Tomato Hornworm does look like a space alien to me. So does the Caterpillar on the cover of my new book! It is a Cecropia moth Caterpillar feeding on an Ohio Buckeye leaf. That isn't very far from where I live! I hope to have some photos like that in the near future to show you. With the help of this book, I will also be able to identify the bugs we find and be able to tell you things about them.

Until then, If you are interested in learning more about garden insects or about Entomology, I recommend a blog called Bugs For Thugs. It is written by a professional Entomologist and is full of great photos and information. Kelley even has an "Ask an Entomologist" section with Q&As about insects that gardeners have encountered. The whole site is filled with great bug photos if you are in to that like I am.

Speaking of bug photos, I have one more site to recommend. Mark Plonsky has a photo blog with a great section on Insect Photos. I don't know how he does it, but his bugs actually look beautiful - not creepy. His use of color and macro lenses is amazing

If I can take insect photos half as good as Mark and know how to identify garden insects 10% as good as Kelley, I will be happy. I guess I better get reading my new Garden Insects of North America book!

Creepy Crawly Close-ups for Wordless Wednesday!

Part of Wordless Wednesday

Visit other WW participants including my Toys2Remember blog!

Raccoons will torment me No More!

The Raccoons that visit my garden tend to talk to me.

As you can see, this one informed me that he was getting tired of his diet of cat food and is longing for another summertime feast of my sweet corn! To that I say NOT THIS YEAR MR. RACCOON!

Every year I attempt to grow a small patch of corn, and every year I get to watch the stalks grow healthy and strong. I also get to watch many wonderful ears develop, but when its just about time to pick those succulent sweet ears ... the local raccoons have a night corn eating garden party! They take every last ear and scatter the cobs all around the yard!

This year the only corn they will get is the few kernels left on the cobs that they find on top of the compost pile! The corn I plan to grow is Bicolor Mirai 301BC which I wrote about in a previous post. The coons won't get any Mirai corn from the garden because number three on my 2007 to do list is to build a raccoon proof fence around that corn! I can't afford to fence in the entire garden, so I am just fencing in the center of the garden and I will grow the corn inside the fence.

"But raccoons can climb a fence" you might be thinking. I'm going to do three things to combat this. First I will make the pumpkin patch but up against one side of the fence (the one furthest from the house and closest to the woods). Raccoons hate trying to get through and over pumpkin vines. Second, I will grow cucumbers ON the fence. According to Carrots Love Tomatoes, raccoons detest cucumbers, so they probably won't try to climb over them. If they remember how much fun they've had at their annual corn eating party and are determined to not let this companion planting bother them, I think my third trick will stop them.

I found a raccoon remedy in another one of my favorite books called Jeff Cox's 100 Greatest Garden Ideas: Tips, Techniques, and Projects for a Bountiful Garden and a Beautiful Backyard. One of the 100 great ideas shows how to securely attach the bottom of a roll of chicken wire to the top of the fence and leave the top of the chicken wire unsupported. You also bend the chicken wire out a little and leave it floppy. If a raccoon reaches the top of the fence and begins climbing on the chicken wire, his weight will cause the chicken wire to fold down on him and dump him off.

Brilliant!

I will post plenty of pictures after I get the fence built. I will also report what my raccoon friends have to say about it! Of course they may take their revenge by convincing their deer friends to jump over the fence, but that is material for another post!

So there you have it - number three on my 2007 Garden to do list!