Tis the season

Memorial Day is the target date for all gardeners in these parts to put in their vegetables. This year we were blessed with terrific weather for the week before and after, broken only by brief passages of rain to water it all in and refill the rain barrels. So, no problem meeting the deadline, despite having an injured foot.

As part of the annual planting marathon, I now rig up plant protectors; for instance, wire cages covered with lightweight insect barrier fabric over all the broccoli. An experiment with this setup last year worked, sparing half my crop from the little green worms that crawl out of the heads when you're preparing the harvest. This year I'm covering all the broccoli and hoping for a repeat performance.

Liking the barrier idea, I placed hardware cloth (metal mesh) over the green bean seeds so birds won't pick off the hulls when they rise to the surface ahead of the sprouts, and critters won't dig them up.

Then I put Wall-o-Waters around tomatoes and cucumbers. These gizmos, which are essentially solar teepees, are made by different manufacturers in different sizes and colors, all in a soft, durable plastic formed of tubes you fill with water. They protect tender seedlings from chill and wind, and can be pulled open or pinched shut as conditions warrant. In theory, they can extend the growing season by several weeks. I haven't used them long enough to prove this yet, but initial results are encouraging.

I always place a yogurt or butter tub, or similar plastic cup with the bottom cut out, around the base of all transplants. Originally I did this upon advice to discourage tomato hornworms; it seems to work against other undesirables as well, plus makes a contained area that holds water.

In response to last year's slug infestation, I purchased some Sluggo -- granules of iron phosphate that are toxic to slugs but, again theoretically, safe for pets and people. I'm not real sure about that, so I only sprinkled it in the areas under cover, so the birds won't pick it up and cats won't get it between their toes. I'm also leaving the bed unmulched, to make a dry and crusty surface for the slugs to suffer on while crossing, instead providing a moist haven for them to thrive in. This creates a lot of splash-up against the undersides of leaves, which can create disease conditions especially for tomatoes, so for them I put down fabric mulch. We'll see if that helps.

Where possible, I place some sort of frame around my plants at the beginning and end of season, to which I can attach plastic or fabric for frost protection. It can come as late as June 15 and as early as September 15, and it's so much easier to have frames already in place when you have to fling covers over everything. Someday I'll have cold frames and hoop houses, but until then I wing it with found materials, tie-wraps and clothespins, and a few reusable accessories.

Over time, even such simple protectors have proven their value in this chilly, erratic climate.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

The eternal dance

For the eleven years I've been gardening, I've never had a slug problem. For the same period, I never mulched.

This year, I finally decided to listen to the experts and mulch my vegetable garden. I used the scraggly hay left over from last year's haybale garden, laying it atop the lasagna garden last fall to let it start rotting in as the new top lasagna layer. At this spring's planting time, I merely scuffed it out of the way and tucked it back as needed.

Little did I know I was creating Slug Heaven! It took me weeks to recognize this, since the dastardly slimeballs only come out at night. I kept waking up to holey lettuce and bean leaves, and stripped marigolds -- too early for most of the leaf-chomping insects I'm aware of, and not the right damage for quadrupeds.

It remained a discouraging head-scratcher until a friend mentioned she's having a horrible time this year with slugs. Upon her advice, I laid out a saucer of beer overnight to lure them to destruction. All that happened was some nocturnal animal lapped up the treat. I switched to her exact technique -- catfood cans set into the soil so the beer was at ground level -- and again netted no slugs, only one empty tin and the other one, concealed from above by moth netting over my broccoli, disturbed in the soil (apparently a raccoon had reached through a split in the netting and tried to grab it).

So much for the beer plan. Prior to it, I had scraped all the hay out of the garden to re-expose the soil. Took somebody else's suggestion and placed collars coated with petroleum jelly around individual plants. This combination slowed things down a bit, but the slugs are still invisibly eating my veggies. I will keep trying other manual and/or nontoxic techniques to tackle this conundrum but suspect, at this point, I've already lost the war.

What steams me is the effect on This Year's Big Experiment. In previous years, the most challenging pest problem has been green worms in the broccoli -- a result, I've learned, of little white butterflies (the cabbage moth, I believe the species is commonly called) laying their eggs on broccoli and related crop leaves over the summer. I read about covering them early with a very light row-cover fabric to block access by the moths.

This created a lovely protective canopy for the slugs, who approach from below. And, as the broccoli grows, the canopy moves upward with them (I didn't buy a wide enough cloth so can't arch over the plants top to bottom, side to side), thereby allowing the moths to fly in from underneath. Yesterday I found 3 of them fluttering inside the netting. So I wrenched it off and released the slug-shredded leaves back to open air.

This morning I got out early enough to catch some slugs in action. Put that to an end with a satisfying squish. A few of the beans look like they might survive the onslaught, but half the broccoli looks awful, while the other half (still under cover) looks only lightly hit. Hopefully there will be some food left over for me at harvest time.

So . . . what's the moral of this story? I'm not sure, but it probably has something to do with balance, as well as environment: There's no sign of slug damage in my EarthBox planters, even though they sit adjacent to the garden, whereas the haybales on the other side have been breached. Birds frolic in the garden all day but apparently don't know where the slugs hide during daylight so they're not picking them off. I will remember all this next year winter when it comes time to design the season's plant layout.

In the meantime, if anyone knows a foolproof, nontoxic way to beat slugs, I'll be happy to hear it!

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardense
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com