critter damage

Our 2021 garden: morning in the garden

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Now that we have Halona melons developing, it is so much more fun to check the garden in the mornings! Check this out.

These melons are visibly bigger than they were when I looked at them yesterday evening. I checked them again this evening, and they are again, noticeably bigger! Not only that, but we are finding lots more new ones, plus some larger ones that we hadn’t seen earlier. None as big as the one I’m holding in the photo, though.

I’ve looked over the Pixie melons, and while there are lots of flowers, they all seem to be male flowers. Which is interesting, since the Pixies are 70-75 days to maturity, while the Halona are 75 days to maturity, so you’d think it would be the other way around.

This is a photo of our very first WINTER squash! *insert happy dance* They are starting to get quite big, and this type are quite enthusiastically climbing the squash tunnel. I forget which ones these are; the markers are hidden under leaves right now. :-D

Well, if I needed clearer proof that something is eating our peas, this is it. Half the pod of this purple pea got et. There were still a few that were ready to pick. Maybe 5 or 6 pods. Just enough to include with my breakfast, as an edible garnish. :-D

This evening, I refilled the patched rain barrel and, while I was waiting, I checked over the peas more thoroughly. Enough are showing signs of nibbles that I moved the garden cam so I can hopefully see what critter is the cause. We’ve seen deer and raccoons going by, but they’re not eating anything, however the camera was not being triggered by anything in the pea beds. In fact, last night, nothing triggered it at all, until I walked past it this morning. I now have it up against the lilac hedge on the North side of the pea beds, and lowered on the flag stand, so I’m hoping it will work.

Two more poppies were blooming this morning!

They drop their leaves by the end of the afternoon, though. I was talking to my sister about them and mentioned that they were supposed to have pink petals, not white, and she said that it’s from the heat. If things were cooler, they would be the pink they’re supposed to be. Interesting. She also confirmed that it’s likely the heat that is causing our peas to struggle. I agree that this would be the major factor, though I’m sure a combination of factors are just making it harder for them to thrive.

And that’s before having critters eating them!

In other things, my plans changed with a phone call, and I headed out for most of the day, but that will be in my next post. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: corn, melons and new critter damage

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We have been very excited by how well the Montana Morado corn has been doing. However, as some of the stalks have gotten taller, they have started to fall over. The soil around the plants seems to be washing away as we water them. So, this evening, I added more garden soil to the bases of each one.

While watering these, my daughter has been focusing on giving a deep watering into the paths in between them, then using a finer spray to water the entire bed, so as to prevent more erosion. A couple of the stalks are also supported by stakes.

We are very curious about what the cobs will look like. Some of the stalks, silks and tassels are very purple, while others are varying shades of green. These are all supposed to give us corn so dark a purple, it looks black. But is that what we will get? We shall find out! It does look like several cobs are filling out nicely. :-) I’ve taken to hand pollinating every now and then, just to be on the safe side.

Meanwhile, while watering the squash tunnel, my daughter found another little melon!

At first, she thought one of the ones she’d found before had fallen to the ground, but then she saw they were both still there, so she lifted the third melon onto the structure. This had me looking around for more, and I was very excited to see two of these.

Tiny little melons, juuuust starting to form!

This is awesome!

I checked the other melons, squash and gourds. The summer squash is getting nice and big, and I might even have a couple of squash to pick tomorrow. The other melons and the winter squash have flowers and/or buds, but no fruit forming. Same with the Crespo squash. The luffa isn’t even showing flower buds, but it is climbing the trellis.

Then we went looking at the tomatoes (so many fruits are forming!), and they are doing great. The tiny little onions we planted under them are still tiny and little. :-D I noticed this morning, however, that a couple of self seeded (likely from the bird feeder) sunflowers seemed to be gone. This evening, I looked again and found their stems, leaves all eaten away. *sigh* More of the flowers in the bed nearby have not only had their heads eaten away, but in one area, even the stems are being eaten. We will not be getting many blooms out of that bed this year!

That reminds me: it looks like a lot of our French Breakfast radishes have been eaten, too. Possibly grasshoppers.

When checking the cucamelons, it looked like some of them had lost a few leaves and vine ends, too! They’re such small, fine plants, though, it’s almost hard to tell.

Then I saw this. :-(

This is the Thai Bottle Gourd. We had the one transplant, and a second seed germinated next to it. Now, the little one has lost most of its leaves, and the big one has lost a couple, plus a couple more leaves are partially eaten.

No damage to the Ozark Nest Egg gourds. Which is good, but we have more of those!

Very frustrating.

This year’s garden has been such a mixed bag of stuff going well, and stuff going badly, due to critter damage!

The Re-Farmer

Second row cover, a determined little bugger, and happy times!

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Today, I was able to find a piece of wood of the right size to put end caps on the second chicken wire row cover. When I headed out to start working on it this evening, I discovered…

… that little woodchuck is a determined little bugger!

Over the next while, I made sure to make lots of noise as I went past the stairs to make sure that, if the woodchuck were in there, it would run off.

My daughters told me earlier that they’d seen the littlest woodchuck in the birth bath, drinking water. At least it was just the little one. The big one would have knocked the bird bath right off its pedestal!

One of the things I was thinking of while adding the end pieces to the row cover, was how to support the chicken wire. I no longer had any hula hoop pieces, like I used in the last one. I thought I might be able to use some old hose pieces, so I went to the pile of junk and odd bits and pieces by the old garden shed. I had left a damaged hose there, and used pieces of it to hold the mosquito netting onto the hula hoops when we had that rigged up as a cover over one of the spinach beds. When I looked at the hose, though, it was so floppy from the heat, that I could see it would never be able to hold up the wire mesh.

However…

… among the miscellaneous bits and pieces, I noticed some wire that looked pliable enough to bend into a curve, yet stiff enough to hold up the chicken wire. I was able to cut three lengths that I could weave through the chicken wire, and was able to push the ends in between the boards the chicken wire was held by. It did the job really well!

With the heatwave returning, I am thinking to sacrifice some old sheets to use as shade cloths, draped over these frames. The problem is, there is still one more newly planted bed, and I am out of the materials needed to made another row cover like these. We are going to have to figure something out! We finally have the radishes, kohlrabi and kale sprouting, along with the chard. I’d like for them to actually survive!

After this was done, I banged around the concrete steps for a while and, once sure that there was no critter under there, brought over some bigger rocks and broken pieces of bricks to fill the hole in again. Hopefully, these are big enough and heavy enough that it won’t be able to dig through again.

I was just about to head back inside while the girls were getting ready to do the evening watering, when I had a very happy surprise.

My husband actually felt well enough to walk around outside! He got a tour of most of the garden beds, and even felt well enough to walk to squash tunnel. He didn’t use his walker – it may be a heavy duty walker, but even it can’t handled the rough ground out there – and he didn’t even use a cane! Granted, it was slow going, and walking over those old plow furrows took extra care, but he did it! Gosh, I can’t remember the last time he felt well enough to go outside, without needing to go to a medical appointment or something. I’m so happy! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Critter battle update, a mini harvest, and we’re getting poppies!

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First, a bit of a follow up from yesterday. After blocking the woodchuck holes by the house and in the old garden area, I headed out a few times to check on the one by the house. Twice, I found things disturbed!

This picture was taken after the second time I found it dug up. The first time, I had started to remove the plastic around the back of the mock orange, saw that things had been pulled out, and started tying it back again. As I was fussing and making noise, I could actually hear little grunting noises coming from under the stairs! I found some rocks had been dug up a bit on the other side, too, but just a little. After blocking the other side, I tried spraying water into the little gaps remaining, to try and pursuade the woodchuck to leave out the other side. We never saw it, but I came back later and it seemed to be gone, so I blocked the opening again. A couple of hours later, what you see in the photo above it what I came back to! After making as sure as I could there was nothing inside, I blocked it off again. As of today, it has not been disturbed again, so here’s hoping the critter has decided it’s not worth the effort.

Later in the evening, I found this in the old garden area.

Much to my surprise, the first den we found was dug into again! It was just a small hole compared to before – the buried sticks seemed to work in preventing further digging. I blocked it off and, when I checked it this morning, it was still buried. Once again, I’m hoping the woodchuck has decided it’s not worth the effort and have moved on.

After doing the watering this morning, I picked a tiny little harvest.

There was one zucchini big enough to pick, and I gathered the last of the garlic scapes (unless I missed one or two). Plus, we have our first peas. :-D Only two pods from the purple peas. Because the pea plants are so stunted in growth, the weight of the pods were keeping the plants they were on from being able to reach the trellis lines. At least we’ll be able to taste the peas. I’m curious about how the purple peas taste. Reviews on the Baker Creek website were pretty mixed!

Unfortunately, it looks like some of the pea plants are not just stunted in growth, but have been nibbled on, too! Where this is new nibbles or not, I couldn’t really tell. I also noticed new nibbles on the Crespo squash. Any part of the squash that started to grow outside the hoop and twine barrier seems to be getting nibbled. We’ll have to find a way to extend the barrier.

Meanwhile, in the old kitchen garden, I’m happy to see pods developing on the Giant Rattle poppies! These had had such a rough started, I wasn’t sure what we would get, so this is making me very happy. For this year, we might have enough pods to taste them, but not enough for cooking with; mostly I want to save the seeds to grow more next year, and fill the bed. Gosh, this brings back memories! When I was a kid, my mother grew similar poppies in this garden, and I remember my late brother and I picking dried out pods and eating the seeds, straight from the garden. We would later have big bunches of the dried pods (well… big, in my childhood memory!) gathered. The only thing I remember my mother making with them was a special soup she made only for our Wigilia (Christmas Eve) dinner.

I did have another harvest this morning, which will get its own post next. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Not as bad as I thought it would be

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While doing my morning rounds, I checked the hole by the concrete stairs under the dining room door, and was happy to see the pieces of wood we used to block it looked undisturbed.

When I was done my rounds, I started working on getting that filled in, which meant I needed rocks. Since we got almost no rain at all yesterday, the garden needed watering, so I set up the sprinkler, then grabbed a wheelbarrow to start picking rocks.

Since the big woodchuck had conveniently dug up a lot of rocks for us, I started there. Last night, my daughters saw the woodchuck leaving the den, so they flooded it, then shoved some pruned branches into the opening before moving some of the soil over it.

This morning, while using a long handled garden claw to help pick rocks, I finished filling in the hold and spreading the sand and gravel out more evenly. We’ll have to come back to get rid of the sticks.

Most of these rocks were gathered from what the woodchuck dug up!

Then I just wandered along with the wheelbarrow, picking rocks as I went. Since was was using the garden claw to help moving them, I was also able to break up some of the old plow furrows as well. I picked only the larger rocks, up to a point. The biggest ones were set aside to be available for things like weighing down row covers or whatever.

By the time I got this many, the heat was getting a bit much, so I just hoped they would be enough and moved on. I could easily have filled the wheelbarrow entirely, if I stayed out longer.

Once at the stairs, the first thing I needed to figure out was what to do with the mock orange. I didn’t want to dig it up, even though we plan to transplant it. We still need to decide where to put it. So I took a piece of plastic that had been used as a row cover and wrapped it around the back of the mock orange, then used twine to tie it up. This turned out to be enough to be able to access the hole.

While I was working on the mock orange and moving the wood to access the opening, to my amazement, I heard something scrambling out the other side of the stairs and run off. I could not beleve it! The woodchuck had somehow squeezed through the other side of the stairs!

Then came the assessment phase.

The curious thing about this hole is the lack of dug up soil piled around. So I played the contortionist as best I could, to get pictures through the opening.

This is where I found my good news. The hole didn’t go any deeper! The opening was dug just enough for the woodchuck to access under the stairs. That explains the lack of dug up soil.

What a relief!

Time to start filling with rocks!

In the one picture, I could finally see the opening to under the stairs. I can certainly understand why critters have been going under there! What a great, safe hideaway.

Which is great if we’re talking kittens. Not so great when we’re talking woodchucks!

Okay, so the hole is filled with rocks, but there is still the space between the stairs and the wall. As long as it was there, things would still try to get under there.

Time to raid our pieces of rigid insulation!

A couple of larger pieces were used to cover the back of the stairs, which would cover the opening under them completely. Another, shorter sheet was jammed between those pieces and the brick wall.

More smaller pieces were used to fill in the gap at the end, and rocks were piled up to secure them even more.

What looks like a gap at this end is blocked by a lumpy area of concrete.

Done!

Before I headed inside, I went to move the sprikler, startling the woodchuck that was watching from under the spirea near the stone cross!

When I headed out a while ago to move the sprinkler again, I could see that something had tried to get under again. I had to replace a small piece of insulation and push the rocks back. On the other side, something had tried to burrow in the gap that isn’t a gap, but only enough to displace some of the small rocks.

It seems to be working!

After replacing the rocks, I used those little pieces of plastic garden fencing to block it off even more.

I am much relieved that the damage was so very minor. I do wish I hadn’t had to block off the back of those stairs entirely, though. It was a really good, safe place for mamas to have their kittens.

Ah, well. Better that than having a woodchuck living under there!

The Re-Farmer

Some garden stuff, and new critter damage

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While heading over to put some kibble out for the junk pile kittens this morning, I found this.

Just last night, I was looking closely at this lilac, to see why one of the branches had died, and found it broken at the main stem. Now think I know what broke it. My guess is a racoon was using the lilac to get at the bird feeder, and it broke under the weight.

Which is what I think happened to this bird feeder.

When we cleaned up and painted this bird feeder, we found only two bent screws were holding it to the metal piece that fits over the pole. We replaced those and added more.

I could only find two.

What I’ll likely do is attach a new piece of wood to the base of the bird feeder, then attach the metal fitting to the new wood. Hopefully, that will prevent this from happening again.

Now that I had good light, I got a picture of the unrolled potato bags. I think this will do well to protect them from further critter damage. I’m just glad that what damage there was, was minor.

I saw no new damage in the old kitchen garden. This edge of the beet bed had been left alone until after the soap shavings were added. This end has hot pepper flakes on it.

Also, those flowers blooming in the foreground are incredibly resilient. When we ended up digging out a whole bunch of soil to make the path along the house, all the flowers and whatnot that were growing there were disturbed. I took out as many roots as I could, and the excess soil got moved over to the rose bushes and honeysuckle. The entire area was disrupted, and this far from the house, everything was buried in the dug up soil, then torn up as the soil was moved again. Yet these guys managed to push their way through the hard packed soil and mulch, and are now merrily blooming!

This morning, I worked on getting rid of the woodchuck den I found under the stairs at our dining room door. In the process, I noticed a splash of colour.

This one little cherry tree has developing cherries. There are two others, here, and they barely even bloomed this year.

I’m glad there will be at least a few cherries this year.

The Re-Farmer

Nooo!!! These critters have got to go!

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Okay, I am not a happy camper right now.

My daughter and I had started to do the evening watering, and she was at the tomatoes when she saw something on the concrete steps outside our dining room door. We currently have our umbrella tree sitting there, and she saw something go behind the pot.

The mock orange here has been recovering nicely from cold damage.

As I to check on what my daughter saw, I could see movement through the mock orange leaves. The kittens have been enjoying playing on these steps. In the past, we’ve had cats move their litters under here. There is a gap between the stairs and the basement wall that even the skinnier adult cats can fit through, and I believe the stairs are hollow underneath. In fact, this is where we caught David and Keith, mostly because their eyes were so infected, they couldn’t see us to run away. Their sibling managed to keep going under the stairs and we were never able to get her. Rosencrantz then moved her out of there completely, and into the junk pile, hence Junk Pile’s name.

So, was it a kitten? Or…

When I got to the steps, there was nothing there, so I moved the branches of the mock orange to see if there were any kittens behind the steps.

Instead, I found a large hole!

Yup. A woodchuck had made a den here.

There wasn’t even the telltale pile of dirt, like the one in the garden.

Not. Impressed.

I grabbed our jug of critter repellent, which was almost empty, and simply dumped it into the opening. Then I refilled the jug with water. As I came back, as saw one of the little woodchucks running away and around the back of the house.

Because this is right up against the house, we can’t just flood the opening, but I did pour a couple of jugs of water down the hole. I also blocked it as much as I could with some scrap pieces of wood, for now.

For this one, once it’s clear, I think we will be gathering as many small rocks as we can to dump into the opening, then top it off with soil. It’s going to be difficult, with the mock orange in the way.

And we’re all out of strong smelling soap and hot spicy things.

While watering near the old kitchen garden, I could smell the soap from a distance. Checking the beds with the soap shavings, they seemed to have no new damage.

However, the end of the beet bed neared the house, where we had never had critter damage before, was now kibbled on. Not much. This area did get black pepper, so maybe that discouraged more damage.

Before heading into the house, I checked some other stuff, including the potatoes my daughter had just watered.

I found this.

Four potato bags against the fence were damaged.

I at first thought it could be that kittens had started rolling in the bags or something, but …

… no kitten would be eating potato leaves!

Off everything we’ve been trying to grow this year, nothing has been thriving as much as the potatoes, so this is particularly frustrating!

Since taking this photo, I went back and unrolled the bags to their full height. They are tall enough that it should keep the critters out.

I am not a happy camper!!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: morning finds

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While doing my rounds this morning, I topped up the small bird feeder. As I took it down from its hanger, I heard something fly out from the plants below. It turned out to be a goldfinch. It flew onto a nearby lilac branch, and just stayed there, watching me.

As I went by again, on my way to the garden, I saw it again.

I came withing a few feet of it, and it just stayed there. Like it was trying to sleep and wondering what this idiot human was doing at 5:30 in the morning!

A few days ago, I noticed we’d lost a few sunflowers, among the Hopi Black Dye rows, and a couple of sweet corn. Off hand, I would have thought “deer”, but it was odd. There were just a few nipped plants, and they were in the middle of the rows, in roughly the middle of blocks, not along the edges as I would expect from a deer going around the roped off blocks.

Nothing showed up in the garden cam, which told me that whatever it was, it was too small to trigger the motion sensor where the camera was set up. So I repositioned the camera (mounting in on that flag stand was the best rig ever!) to hopefully catch something.

When checking the beds before watering them, I was disappointed to find this.

The second Crespo squash find has had its end nibbled off, too. Only as far as the hoop barrier, but then, the only vine had been nibbled about the same amount, and there was no barrier at all at the time.

Unfortunately, we don’t have another camera for this end of the garden.

As for the sweet corn…

Three corn plants were nibbled on. In the middle of a row, and in the middle block of the 3 corn blocks!

Just those three. Nothing else in the area was nibbled on.

It was a gorgeous 18C/64 when I first came out, but by the time I finished using the new action hoe to finish weeding a second row, it was already getting too hot for manual labour. So I headed indoors and checked the trail cam files, to see if whatever did this was captured.

Well, waddaya know. Do you see those two “lights” on the left?

Those are the eyes of two big, fluffy raccoons!!! And the far one could be seen coming out of the roped off area, while the nearer one was on the outside of the roped area.

*sigh*

So it is likely these guys that have been nibbling our sweet corn and sunflowers. We have not been seeing deer on the trail cams lately, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been going elsewhere in the yard. The water level in the kiddie pool is down, but not by much, so I don’t think anything as big as a deer has been using it.

The more stuff like this I see, the more I am thinking we are going to have to invest in a guard dog. A large breed that loves our cold winters. Which is a weird thing to think of, in our current heat.

As I write this, we’re at 33C/91F with a humidex of 36C/97F, and our high is predicted to be 34C/93F… oh, wait. My weather app icon on my desktop just changed. We’ve just hit 34C. The humidex is supposed to reach 37F/99F. Which is actually a bit lower than was forecast, a few days ago. But then, the weather forecasts have been unusually off this spring and summer. It’s one thing to be off by a couple of degrees, or even the continual calling for rain and thunderstorms that never happen. It’s when they say things like “rain will stop in X minutes”, and there’s no rain at all, anywhere in the region. Or “rain will start in X minutes”, but if I look at the weather radar, there isn’t any rain showing in the entire province, nor even in provinces on either side of us, nor the states to the north of us. Frustrating!

Still, over the next two weeks, the temperatures are expected to hover just above or below 30C/86F. One of my apps has a 25 day forecast, so it’s running into August, where, we’re expected to hover around the 25C/77F range. The average temperatures for both July and August in our area is 25C/77F, so I guess that’s about right. I was planning to plant spinach and lettuce in late July. I guess we’ll find out if it’s too hot for them or not!

One thing about our expanded gardening this year. We are continually looking at things and saying, “okay, so next year we’ll do this” or “next year, we’ll not to that.” :-D It would all be a waste, if we didn’t learn anything from it! :-D

Now.

What to do about the raccoons…

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: nibbles and attempted nibbles

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While doing my morning rounds, I found that something had tried to get under the floating cover on a beet bed.

It seems than an onion did its job of guard duty!

This particular union had been falling over on its own before, and when I picked it up, I could see it’s roots were gone and it had started to rot a bit.

There is now a brick where the onion used to be. LOL

Unfortunately, other things were not so lucky.

While our Crespo squash has not been bothered since we put distractions around it, for the first time, I’ve found some of our Montana Mordao corn has been nibbled on. Just two little ones, right at the corner, suggesting a passing deer. The flags I left from marking where to transplant seem to no longer be enough to keep them away.

Project for this evening, when things cool down a bit: place distracting things around the purple corn.

The Re-Farmer

Some unexpected critter damage

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While doing the evening watering, I had found an unpleasant surprise.

The larger of our Crespo squash vines got a substantial portion nibbled off!

Unlike the summer squash, these don’t have spines on them that would dissuade being eaten. I am guessing this was done by a deer, but I really have no way to know.

It was just part of the one plant that was eaten; the other is untouched. The nearby Montana Morado corn was also untouched, and I saw no damage in any of the garden beds on this side of the house.

When the watering was done, my daughter and I rigged up the last three hula hoops to make a “fence” around the mound. The ground is so hard, we couldn’t push anything into it, so we had to use the pointed metal bar we found, to make holes, like I did to drive in stakes for the summer squash. After setting up the open hula hoops around the mound, we threaded some aluminum tart pans onto twine and tied them between the hoops.

While watering the haskap bushes, near the tomato plants on the south side of the house, I noticed something else. The bed we planted the haskaps in have a lot of flowers that grow quite tall before producing bright yellow flowers. We’ve pulled them up around the haskaps, but at this stage, they are taller than the bushes.

Except for some of them.

A whole bunch of them at one end of the flower bed have lost their heads! Given the height, this had to have been doing by deer. Looking more closely, I saw or were missing their tops on the south side of the flower bed. Which means deer have used the path between the flower bed and the new tomato bed.

No tomatoes were damaged, though.

My daughter had watered the old kitchen garden, so before I went inside, I decided to check it as well. I found more nibbled beets in the bed along the retaining wall. These area has different beets planted in sections, unlike the big bed where they are all mixed up. At one end is a type of beet that has lighter, all green leaves, without the red stalk and veins that the other types have. Only that one was nibbled on. There wasn’t a lot of damage, and I am wondering if maybe it was a skunk? It definitely wasn’t a deer, given the location and the netting nearby, and I would have expected the woodchuck to have done far more damage. There’s no way to tell.

At least the Epsom salt treated carrots nearby have no new damage to them.

The loan beet bed by the garlic was a concern for me. It’s recovering quite well from being thoroughly nibbled on by a deer. I trimmed the onion greens that surround the beets, so today I loosely laid the remaining piece of mosquito netting over it, like a row cover, with the short ends weighted down with some scrap boards. Hopefully, that will keep the deer out of it and the beets can continue to recover.

Thankfully, what damage we found this evening was relatively minor.

I’d much rather there was no damage at all, of course!

The Re-Farmer