It’s like they all exploded into existence, overnight. I’ve read that peas don’t like to be over watered, but they sure seemed to like the downpour we had!
The remaining three strawberry plants in the asparagus bed were eaten. One not as bad as the others, but a lot of leaf loss, for sure. I have to find some way to protect this bed, so the plants can recover.
What I really wanted to check – with some dread, I admit! – was the squash patch. Did the cornmeal work, or did my squash plants get decimated by the hundreds of slugs I saw last night?
Well… the good news is, there was no new damage to any of the plants, though a couple of seedlings will certainly not recover from the state I found them in last night.
There wasn’t a single slug, in any of the traps.
I could still see corn meal dusted on the mulch around each mound.
I didn’t see a single slug, live or dead.
Now, a live slug, I would not have expected to see. Not in the sun and heat we already had by then. But I did think I might see less cornmeal around the plants, and dead slugs.
It could be, they ate their fill, then crawled away before they died, but if that were so, I would not have expected to see so much cornmeal still visible.
So I’m not sure what to make of this. I mean, I’m glad there is no new damage to the plants, but for all I know, they’ll be back tonight.
Which means, when I head out to do my evening rounds, I’ll be looking closely at the squash patch!
As I expected, the predicted thunderstorms went right past us BUT, we did get a wonderful downpour!
While it was raining, my daughter came to ask me to go outside with her; she was hearing bad sounding cat noises and, fearing a cat might be trapped somewhere, she wanted to have an extra pair of hands with her.
Well, it wasn’t a trapped cat. It was Shop Towel beating up The Distinguished Guest. I had to literally kick them apart, he had such a death grip on TDG.
In the process, I got completely soaked. When I got back inside, I decided to change straight into my pajamas. I considered skipping my evening rounds, but when the rain stopped and it was clear it was done for the day, I headed out in my pajamas.
I am so glad I did.
I discovered, we have a war going on in the squash patch!
I’ve been seeing some slug damage already, but the rain must have brought them out. The first couple of hills with summer squash seedlings, I found some munching away and started picking them off.
Then I saw what was in the mulch around it.
The little red dots that you see mark the slugs in just one small area – and it isn’t even one of the worst hills! Every single hill had them; even the ones that were resown and hadn’t germinated yet. I checked every plant, making sure to look under each leaf, and some of them were covered with slugs on the underside! While I took slugs off the plants themselves, there was just too many of them. Most of them were incredibly tiny, as if they’d hatched very recently, but there were plenty of big ones, too.
I went in to do some research on how to get rid of them. There is the well known beer trap, which does work. However, my daughters are the beer drinkers, and they don’t drink the cheap stuff. I’d have to buy beer, and the beer traps would need to be refilled every day. It could be done, but not the best option, and not something we could do right away.
Slugs apparently hate coffee grounds, so sprinkling coffee grounds around the plants to protect them would work. Especially if ground eggshells were also included. The girls have been drinking cold brewed coffee in this heat, but the grounds go straight into the compost bucket. So they will start keeping the grounds for me, spreading them on a tray to dry in the oven. It would take quite a lot of grounds for the size of our squash patch, so it would take quite a while to have enough to sprinkle around every plant. With so many slugs, they’d probably eat all our squash plants well before then.
Then I found out that slugs love cornmeal, but it kills them. It was recommended to make slug traps by putting a couple tablespoons of cornmeal into jars, then putting the jars out, laying on their sides, in the evening. By morning, they should be filled with dead slugs.
We buy cornmeal in large bags, but haven’t been baking cornbread lately, because of the heat, so we have quite a lot of it handy.
My younger daughter and I gathered up small jars that we’ve been hanging onto, put cornmeal in them, then took them out to the garden. I wasn’t going to use any of our good canning jars, so we only had eight jars.
We have 30 mounds in the squash patch.
I scattered the jars around, putting some on the mounds with more visible slugs. You can just see part of one of them in the above picture. Still, it just didn’t seem like it would be enough.
So I took an empty sour cream container – the 500ml size – and used an awl to punch largish holes in the lid, then filled the container with cornmeal.
In this picture, you can see that one of the seedlings is mostly eaten. There had been no damage on that seedling, this morning.
You can also see cornmeal sprinkled all around on the mulch. I used the sour cream container as a shaker and spread cornmeal liberally around every single hill. I really don’t care if the slugs get trapped in the jars or not. I just want them dead.
I really hope this works. With how many slugs I saw – and knowing many more would be hidden in the mulch or the grass – it’s entirely possible most of the squash plants would be eaten by morning.
I have never seen so many slugs in my life. Not even when living in Victoria, BC, where the banana slugs would be out like crazy after a rainfall. It is absolutely insane!
While doing this, I saw only one frog in the squash patch. We see more of them among the other beds, but the squash patch is too exposed for their comfort. The next step in the battle is to set up frog houses all around the squash patch. The challenge will be the heat, as there won’t be a lot of shade in the squash patch until the plants get bigger – and for them to do that, they need to survive the slugs! I could simply lay out some boards in places. I’ve got a stack of them that were used to protect the tomatoes from wind, when they were first transplanted. We’ve got broken ceramic pots that would work, if we also cover them with mulch to keep them shaded from the sun.
We’ve got a lot of frogs this year. I will happily enlist them to gobble up as many slugs as their round little bellies can handle!
This is war, and I’m willing to break out the big guns, if I have to!
Well, we decided to start bringing things in. Tonight and tomorrow night, we are supposed to reach lows of 1C/34F
While our one eggplant that is producing is small enough to give protective cover, that’s pretty much it. The rest is just too much or too large to be able to cover adequately.
The shelling beans were simply ready to be harvested, so I worked on those first.
These are the blue grey speckled tepary beans, and the are so tiny! I haven’t tried to open any pods yet. It was almost but not quite raining as I picked these, so once I got them inside, they went onto a screen and are laid out to dry thoroughly indoors before I start shelling them.
Then it was time to pull the Tropeana Lunga onions.
They are SO much easier to harvest from the high raised bed, than the onions in the low raised beds. I had to dig most of those out, because the soil is so compacted. Not here! These came out easily.
Check out that chard. Not a single leaf to harvest!
I had this wire mesh door on the picnic table under the canopy tent, where I was able to cure onions before, but with the cold temperatures, I set it up in the sun room. It is supported by a couple of saw horses over the swing bench, giving the kittens plenty of space to go underneath and have their warm and cozy naps!
These onions are a very thick onion, in the stem and the greens. They are very much like the Red of Florence onions we already harvested, but with even sturdier stems.
Next, I worked on the red tomatoes. A few of the ripe ones had been partially eaten, while others had holes like this.
Some of the holes were even still occupied!
Slugs are remarkably voracious!
This is all the red tomatoes. In the bin are the Cup of Moldova, and on the side are the Sophie’s Choice. There were very few Sophie’s choice, overall.
While I was working on these, I got a surprise visitor.
Rolando Moon showed up! I haven’t seen her in weeks! She let me pet her a bit, but mostly hung around and hissed and growled at the kittens. Except for when she suddenly showed up with a big mouse in her mouth. One of the kittens became VERY interested in her at that point. Rolando Moon can be aggressive, so I did step in, which allowed the kitten to make a jump for the tiny bit of mouse that was left. He promptly inhaled it and was sniffing for more, but with Rolando being the way she is, I carried him off.
Do you know that it’s really hard to harvest tomatoes while there is a kitten perched on your shoulders, and it refuses to leave? 😄
Next, I worked on the Chocolate Cherry and the Yellow Pear tomatoes.
There were SO many yellow pear tomatoes!
I also harvested the dry King Tut Purple Pea pods, though they were green instead of purple. I’m not sure why I’m keeping the seeds, to be honest. The last Red Kuri squash was also harvested, and now sit with the onions to cure.
I have left it to the girls to work out what to do with all the tomatoes, except for the ones that I will be keeping to save seeds from. The Chocolate Cherry, for sure. I’m told those were the tastiest. Not the yellow pear, though. I’m glad we tried them, but they weren’t enjoyed enough to bother saving seeds from. Both the Cup of Moldova and Sophie’s Choice are rare varieties, so I will be keeping seeds just to help keep them going. We will decide later if we want to stick with them next year, of we want to try other varieties as well. My daughter described both of them as good, but very mild in flavour. I think she and my husband would prefer something more intensely flavoured. We’ll see.
This bed that had the paste tomatoes is now completely empty. That means I can prep it to plant the best of the hardneck garlic I’d saved from this year’s harvest. We will need to get more, though.
This bed had the yellow pear tomatoes. There are still the red onions from sets in there, but I don’t think we’ll get anything out of them. Once those are out, this bed, and the one to the right of it, can be prepped for next year.
The kulli corn in the bed to the left still has no cobs forming, at all.
This is where the chocolate cherry were. It’s the second year we grew tomatoes here, so we will do something else here next year. I’m thinking peas.
There are still carrots in this bed. I don’t know that there are any shallots or onions left. There are two shallots that went to seed, but the seed heads seems to have stalled in development. It seems the same with the lettuce I left to go to seed. I think it’s just been too chilly for them to progress properly.
That’s it for now. Later on, I’ll head out again and look over the pumpkins, and see about harvesting the biggest ones. Pumpkins can continue to ripen after picking, if we can keep them warm, dry and in sunlight. That is a difficult combination to achieve in our household, though!
I also want to put bottles with warm water in them around the eggplant that’s fruiting, and then cover it. I may as well harvest what summer squash there is, too. We won’t be able to protect them from the cold, so chances are, they will get killed off tonight. I might be able to cover the apple gourds. They are the only ones that are immature enough to make the effort. After these 2 expected cold nights, the overnight lows are expected to be much warmer, so if they can survive those two nights, they still have a chance.
The Re-Farmer 