The Battle for the Garden

This year's garden. Success!

We wanted to have vegetable garden when we moved out here to the woods. Little did we know what a battle it would be. Everything out here wants to eat our garden. When the weather has been dry for awhile and all the wild grasses and bushes are brown, our garden is the only patch of green for a long ways and it stands out like a beacon to all sorts of critters who want to get in there and eat everything. It is way worse here than when we tried to grow vegetables in the city.

Gardening is hard enough work as it is without having to battle all the hungry critters. Fortunately for us the soil here isn't too bad to start with. We cleared an area of our yard of weeds, dug down 16 to 18 inches and loosened and turned the dirt. We made a compost pile so and made some of our own fertilizer and then we turned the compost into the soil. We planted a row of lettuce mix - a mixture of seeds for maybe five different kinds of lettuce. We planted broccoli, spinach, beets, leeks, and onions. We bought small tomato and pepper plants. We used store-bought potatoes, cut them up and planted them. We were excited.

About half the lettuce sprouted. None of the spinach or broccoli came up. We saw only two beet plants, but the leeks were looking pretty good. We are pretty sure it was gophers and squirrels. There were holes and little piles of dirt everywhere. We diligently watered what little we had growing and some of the lettuce started looking pretty good. One day, I went out to check the garden and all the lettuce was gone. Not a bit of it was left. It was so disappointing.

We read that gophers don't dig down more than a foot below the soil surface and that ground squirrels don't go below 24 inches. I spent several days digging a trench around the whole perimeter of the garden. I tried for 30 inches deep but it ended up just a little over two feet deep. I bought a 3-foot wide roll of half-inch hardware cloth and put it in the trench so that less than a foot of it stuck up above the surface. I packed the dirt back in the whole and that was the end of the gophers getting into the garden. The squirrels were another problem.

We had to build a cage around the garden. We used chicken wire for the walls and stapled it onto 4x4 posts. The posts are set a few feet in the ground outside of the anti-gopher hardware cloth. Squirrels can climb over anything so we put fruit tree netting over the top of the cage. The netting is tied to the top of the chicken wire every four to six inches with little pieces of bailing wire. We probably spent a couple hundred dollars on chicken wire, hardware cloth, 4x4's and fasteners. Not to mention the days of labor. $200 would have bought a lot of vegetables at the grocery store!

Fortunately the cage works. That is IF we remember to close the door! We do have to keep checking the cage walls because, occasionally, something figures out a way to get in by digging, or wedging themselves through some tiny gap between the chicken wire and the ground or they somehow get between the roof netting and the chicken wire. The only critters that can get in there are insects and we need some of them to do the pollinating of the plants. Unfortunately, destructive insects get in as easily as helpful ones.

blister beetle

We planted a row of potatoes our second spring here and, once the plants got big and beautiful, we noticed cute little beetles crawling around on the potatoes and tomatoes. But wait, there were starting to be big holes in the leaves and some of the plants were dying. We caught a couple of the beetles and looked them up online. They were blister beetles.

Blister beetles particularly love to eat the leaves of potatoes and tomatoes. They are called blister beetles because they secrete a substance that sometimes causes blisters on the skin. We didn't want to use any insecticides in our garden so every morning and just before dark we would go out with a wide mouth jar about a third full of soapy water and knock the beetles off the leaves into the jar. This was a bit time consuming because we had to inspect each plant twice a day looking for the beetles.

The work paid off and, after several weeks, we were no longer finding the blister beetles and our tomatoes started looking better. It was too late for the potatoes, though. The plants died back but a month or so later, new ones sprouted. We didn't see blister beetles on the second batch of potatoes. That was a relief.

squash bug

On the other side of the garden we had pumpkins growing. They grew huge luxuriant leaves and then we started noticing a different beetle eating holes in them. These were squash bugs. We used the same technique of knocking them off into a jar of soapy water. Fortunately we noticed the squash bugs before there were very many of them. Unlike the blister beetles, the squash bugs like to eat from the underside of the leaves so they are harder to see. The trick is to water the plants really well, or wait for a big rain. After the rain the bugs climb up on top of the leaves to dry out. Then it is easy to see them and get them into the jar. Twice a day, we searched the pumpkin patch for bugs, nipped the problem in the bud and got six beautiful pumpkins this fall.

For this winter we will remove all the plants from the garden and try to leave no organic matter on the surface of the ground. We will not mulch the bare ground. The idea is that hard freezes, of which we will get many, will kill the beetle eggs. It may not kill all of them but every little bit helps.

tomato worm

And then there are the tomato horn worms. We had to regularly inspect our tomatoes for these. They are pretty easy to find. Just look for the plant with no leaves on the top of a stalk. These large fat green caterpillars are usually very close by. We pick them off and smoosh them into the dirt with our shoes. It's pretty gross. If left to continue their lives they will eventually turn into sphinx moths. It's kind of ironic because sphinx moths are pollinators and many plants depend on them.

We are continuing to learn about how to garden out here. Now that we have our big cage and know what some of the insect pests are, we will be better equipped for next year's garden. Wish us luck!

Insect identification resources:
Bug Guide.Net 
InsectIdentification
Bug Files - this site is a database of photos of almost 7,000 different species.