The netted ‘room’ is excellent at keeping birds out, but does nothing to thwart rats.
With a third of my garden protected with permanent bird netting this year, I was pretty smug about pests this spring. Silly me …
2023 may have been the year of the rabbit in the Chinese Zodiac, but in my garden it was year of the rat, and it seems to be continuing in 2024.
In the spring, rats ate all my pea seedlings … twice … On one of those occasions, they plundered the seedlings in the three hours the tray sat in the garden before I planted them out. I was working (planting other things) just metres away while the rat collected all the seedlings and tucked them away in its nest (I found them later when I uncovered the nest).
The rats also did good work on my first planting of corn, melons, cucumbers, and pumpkins, eating the seeds and uprooting the seedlings.
I went through three cheap rat traps (none of which actually caught a rat, and all of which quickly broke), before spending an excessive amount of money on a DOC 200 trap. This terrifying stainless-steel beauty caught its first rat within 24 hours. It has nabbed 3 rats, a hedgehog, and an English sparrow in the three months I’ve had it, which I’m quite pleased about.
Unfortunately, it has not solved my rat problem. Last week I discovered a rat (or rats) had tunnelled straight down my potato bed, eating nearly every potato in the entire bed, and damaging some plants so badly they were dying. Yesterday, I went to pick a gorgeous Black Brandywine tomato that was ripening on my now bird-protected tomato plants. I found the tomato on the ground, half eaten by little rat teeth.
I’m beginning to wonder if I will get anything off the garden this year. So far, the rats don’t seem to like courgettes or cucumbers, but my beans are planted right next to the compost pile where the rats seem to nest. Once they start plumping out, they’ll be primo rat food. And the corn? You know those rats will be scampering right up the plants to gnaw at the ears. Makes it hard to lure them to a trap when the garden is a smorgasbord of delicious food.
Makes me wish I still had a cat—the rats didn’t start to become a real problem until he was gone.
I’ve also got my first ever infestation of whitefly this year. Pretty embarrassing for someone whose Master’s degree was on greenhouse pest management. Whitefly wasn’t even on my radar, so I missed early signs of the infestation. They’re not only in the greenhouse, but outdoors as well. The key to effective integrated pest management is paying attention and catching infestations before they’re a problem, and I failed spectacularly at it. Now I’m playing catch up. My only consolation is that it looks like lots of other people are, too, because both suppliers of whitefly biocontrol agents in New Zealand are sold out. Serves me right, I guess.
So as we enter 2024, officially year of the Dragon, I’m wondering if there’s a dragon that eats rats …
January is quite possibly the best month in the garden. Seemingly overnight, the vegetables double in size. Summer crops begin ripening. Weed growth slows, and the vegetables are large enough to compete with all but the most aggressive weeds. Garden work switches from planting and weeding to picking and processing. The frenzy of December berry crops is over, and the cupboard is bursting with jam.
January is a time to enjoy the fruits of my labour. Not that there isn’t work to do, but the rewards of all my work are beginning to outweigh the effort. It’s a great way to start the new year.
Another great way to start the year is with the giant plant tags Santa Claus made me for Christmas. They’re not the most efficient markers for the garden, but they’re adorable and add a touch of whimsy.
With luck (and a lot of hard work by my husband), by the end of January, I’ll also have a nice new garden shed for storing tools and potting up plants. There will be a bit of whimsy in the shed, as well, inspired by a leaded glass window we found for it. I can’t wait to have that bit of the garden plan complete and functional!
I hope your January is full of things to enjoy and to look forward to.
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. Although my husband and I don’t celebrate the day here with a gathering of friends and family, pumpkin pie out of season, and imported cranberry sauce like some American expats, I still like to take the day to give thanks.
Today I’m particularly thankful for a number of things. I’ve been home sick all week. Today is day nine of this miserable head cold and it’s getting really old. After more than a week of all the joys a bad cold can offer, I am incredibly thankful for the luxury of taking time off work when I’m sick.
I’m thankful for the riotous display of flowers outside my office window, which made me smile in spite of feeling crummy. I am also thankful for the vegetable garden’s springtime bounty, which allowed me to hole up at home without need for a trip to the grocery store. I’m thankful for the neighbour who brought me lemons, knowing I was sick. I’m thankful for the warm sunshine I sat in at lunchtimes this week.
Today, wild wind and rain are pounding the garden and house. So today I am thankful for the rain—it was much needed. I am also thankful for a roof that doesn’t leak, and snug windows and doors through which the southerly wind can’t whistle.
Those are the little things, of course. With the drumbeat of war and disaster in the news, I’m also keenly aware of and thankful for the safety and stability of my life. My easy access to food and water. My ability to plant a garden and expect to be able to harvest it. The opportunity to live in a culture in which most people embrace diversity and treat others with respect.
So, while I’ve had plenty to grumble about this week, I’ve also been blessed in thousands of immeasurable ways, for which I am grateful every day, not just on Thanksgiving.
May your day be filled with things to be thankful for.
The garden group I’m part of recently met at our house and took a stroll through our gardens. It was great to get ideas and advice on disease problems, nutrient deficiency issues, and all manner of other aspects of gardening.
But equally valuable was to get their perspective on the changes that have taken place in our garden over the past year. We see the place daily and don’t always appreciate how much real progress we’re making on bringing this degraded paddock back to life.
So I thought today I’d look back and do a little before/after comparison, to remind me of what all our hard work has wrought here over the past 3 years or so.
When we bought the property, there was nothing but poorly-growing pasture grass and weeds. The developer had scraped every bit of topsoil off, leaving us with heavy clay and rocks. When we had the soil tested, we found there were virtually no nutrients in it at all. Truly a blank slate. Or first attempts at growing vegetables here yielded shin-high corn plants. The tomatoes, peppers and eggplants stopped growing the moment I planted them out.
Before we even moved in, we began to plant natives around the edges of the property. The fruit trees went in during our first winter in the house, as did the roses. We bought literal truckloads of compost to add to the soil, and I’ve incorporated trailer loads of manure gifted by generous neighbours with livestock. And I can’t count the number of bales of pea straw I’ve layered over garden beds over the past three years. We picked rocks of all sizes from the ground every time we dug a hole or planted a seed. Those rocks have formed the edges of raised beds, filled gabions and created paths all over the property. Â
The results have been transformative. See for yourself.
Photos taken from about the same vantage point on the property–2019 vs 2023
The view from my office window, June 2020 vs November 2023–those native trees have grown 3 metres in 3 years!This is where the construction vehicles parked in 2020.Flaxes on the left and currants on the right were planted in 2020 and now threaten to take over the path.Swiftly growing roses screen the picnic/bread oven area from the neighbour’s house.
A glance out my office window these days reveals myriad spring blooms, which grow more exuberant every morning. At this time of year, the majority of the blossoms are purple. It was not by design—many of the flowers I planted were of unknown colour at the time—iris divisions from a freebie box at work, aquilegia seeds from a neighbour’s mixed plantings, and the ever-present weedy pansies. Intended or not, the overall effect is quite delightful, especially when the flowers are frosted with dew. So here’s a little purple to calm your day.
Over the weekend, I was weeding the native plantings at the front of the property and discovered a wee lancewood seedling. We’re quite fond of lancewood, and have planted several around the property, but none of ours have set seed yet—they’re all still in their stick-like juvenile form. So the volunteer came in from someone else’s property, no doubt dispersed by a bird.
Normally, weeds are a source of dismay, but I was thrilled to find the little lancewood. I’ve been surprised at how many ‘volunteer’ plants we get at our new property—there’s more rainfall here than at the old place, and plants tend to establish on their own, without my help. It means the unwanted weeds grow better, too, but I’ve been thrilled by what has popped up.
Among the native weeds, we’ve got coprosma, akeake, poroporo, NZ iris, snow tussock and hebes. Some, of course, sprout where we don’t want them, and I have to weed out a fair few. But many get transplanted elsewhere or potted up and given away. I love the thought that our native plantings might one day be self-perpetuating.
Rampant fumitory, rampant along the garden fence.
Among the non-natives there are some welcome weeds, too. Pansies, flax, thyme, oregano, sage, cilantro, peas and fennel are all desirable—in the right place.
I will also admit to appreciating the flowers of daisy, scarlet pimpernel, scrambling speedwell, and rampant fumitory wherever they grow, but only because these plants are a minor nuisance and easy to pull out. Other pretty weeds, like bindweed, yarrow and vetch are on my hit list, regardless of their flowers.
Then there’s stinging nettle. I hate nettles. But lush nettles are a good sign of fertile soil, so I admit I like to see them pop up and grow well, even if I do pull them out.
Is a plant a weed if I like it? Maybe not. But all these volunteer plants do make for extra work in the garden, whether I appreciate them or not.
The volunteer pansy brigade. Who can complain about that?
Yesterday I wrote about strategies for preventing pest problems. If you’ve taken all the measures you can to prevent pests, but the pests arrive anyway, there are different questions to ask:
Centipedes are predators of many garden pests.
Do I need to worry? Low levels of pests aren’t a big deal. A few aphids, a caterpillar here or there, the odd bite out of a leaf—these things aren’t going to have a big impact on the quality or quantity of your harvest. Just keep an eye on them to be sure the problem doesn’t get worse.
Can I physically remove them? I’m a huge fan of squishing and hosing pests off plants. For example, I have problems every spring with aphids on my roses. If I do nothing, the plants become completely covered, and the blooms are destroyed. So in spring, I keep an eye on the plants, and once the aphids start reproducing, I hose the plants down once a week, knocking off most of the aphids. Usually I only have to do this about three times before the aphids’ natural enemies build up enough to keep them under control without my help.
Can you disrupt a critical part of your pest’s life cycle? Is there a life stage that can be easily killed, or has specific requirements you can disrupt? For example, I keep a close eye on my brassica seedlings, looking out for cabbage white butterfly eggs on the undersides of the leaves. All it takes is a quick swipe of the thumb across the bottom of each leaf to squash the eggs and eliminate future problems with caterpillars. Another example is my recent problems with slaters in my greenhouses. Discovering that the slaters are congregating between cement blocks stacked beside the greenhouse, I’ve started regularly checking and squashing all the slaters in those blocks. (I could also have moved the blocks, to eliminate the slaters’ shelter, but since the population was quite high, I thought squishing a whole lot of them would be more effective for now. Later I will probably move the blocks to make the area around the greenhouse less attractive to slaters).
Can I make use of them? Pest-covered plants, grass grubs and slugs all get thrown over the fence to my chickens, who turn them into beautiful eggs for me and save me from the disgusting task of squishing the bugs.
Can I pull out badly infested plants? If there’s a couple of plants badly infested, but the pests haven’t spread much, rip out those infested plants and destroy the pests on them. You’ll lose a few plants, but you’ll protect the rest of your crop.
Pest-gobbling chickens.
In an IPM system, you don’t consider any sort of chemical control until you’d exhausted all the possibilities above. In practice in my garden, I almost never need anything else. Occasionally, if I’ve missed an aphid infestation on a crop that can’t handle a strong spray of water, I’ll use a soap solution to kill aphids. That’s the extent of my chemical control. But if you do need to resort to chemicals, it’s important to choose the right one. The more specific it is to your pest, the better. Many modern pesticides are narrowly focused, and target specific pests, and that’s great. With a narrow target, the pesticide is less likely to kill beneficial insects or harm people and pets. Stay away from broad spectrum pesticides. Also, if you do use pesticides, be sure to follow the label directions carefully, wear protective gear, and dispose of leftover product and empty containers properly.
It’s nearly spring, so naturally my thoughts turn to the subject of pests. Our big pest-related project in the garden this year is bird netting a third of the vegetable garden, so we don’t lose most of our tomatoes and peas to the feathered rats.
Aphids–the one on the right is healthy, the one on the left has been parasitised by a wasp, one of the many natural enemies that keep aphids under control in the garden.
As an entomologist whose research focused on Integrated Pest Management, I always have a lot to say about pests. And it’s an important topic—globally, 30-40% of crop yield is lost to pests (interestingly, this figure didn’t change with the advent of chemical pesticides—insect pests are incredibly quick to evolve pesticide resistance). That’s a lot of wasted food!
For home gardeners, fighting pests is a daily task. Every place I’ve gardened has its own unique pest problems. Growing up in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania, I remember the rabbits munching through the garden. In State College, Pennsylvania it was flea beetles that shot so many holes through my eggplants’ leaves they never had a chance to grow, and the squash bugs that clustered in masses under the leaves of my zucchinis. In Panama, leaf cutter ants could strip a plant bare in no time.
In my first garden in New Zealand, aphids and rabbits were my main problems. When we first arrived on the property, there were so many rabbits I wondered if I’d be able to grow anything. A rabbit-proof fence was the first garden project there.
In my current garden, birds are my worst enemy—mostly English sparrows and European blackbirds. They strip seedlings bare, eat tomatoes, pull out onions, and scratch away mulch and soil, leaving plant roots to dry out (never mind the amount of chicken feed they snarf down every day!).
Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for the pests), my masters degree focused on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), so I’m well-armed when it comes to tackling pest problems.
IPM is often called common sense pest control. In IPM, the goal isn’t to eliminate pests, but to minimise the damage pests cause, while choosing the most environmentally-friendly control methods that do the job.
To successfully use IPM, you must first know your enemy. What conditions does it like? What’s its life cycle? What are its natural enemies? How does it find your plants, and how does it travel? Books and the internet can tell you a lot, but careful observation of the pests in your garden is key. The particular conditions in your garden will affect how pests behave, and where their weaknesses are. If you know exactly where pests are and what they’re doing in your garden, you can begin to tackle them more effectively. For example, I know that in my current garden, there are particular varieties of squash the aphids like. By keeping an eye on those particular plants, I can catch aphid infestations early and deal with them before they spread to more plants.
Bird netting protecting pea seedlings
Once you know your pest’s habits, you can begin to consider control methods. Questions to ask:
Can you time your plantings to avoid the damaging stage of the pest’s life cycle? For example, I don’t grow brassicas during the summer here—I have an early spring crop and a winter crop. By avoiding brassicas in summer, I eliminate bad problems with cabbage white butterflies, which tend to reach damaging levels around Christmas. I still have to be on the lookout for butterfly eggs on my seedlings, but once the plants are growing, they easily stay ahead of the caterpillars.
Can you exclude the pests from your crops during critical time periods? For example, psyllids can transmit disease to potatoes and tomatoes, leading to poor growth and damaged tubers. By covering the plants with a fine mesh cloth, I can keep the psyllids out for most of the summer (until the plants are too big for the covers, by which point the psyllids don’t seem to be much of a problem). I do the same for my peas and lettuces—netting out birds until the plants are large enough to handle losing a few leaves. I also net my berry crops and olives before the fruits start ripening, so the birds don’t pick them before I do.
Can you plant varieties the pests don’t like as much? For example, I plant mostly red varieties of lettuce, because the aphids take longer to discover them than they do the green ones. Usually, by the time the aphids find my red lettuces, they’re bolting and ready to pull out anyway.
Can you plant a ‘trap’ crop that the pests like more than your favourite vegetables? I haven’t done this explicitly, but as I mentioned earlier, there are certain varieties of plants I know are particularly tasty to pests, and I closely monitor them and kill the pests on them before they can spread to other crops. A true trap crop is something you’re willing to pull out entirely when it is infested by your pest, in order to destroy the pest.
Can you prevent pests from finding your crop? Interplanting different crops can help disrupt the spread of pests, because they struggle to find new plants to feed on. It can also help you make the most of the space in your garden. For example, I sometimes plant summer lettuces in the shade of my sweetcorn—not only does the shade help prevent the lettuce from bolting, it also seems to hide the lettuce from aphids.
Can I encourage the pests’ natural enemies? Many pest insects are preyed upon or parasitised by the larvae of beetles , flies and wasps. The adults often eat pollen and nectar, so planting herbs and flowers is a great way to encourage many pests’ natural enemies.
All six of the questions above will help you avoid a pest problem in the first place. They are changes in the way you plant or grow your crops that make it less likely you’ll have pest problems. Tomorrow, I’ll look at what you can do once you’ve discovered pests in your garden.
Looking forward to scenes like this in the coming weeks …
My seed order arrived last week, and I’ve stocked up on seed raising mix in preparation for this coming weekend.
The middle of August marks the start of spring planting, even though officially spring is still two weeks away (in spite of this week’s cold and snow).
This weekend I will plant hundreds of vegetable seeds—broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuces, spinach, onions, peppers, eggplants, herbs—a combination of early crops that can handle the cold and slow-growing late crops that need a long time in the greenhouse or indoors.
This weekend is always a bit exciting and a bit daunting. Daunting because whatever winter projects I had going are doomed to the back burner until next April. Daunting because of the vast amount of work to get done in the coming months. And exciting because of the pleasure I get out of growing delicious food, and the joy of trying out new varieties of vegetables each year (this year, I’m trying Bartowich Parsley for the first time, a purple snow pea, a new hot pepper, and a couple of new tomato varieties).
I used to get overwhelmed at this time of year by the sheer amount of work ahead, but I’ve learned to manage the work, and more importantly the stress, by creating a weekend-by-weekend to-do list that runs from mid-August through the end of November. The list includes all the annual garden tasks associated with spring—planting seeds, potting up seedlings, preparing garden beds, setting up trellises, cleaning greenhouses, maintaining irrigation lines, fertilising weeding, mulching … With everything on the list, I know I won’t miss any tasks and everything will be done on time.
Obsessive compulsive? Yeah, probably. But it means I can fully enjoy each and every task without stressing about the fact I’m NOT doing something else.
So from tomorrow, if you need to catch me on the weekend, I’ll be in the garden.
Here in the dark part of the year, the lack of daylight can be depressing. Rise in the dark, eat breakfast in the dark, have a few hours of light, then eat dinner in the dark, go to bed in the dark … And even during the day, shadows are long, and the frost lingers in every chilly pocket of the yard. The trees across the road cast shade on my office windows for much of the day, so even the sunny side of the house can feel dark.
But the low angle of the sun in winter comes with its own beauty. While my office is mostly shaded, the trees don’t provide complete shade. Shafts of sunlight track across my office as the sun moves. An antique chandelier crystal my husband bought me years ago catches the sun’s rays and fills my office with thousands of rainbows that appear and disappear throughout the day, shimmering on the white walls and ceiling and splashing across the floor.
In summer, the sun is too high to hit the crystal—it’s shaded by the eaves. I could hang the crystal lower, so it made rainbows all year, but I like to think the rainbows are winter’s gift to me. They’re something to look forward to during these short days.
Robinne Weiss 