Gardening update
----------------
As previously phlogged[1], this year my wife and I are experimenting
with the "square foot gardening" method in raised beds in our
backyard, since we unfortunately no longer have access to the
extremely generous hundred square metre cheap allotments we had
previously enjoyed in Finland. I figured it was about time for
an update.
The big success story for us last year was various crops in the
squash family, which provided an abundant yield, so we stuck with
that albeit naturally on a smaller scale. We planted two squash
plants and two zucchini (aka courgette) plants, and they are by far
the largest things in the bed thus far. Unsurprisingly you can
only fit one of these plants in each square foot space; Perhaps
stupidly, we put all four of these adjacent to one another in a 2x2
section of spaces and it's getting very crowded. It would probably
make a lot more sense to space these wider apart.
Our two cherry tomato plants are also looking pretty robust.
Our two capsicum (aka bell pepper, aka paprika) plants seem healthy
enough but are small and growing slowly, perhaps they really want
a warmer climate. The same is true of the eggplant, the small
and growing slowly part, I mean. Leafy things like rucola (aka
rocket, aka arugula) and spinach are also looking great and might
even already be ready to harvest soon. We planted some rhubarb,
not realising that it takes a few years before you can harvest.
It seems to be doing okay, like the capsicum and eggplant isn't
exactly thriving. Of our various herbs, surprisingly few actually
germinated, but what's there is doing well. I keep meaning to try
planting more to fill the empty spaces.
While the squash and zucchini are doing well, they are also the locus
of the one serious pest problem we've been having. For a while
we were very concerned that the big leaves of these plants were
being nibbled at by something, but we very rarely caught anything
in the act. We found quite a few small, bright orange crab-looking
things, but a little research suggests these are spider mites and
that they are, in fact, something you want in your garden because
they eat other things that you don't want. As the damage became
worse and wors we panicked and bought some eye-wateringly expensive
pyrethrum spray, a very ecologically friendly natural pesticide,
and started spraying it regularly to no apparent effect.
After observing just how many slugs appeared seemingly out of
nowhere overnight on my recent S24O, I wondered whether or not
perhaps the culprits weren't slugs or snails that we were never
seeing because they only came out at night. So the other week we
popped out just before bed when it was dark to hunt around with a
torch, and were really very surprised to find some of the leaves
literally crawling with earwigs (forficula auricularia)! There had
to be about a dozen of them one just one leaf.
Yet more research suggests that they are actually a common garden
pest, which was definitely news to us. Not really knowing what
else to do we let them be for the night, satisfied that we now at
least knew what we were dealing with, which is, of course, half
the battle. It seems that a very common remedy is simply to trap
the earwigs in a small container, set into the soil, containing
a mixture of soy sauce - the smell of which apparently attracts
them - and any kind of cooking oil - which makes them slippery
enough that they can't subsequently climb out of the container.
If you're so inclined, the web can provide you plenty of photos from
people who have done this and come out the morning after to find a
pretty gross-looking container filled with hundreds of the things!
Happy that something so cheap, simple and non-harmful to anything
other than the earwigs was a possible solution, we set one of these
out on Monday night and yesterday morning found a disappointing first
haul of precisely 3 earwigs. We've tried moving the trap closer
to the plants having the problem and I hope we can get some more.
Apparently, like spider mites, earwigs aren't the worse thing to have
around because they are predators of other less desirable things,
but it would be good to reduce the local population to the point
where our plants are growing faster than they're being eaten.
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/almost-square-foot-gardening.txt
