Fighting Critters

While the excessive rain has probably been the biggest challenge to gardening this spring and early summer, I've been taking on a couple of other pests as well.

I went to the garden one evening in mid June to find that some rabbits had snatched three broccoli plants and snacked on some Swiss chard. Fortunately, they had not yet found the romaine and bibb lettuce.

Thinking back to the previous year and the ways in which my full-sized broccoli consistently got nibbled away, I decided I had had enough. I drove on up to Family Home & Garden that night and plunked down the cash for the materials for a solar-charged electric fence.

I got half of it set up the next night before some thunderstorms rolled in, and then the rest set up on the next day. Upon being plugged in, the fence put out a decent charge. If you're wearing sneakers, the charge is not much, but if you touch the fence while simultaneously touching the ground with a bare hand, the shock is unmistakable and has you impulsively snatching away your hand from the fence.


The second battle is with the bugs. A few weeks ago, I put floating row cover over some newly planted cucumbers. Protected from the striped cucumber beetles, the covered plants took off and grew more vigorously than the uncovered plants seeded two week earlier.

With this success, I decided to put floating row cover over some other crops planted this weekend. I planted a row of pac choi and a row of mustard, two plants viciously attacked by flea beetles this spring. Given the hoards of European cabbage moths flying about the garden, I also planted some fall broccoli and cabbage under the row cover as well.

So now my thoughts turn to how to fill up the little remaining space in the garden bed, and how to use the space that will soon be vacated by spinach, onions, and other greens. During the next week, I think I'll maker a summer planting of the following crops: peas, romaine and bibb lettuce, spinach and some large Spanish radishes.