Category Archives: Uncategorized

Garden Nuisances: Children, Dogs and Pocket Gophers (with a beginning about Pansies)

05 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Another serious helper.

Look closely at her nose….she has been digging for gophers!
Here the small child pulls out a corn stalk.

It has been a while since I’ve written. My garden has been a small priority in the busy month of December. Needless to say, I did plant two or three boxes (yes boxes) of pansies that I dug out of the ground at Weidners Gardens in Encinitas. I took the kids and we had a great time running through their incredible fields of pansies and violas with spades and cardboard boxes to fill. The dirt there is so enviable. I try to dig up as much of it with each plant as I can and transport it home. (Don’t tell them!) 

Home with the six-year-old helping me plant all the pansies we dug up is another situation. Did I mention that each plant is about as big as a dinner plate? I think they are $1 each. You get giant, gorgeous, healthy plants that grow and grow. No root rot. Ever have that fatal disease with your pansies? They get yellow and sort of wiggle off their stalks? Dead before you know it. No way, with these babies. They are hearty and so easy….anyway, my six-year-old wanted to help plant all of them. And they still lived. While trying to dig all the holes before she “helped” too much, I heard her say, “Mommy these are so soft.” I thought she’d have a petal pressed between her fingers, but no, she was holding the roots of a giant pansy plant, smashing them and feeling their silky threads. Then she planted them.  They lived anyway. 

This brings me to the topic of this blog — things that kill your garden. Okay, that sounds kind of harsh. I mean to say that there are some common garden nuisances that I encounter, and I thought I’d share some of my techniques for helping fix these problems. This is getting long so I included a few photos at the start. I’ll write the rest later. I am out trying to take a picture of that gopher (or maybe it’s a mole.) I’m not sure what it is that leaves little mounds of dirt as well as a system of tunnels. My husband and I caught a mole under a flowerpot one day, but that is another story and another nuisance. Another day, another garden nuisance.

Sexy Pumpkins

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in garden, gardening, pumpkins, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Well, here is an update on the pumpkin situation. The one Cinderella pumpkin sits on my front porch, making me happy when I see what I have grown.

But my neighbor deserves credit for figuring out what was wrong with my pumpkins. She told me I had to mate them. Yes. Mate. Male pollen sprinkled into female flower.

I told my dad, who is an old farmer–really, he raised lots of cantaloupes and lettuce on a big farm when I was little. He had a huge vegetable garden on our plot in town. (To give credit, my mother is an excellent gardener too.) He scoffed, guffawed (you know what I mean). Dad resistance.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “That’s baloney.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I read it on the Internet.”

More scoffing.

But I think so. All the bees are dying. If the bees die, they can’t fertilize your pumpkins. I told him this. I guess he admitted my point of view–but only slightly.

So once I studied those Internet pictures on male and female flowers on pumpkins (that’s it, I swear), I marched up my hill to the small planter I have on our “vista,” which sees nothing but treetops. I peered into one of the yellow blooms.

Buzzzzzzzzzz. Yikes. I jumped. Out flew a bee right at my nose. Okay, Dad, maybe you were right. This is hogwash.

But then I started looking for females. There were plenty of male flowers . In fact, too many. Not one female anywhere! The only female must have been fertilized by some miracle of survivor bee power. But now, it’s a locker room of manliness.

That’s why I have no baby pumpkins. I have only men flowers to mate. Who knows where the females, with their tiny pumpkin babies sitting at the stalk of their flowers, went or why they aren’t growing.

It makes me kinda sad.

Well, there’s always next year. That is the good thing about a garden. In a garden, you can always start over.

Terrible Tomatoes

09 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by in gardening, rats, tomatoes, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Terrible Tomatoes

Today I will tell you about the thing eating my tomatoes. I have nurtured these tomatoes along, watched them turn from yellow flowerets into big, green fruits. I waited patiently for them to turn red, the vine ripened type you rarely get to eat, and I waited with anticipation. Yet something curious happened. One day in the afternoon, I’d see my lovely green tomato. The next morning, instead of being a green turning to red shade, I discovered a giant bite smack dab in the middle of its green bellied flesh. This was an isolated incident I told myself. Each morning, I ran out before work to look at my garden. And each day, more bites. Then disappearances. A mystery that took me a few morning of head shaking. Something was eating my tomatoes!

One by one, whatever this thing is, it gorges itself on the flesh. It’s disgusting really. At first I thought I was out smarting it by leaving the half eaten carcass. If I did that, maybe it would slow it’s progression, but it doesn’t. Some nights, the thing eats two or three. I’ve started picking the tomatoes green so they can ripen. Forget vine ripened! I just want something to show for all the nurturing I’ve done. The terrible thing is the monstrous eater has moved now from the back tomato patch to the giant sprawling heirloom in the front yard–the one that has tomatoes as big as pumpkins. I can’t let it eat those beauties.

What is it? I guess a rat, maybe a ground squirrel. Bird net doesn’t stop it. A big Tom Cat rat trap did nothing. I’ve thought of poisoning my tomatoes like that witch in Snow White, but that seems so wrong. 

Well, I’ll let you know what happens. Here is a picture of the gore. Here’s the green pumpkin tomatoes, too.001004