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Caption Competition: Comfy Cat

One of the local cats has decided my windowboxes (planted with succulents that haven’t yet grown to cover the whole box) is the best place to sunbathe. Can anyone come up with a catchy caption, before I wander out and make the trough inhospitable with some short sticks?

Book Review: Pests and Diseases

Next up in the review pile is ‘Pests and Diseases‘ by David Hurrion, another book in the Gardeners’ World magazine series.

Glossy, full colour and pocket-sized, it’s a handy reference guide to take out into the garden when you’re experiencing a problem with one of your plants and need to identify it and find a solution.

The book starts off with the basics of raising healthy plants, and a guide to recognising damage that is caused by environmental conditions (also known as physiological damage) rather than a specific pest or disease. There’s a look at why plants are attacked and the different kinds of organisms that attack them. Then you’re in to identifying problems, dealing with them, and helping to avoid them in the first place.

The second section deals with identifying symptoms and is divided up into stem problems, fruit and blossom problems and underground problems. For some reason, attracting beneficial insects has been added to the end of this section, rather than included in the good gardening habits covered in the first section.

It’s the third section that earns this book a place on your bookshelf – the A to Z of basic problems. Although it doesn’t have a picture for everything, there is a description of all the common pests and diseases you’re likely to encounter in your garden, with an idea of how much of a problem they are and ideas on how to control it. Although organic control methods (good gardening practices, natural allies and biological controls and barriers) are discussed, this isn’t an organic book – there are references to pesticides for those who want to use them as a last resort.

The A to Z listing is great if you’re flipping through, but possibly less useful when you’re faced with a problem – you’ll have to have some idea of what you’re dealing with to find the relevant information. This isn’t a bad book, it would be very useful for novice gardeners who are learning to recognise pests and diseases and want a guide to take out into the garden with them. There aren’t too many ‘yukky’ photos, which can be an issue in some of the more detailed publications on pests and diseases, but if you already know the basics then forego buying this one and invest in the RHS version instead.

Scardy Cats

Maybe I should just electrify the fence

Back in 2004 I was despairing of my cat problem and I bought some of the Scardy Cat Plants that T&M were offering. At the time I think they were quite new, and not widespread, which they now are. They could only be bought as plants, which is still true, and as they’re not frost hardy you have to overwinter cuttings indoors if you want plants for next year. They weren’t entirely successful at the time, and I didn’t bother.

Now I am considering cat defence strategies for next year and I’m wondering whether it would be worth investing again, and using them as one aspect of the defences. I have been looking for a source of seeds, but there doesn’t seem to be one. Has anyone tried saving seeds from their plants? Although sold as Coleus canina apparently they’re really Plectranthus caninus, but I can’t see seeds of those either. However, it is in the mint family and cuttings are supposed to root really easily in water, so they’re not hard to propagate – which does beg the question why the plants are still so expensive to buy!

My research has suggested other scented plants that cats don’t like, including lavender (which we have) and mint (ditto). They certainly don’t like coffee grounds, but I no longer have access to a supply of those, which is a shame. It was quite nice going out into the garden in the morning and it smelling of coffee; it’s preferable to the alternative!

As cats clearly don’t like citrus smells, are there any plants with a strong citrus scent?

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Looking at the picture I have chosen for this post, it has just occurred to me why I’m having more cat problems in the garden this year – my elderly neighbour replaced his gargantuan hedge with a rather puny fence last autumn. I gained a couple of feet of garden and a big cat problem :(

Cat-astrophe

God I hate cats. I don’t mind the pampered pussies who stay inside all day and act cute. I don’t even have that much of a problem with the mainly feral felines who keep rural rodents under control. It’s the ones in the middle I hate – the domesticated cats that consider my garden to be part of their territory.

It was bad enough yesterday morning when I discovered that the only thing worse than discovering cat shit in your raised beds is discovering cat diarrhoea in your raised beds. I can tell there’s cat shit in the garden ages before I find it – the pong is unbelievable.

After I cleaned up yesterday’s mess I took the offensive, donned some rubber gloves, and crumbled up dried chillies into my largest raised beds. Hopefully any cat crouching there will get more than he bargained for!

But this morning there is worse news – something, presumably feline, has trashed one of my forest garden beds. Yesterday the sweet violets, Egyptian onions and sea kale were thriving at the base of the Japanese wineberry. This morning they’re all severely damaged. It doesn’t even look as though they’ve been scratched up in the search for a suitable toilet site. Pete says he heard two cats fighting last night, so presumably they were having their rough and tumble on my poor plants.

Cats are a perennial problem in this garden. Episode 40 of the Alternative Kitchen Garden (recorded back in 2007) details some more of the ways you can deal with them, as well as presenting a balanced view with some stuff about people who welcome cats in their gardens.

The six foot fence deters the older, fatter cats, but the neighbours keep buying new kittens that are more athletic. In despair I have placed an order with the Organic Gardening Catalogue for cat repellents of various sorts (we have a PIR scarer, but it doesn’t seem to be doing the job at the moment) and will report back on whether any of them work.

The Pod Plants Have Landed

For the last couple of weeks, presumably because of the warm and humid weather, there has been a sudden upsurge in the population of fungus gnats in the house. They live in compost, and although the ‘official’ advice for keeping them under control is to let compost dry out between waterings, I have never found it to be of any use. I’m an erratic waterer anyway, but dry soil doesn’t seem to deter these little flies.

As I have mentioned before, fungus gnats (AKA sciarid flies) don’t fly very well. They seem to be attracted by damp heat, and so have a tendency to fly at your face or into your cup of tea. In fact, any dregs of liquid left lying around are likely to become a fungus gnat graveyard.

They’re pretty easy to kill – you can literally grab them out of the air if you’re so inclined, but occur in such numbers it’s hard to keep them under control. Yellow sticky traps work really well until they fill up with little black bodies; carnivorous plants can also help, and turn a waste product into a resource – recycle your flies into plant food!

With something as tiny as a fungus gnat, a Venus fly trap just doesn’t get the job done – there’s not enough weight to trigger the traps. Pitcher plants would probably work (I haven’t managed to keep one alive for long yet) but the best plants for this kind of pest control job are definitely the Drosera family – the sundews. Generally easy to look after (there are even some that will happily survive outside in the UK climate), they produce sticky little globules over their leaves that are perfect for trapping tiny flies and insects.

I have a couple that have lived in the humid environment of the bathroom for several years, but I have a tendency to forget to water them (and they must have rainwater, not tap) and so they look a little sad. But I have invested in another 6 plants so that we can have them all over the house, and this time I will look after them better. I bought 3 Drosera dichotoma – the Fork Leaved Sundew – which has dense sticky leaves that should be perfect, 1 Drosera aliciae – Alice Sundew, 1 Drosera capensis alba – Cape Sundew, white form, and 1 Drosera scorpiodes, a pygmy sundew native to Australia. They all came from The Little Shops of Horrors and arrived today (I ordered them on Sunday) all nicely packed in what looks like plastic drinking glasses to keep them safe, which is a fabulous idea and I can reuse the glasses as mini-propagators or for sending plants out myself. I did look locally, but couldn’t find anywhere that sold suitable plants in good condition.

The idea of having several sorts was that I could see which ones adapt themselves to life here well and which ones do the job best. And of course, it’s more interesting :)

Enlisting an army

Spring is a busy time in the garden and I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed, but this morning I have enlisted some helpers – around 12 million of them, in fact! My slug killing nematodes arrived yesterday, spent the night in the fridge and this morning have been watered around the garden. They should help control slugs for the next six weeks.

After I set them to work I did some myself. I potted up around 30 pepper seedlings, then ran out of clean pots, which leaves me around 6 left to pot up from this batch. And then I potted on the three small olive trees that arrived a little while ago. They were in such horrible, clumpy soil that I had to break their rootballs apart before potting them on, otherwise I don’t think they’d ever spread out into the new compost.

Dirty Taro

I haven’t been out in the garden much lately, but last week I noticed that the taro plants in the Grow Dome were suffering from aphids and sooty mould – some of the leaves looked pretty dirty.

On Christmas Eve the weather was lovely – bright and mild – and while the chickens got to work in their giant dust bath I cleaned up the taro. I wiped the leaves down with a cloth and a solution of eco-friendly bug spray, the idea being that wiping would remove the sooty mould and the liquid would kill off the aphids.

How well it will work, and whether a second application will be necessary, remains to be seen – but for the moment the taro leaves certainly look much cleaner.

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According to Amazon, ‘Growing Stuff’ will be published on 20th February 2009. There’s a little bit more information about the book on the Black Dog Publishing website.

Patchy Pollination

Most people, if they think about pollination at all, must think of it as a binary process – it either happens or it doesn’t. But in the fruit garden life is much more complicated than that. Many of our familiar crops rely on multiple pollination events to form what we would consider to be one fruit. Raspberries are an obvious example. Apples are less obvious, but you’ll get oddly shaped apples if they are not pollinated properly (once for each seed, IIRC).

And this is what happens if your sweetcorn is not properly pollinated because the slugs eat the the sweetcorn silks (which are the female flowers).

This is by far the worst affected of the three cobs I have picked so far, but I have no hopes for a decent harvest. I should be more disappointed, but the fact is that I find it quite interesting, and the chickens are more than happy to eat the affected sweetcorn (the underside of the cob in the photo is far more normal looking).

I haven’t given it much thought before, but it looks to me as though every single thread in the silks corresponds to one of the kernels in the cob. I have never even heard of slugs/ snails munching on sweetcorn silks before, so I wasn’t prepared for it. I thought the plants where safe once they started growing strongly.

Sweetcorn is unusual because it’s one of the very few common kitchen garden crops that is pollinated by the wind rather than self-fertile or pollinated by insects. The idea of growing your sweetcorn plants in a square block, rather than in rows, is that it maximizes the chance of the pollen falling from the male flowers (tassels) at the top of the stem onto the silks on the tops of the cobs, and thereby helps to prevent patchy pollination (slugs notwithstanding). If you’ve only got a few plants then you can give them a tap when you walk past to help release the pollen.

Mouseketeers

Tiny flowers on the mouse melons

A melon for mice, indeed

About a week or so ago I noticed that a couple of the ground cherry plants that had been struggling had given up. When I looked closely, I saw signs of a spider mite infestation – not serious, but definitely there. I pulled up the plants and composted them.

Over the weekend it was clear that the infestation was spreading – several plants were showing the golden spots on their leaves that are an early indication, although there weren’t many signs of their dense webs. And so yesterday I got out my eco-friendly bug spray (it’s based on fatty acids and suffocates pests, AFAIK) and gave everything in the Grow Dome a good spray. Then I fed and watered everything to keep all of the plants healthy and to raise the humidity (which spider mites don’t like).

This morning I have watered again. In a few more days I might spray again.

More positive news is that the spindly mouse melon plants (also known as Mexican gherkins) are flowering and setting fruit. They really are tiny – the fruit in the photograph is at most 0.5 cm long!

*This is the closest thing I’ve got to a cucumber at the moment, Patrick!

Fort Broccoli

After days of dodgy weather, and a couple away from home, this morning I spent some time catching up in the garden. I harvested the red onions (which were healthy, but very small) and the garlic.

I replaced the two peppers that had been slug munched since they’d slimed their way right through the growing points and the plants were left worthless.

I planted out 5 of my purple sprouting broccoli plants, which leaves me with a few spares in pots. I watered them in, sowed trefoil underneath and then spent an age clearing out the shed so that I could find the brassica collars. Once I’d found and fitted those, I sprinkled eco slug pellets and then strugged with my ‘easy’ tunnel – the gardening equivalent of a Rubix cube, they’re a fabulous invention that will send you round the bend.

The result is Fort Broccoli. The trefoil and the mesh tunnel should protect them from the worst ravages of cabbage white butterflies (which have just started to make an appearance). The slug pellets should prevent them from being munched. The tunnel should also prevent them being too badly damaged or dried out by the wind. The brassica collars will protect them from cabbage root fly.

In the autumn I will have to take the tunnel off and stake the plants against winter winds. It might sound like a lot of work for 5 plants (they grow big!) but it will be worth it in PSB season next spring.

The Slug Buggers didn't work

So despite the fact that I undoubtedly used far too many, the Slug Buggers failed to protect my peppers last night. This one was still chomping away this morning. He’s now running the gauntlet of the chicken run, but he’s too big to be eaten.

In other news, I’ve had my first article published in the Guardian today: No Hoe Zone, about making use of some of those pesky weeds in the garden.

Newly planted peppers

The potatoes have been replaced with sweet peppers. There are six plants, and they should be two each of three different varieties – Sweet Lipstick, Californian Wonder and Marconi Rosso.

The latest slug protection product is Slug Buggers*. I saw them advertised in a magazine and thought I would try them. They’re made from waste sheep’s wool, and therefore pretty environmentally friendly and benign.

The main problem is that they don’t come with any instructions. I think I used too many – I used most of the tub to put a ring around 5 pepper plants, which would make them pretty expensive to use on any scale. A quick hop around the internet suggests that broadcasting them in the area to be protected would be enough, but the manufacturer doesn’t have any information on their website.

And they smell. Well, they stink… of sheep. I don’t mind the smell too much, it reminds me of holidays in the country, but now the garden smells like a small holding. I threw a handful around in the Grow Dome, and the smell is even stronger in there. But I suspect this means that they’ll have the fringe benefit of keeping cats off the flowerbeds as well – they won’t want to scratch around in something that smells so strongly.

Whether they work or not… that remains to be seen.

*Gotta love the name

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There’s some good gardening discounts around at the moment, including 20% off at Crocus. Check out Muppet’s Moolah for more information.

Every silver lining has a cloud

Strawberry spinach, growing safely

Allotments have been big news for at least a year now. With a growing emphasis on green lifestyles, and food scares, more and more people are going back to growing their own. It’s not all plain sailing, although most people only have to deal with slugs and snails and not pesky porkers.

The current economic situation also seems to be fueling a rise in interest in growing your own food, and if it continues then it will no doubt mean more people looking for an allotment. This can only be seen as good news, stemming the tide of allotments being sold off for development.

But having an allotment is hard work (as I found out) and not for everyone. I feel very sorry for those allotmenteers and kitchen gardeners who have been affected by the current contaminated manure crisis (see Daughter of the Soil and Bifurcated Carrots for good posts on this topic).

And it seems that, with money tight, two-legged rats are becoming more of an issue than ever. Not content with vandalism and destroying what other people have worked so hard to create, they’re now starting to steal people’s crops as well. That news reports covers thefts from Elder Stubbs allotments, a very forward-thinking site I was lucky enough to visit last year.

Busman's holiday

There’s aphids on the goldenberries

The ladybird larvae on my compost heap have eaten the hordes of aphids that were on there. I’m not sure how far ladybird larvae can travel to find their next meal – I guess it depends on how big they are – but I thought I would make life easy for them.

A couple of weeks ago I repotted some chives that were looking pretty sad. They’re now looking healthier, but have fallen prey to the dreaded blackfly as well (I’ve never really had blackfly in the garden before, but this year they’re everywhere). I moved the pot of chives up next to the compost heap yesterday, and this morning almost all of the ladybird larvae (I counted at least 10) have moved onto the chives and are doing their job.

There’s not enough food there to keep them occupied for too long, but the goldenberries in the Grow Dome have attracted more than their fair share of aphids, so I have taken the pot of chives into the Grow Dome so that the larvae can move from the chives onto the goldenberries.

I’m fairly sure they’re mostly harlequins (and this morning I saw what I think is my first adult harlequin – it looked like this one, but disappeared before I could take a picture) and so less universally ‘good’ than native ladybirds, but they’re still an aphid’s worst nightmare.

Harlequin?

By the time I got round to pruning the Minarettes, the young leaves on the cherry were pretty badly infested with blackfly. I didn’t think too much of it, just pruned the tree and threw the prunings into the compost heap.

When I went out to the Grow Dome this morning, I noticed a lot of blackfly crawling around on the lid of the compost bin. It was like blackfly rush hour. I was going to do something about it, but then I saw that a ladybird larva was munching away happily. Later on in the day, he’d been joined by some pals.

I thought that was good news, but having looked closely at the photograph I’m not so sure. The ladybird larvae that I’ve seen previously looked similar to this, but weren’t spiny. I think these ones may be Harlequin ladybirds – the alien invader.

I’ve submitted a report, and the best photo, to the Harlequin Ladybird Survey. Hopefully they will be able to make an identification from the photograph, and let me know which species these little beasties are.

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