Pests and Pestilence, an Ounce of Prevention

Here’s where the proverbial ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Once the woodchuck has chomped off your beans at ground level, the raccoon has stripped and devoured every ear of corn, and the cucumber beetles have decimated emerging seedlings, you may as well throw up your hands in surrender and hightail it to the nearest farmer’s market with wallet in hand.

Remember the lazy gardener’s motto and build your soil for fertility and tilth. Insects and diseases do the most damage on unhealthy plants. Robust plants draw their vigor from soil. Check yours for proper pH and sufficient nutrients, keep its organic content high, make sure there’s enough water by irrigating and mulching, control weeds while plants are little, and rotate crops.

Read the blurbs in seed catalogs to find disease-resistant varieties, choose seeds adapted to your geographic area, and grow plants in season.

Varmints — Spell Trouble

A Line of Defense

“The woodchuck got to me. He ate EVERYTHING — an entire row of beans in one night. I couldn’t feed him and me, too.”

If you’re in a country place where the woodchuck and rabbit populations are high, you need a fence. Invest some time and effort to construct one that’s burrow-proof. Do it in fall, while the memory of crops unsavored (because the varmint got there first) still stings.

Friends of mine marshalled their strong sons to install a fence that is three feet above ground (stretched on metal fence posts), one foot below ground, and runs one foot out horizontally, underground, to discourage burrowing beasts.

“It was a terrible job to put in,” they recall, “but worth every aching muscle. We had to dig a trench a foot deep and a foot wide around the entire garden, install the fencing, fill in the trench, and reseed the lawn. Around the bottom of the fence they have sunk four-inch high plastic edging to keep weeds from growing into the garden.

If you’ve decided to fence in your garden, but the creation of a gate sounds technical, look at this stile. It’s easy to build, beats bending a fence to crawl over it, offers a place to put things, like that dozen tomatoes you just picked, and makes an easy entrance to the garden. But don’t try to run a tiller up over the top.

If you till, you’ll need an opening wide enough for garden machinery to pass through. Gates can be complicated to construct. Bob and Eleanor Kolkebeck have devised a simple substitute. On each side of their five-and-a-half-foot wide fence openings, they drove two metal fence posts (leaving four feet extending above ground) so there is a slot between them. The gate is a three- by six-foot wooden frame with hardware cloth stretched on it. It slides between the double fence posts like a sliding door — no hinges or latches to fuss with. Just remember to close it when you leave the garden.

A four-foot fence won’t stop deer from entering your garden? Don’t believe it. Lay four-foot high chicken wire around the perimeter of the garden. Deer won’t walk on it. Stake it down so that it lies fairly loosely on the ground.

Take a few minutes to cover your raised salad bed to make it nibble-proof. Rig a tunnel of hardware cloth to protect lettuce, spinach, basil, and parsley grown in the bed. Staple the hardware cloth on one side. Attach a pipe to the other side to weigh it down. The pipe rests on hooks screwed into the pressure-treated pine timbers that contain the bed. Handles above the pipes make it easy to lift the mesh to cultivate and harvest. To close in the ends, attach pieces of hardware cloth with clothespins.

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