And The Garden Goes On, Rodents Be Damned, I'm Back

Back on August 6 I secured the veggie garden gate and with mixed feelings of disgust and relief I bade it farewell as Dave and I set off on a 3 1/2 week hiking adventure to Norway and Iceland. Honestly, as we were traipsing the trails I barely gave my garden a thought. Whatever was happening in the garden was beyond my control and was not worth worrying about.

Before our departure I had done everything I could to try to deprive the local rodents of an opportunity to feast while I was away. Pretty much everything that pleased their palates was encased in hardware cloth. Other things like squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes which could not be enclosed in rodent resistant cages were relegated to the compost bin. It's hard for me to believe but this is the first summer in years that I'm not harvesting homegrown tomatoes. So it goes.

So what did I find upon my return? Let's see.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first.

Peppers from 2017

There's a few pepper plants growing that came back from 2017 and those plants aren't protected in any way. Of course the rodents have developed a taste for Jalapeño peppers and have figured out how to eat just the mild flesh and the seeds and leave the spicy core. I got home in time to rescue most of the peppers on one plant and pretty much stripped it of the green peppers but now I have to figure out what to do with the green peppers. I much prefer ripe red Jalapeños but I won't let the green ones go to waste. The rodents are also nibbling at the Aji peppers but so far haven't done much damage. There was a couple of cherry tomato vines behind the pepper plants but the rodents started to eat the tomatoes at the end of July so I ripped out the plants back then.

Rodent Gnawed Peppers

I had been a bit concerned that the broccoli plants would throw up some tall shoots and push open their cage while I was gone, but the rodents dug their way in and took care of trimming all the tender young shoots for me. They didn't manage to completely destroy the plants and now that I've made it more difficult for them to dig their way in I'm hoping that the plants may be able to produce more shoots.

Once the rodents were finished snacking on broccoli they dug their way into the neighboring cage where the Yellow Cabbage collards were growing and ate the tops of the plants which pretty much destroyed the plants so what was left of them is now cooking in the compost bin. After I removed the plants I covered the ground with hardware cloth to keep the boogers from digging back into the broccoli cage.

One other thing that the rodents have developed a taste for is Calendula seeds. I know it's not birds because the birds don't gather seed heads and find a nice cozy place to munch and leave behind a pile of eviscerated seed capsules.

So that was the worst of it, but as I said I didn't leave much exposed in the garden that they have a taste for. They don't dig for potatoes, celery isn't to their liking, basil is blah to them, parsley is passé, and bolting fennel is too funky. 

So let's check out the fortress that makes up the rest of my garden.

Most notable is the extraordinary defenses that I set up around the pepper patch. I put in 70 plants this year, filling almost an entire bed, and I'm not letting them go down without a fight.

I made a number of panels from 3 X 5 foot pieces of concrete remesh to which I attached hardware cloth. Those panels are attached to stakes with cable ties. I made sure that there are no gaps that the beasts can wiggle through.

In addition to the panels surrounding the bed I added 2-foot pieces of hardware cloth that juts out from the top of the panels just in case the Damn Rodents try to climb up the fence and into the bed. If they try to climb up and over they will find themselves wedged into a tight space. 

I made the "fence" fairly easy to disassemble so that if the harvests come on strong I can take the panels down for easier access. In the meantime I can use a couple of step ladders to get into the bed to check on things and do light harvesting. I don't want to get too confidant now but so far Fort Pepper seems to be effective.

First Pepper Harvest

In the bed on the other side of the main path, other than peppers from last year there's a cage where I have a couple of varieties of beans and a patch of cilantro that I seeded just before I left for vacation. I got my first harvest of Baciccia beans the first week of August and it was enough to enjoy some fresh and freeze some for later. 

I seeded some Castandel bush green beans at the end of July. Those are doing ok and I'm hoping for fresh beans in October.

On the back side of the bed I had been growing a long row of bush dry beans. As you can see the space is now empty but not because I harvested the beans. The rodents found a way into the cage that I had erected to protect the beans and they ate all the flowers and young beans. Those plants fed the compost bin back in July. I just covered the space with cardboard until I got home and just the other day I planted the corner of the bed that you see at the bottom of the photo with saffron bulbs.

Most of the rest of the veggie activity in the garden is in the next bed. One end of the bed is planted with 3 Brussels sprouts and 3 kalettes plants. Each plant has it's own protective cylinder of hardware cloth. The rodents haven't taken an interest in Brussels sprouts and kalettes in the past but I'm not taking any chances.

The celery was nibbled on back in July but the critters don't seem to have liked it so it's been unmolested since then.

That's a good thing because it grows too tall to easily keep covered up.

Mature flowering fennel hasn't been targeted by the furry pests but they have munched on young fennel at times so the new plants that I set out are in protective cages.

The same goes for the new chard plants.

Inside the cage are beets which in the past have been gnawed on, both roots and shoots.

July sown carrots are also under protective cover, rodents like carrot tops.

Celery stalks aren't on the rodent menu but they do like celery root (celeriac).

And parsnips are easier to grow under cover more to protect young seedlings from intense sun than from predation.

The last bed is where I would normally be growing mostly squash, cucumbers, and melons. There aren't any there now. I cut down the Tromba D'Albenga vines before I left for vacation because the rodents were eating the vines and the young squash. The cucumbers were also starting to attract the attention of the rodents and even without that concern there wouldn't have been anything edible on the vines after a month without harvesting so they also fed the compost bin. I wasn't even going to attempt to grow melons because last year the rodents ate all the flowers on the vines. And after my experience withe the Tromba D'Albenga plants this year the winter squash fell off the grow list also. What's left now is basil, parsley, Cilician parsley plants gone to seed, and bolting fennel from which I'm collecting fresh green seeds for culinary use.

There's a patch of Upstate Abundance potatoes left that I need to dig.

And in this corner where I dug the French Blue Belle potatoes the other day I've sown some Nema-Gone marigolds. The French Blue Belle potatoes produced a good quantity of potatoes but unfortunately a lot of them were infected with nematodes.

So that's the latest  in my garden. It's not quite what I would expect at this time of year but I'm grateful to be able to harvest what I can in the face of a seeming plague of rodents. The battle continues, I trapped another rat in the garden just yesterday and I know there's more out there because there was fresh nibbling in the unprotected pepper plants last night.

I'm back, I'm refreshed, and I'm inspired to start gardening again in whatever reasonable way I can.