Maarten Smet

Cristo,

I use a modified/easier version of this:


I didn't use a rod, I used a regular thin metal wire (I used wire that kept a roll of chicken wire rolled up), with a washer at the end for the bait to rest on. I didn't drill any holes, you just bend the wire over the top PVC pipe and the end cap keeps the wire in place. Didn't use glue either, very simple

Maarten

I like my nanking cherries, I have some that have white flowers and some with pink.

Some observations:
- Fruit is tasty
- Low maintenance, I have one in a dry garden and it seems to be doing ok
- In one of my gardens, it seems to attract Japanese beetles and can be used as a trap crop
- It seems to fruit all at once, would love to have it more gradual so I can snack on it over a longer time
- Propagation with cuttings: I have had no success rooting from cuttings, it takes a while for cuttings to root. The laziest successful approach is to put a rock on a branch close to the ground, then wait 1-2 years and a new plant will form (yes, it takes that long)
- My favorite function is that it can be used as dwarf rootstock for plums. Last year, I grafted a plum on one of the stems so I am patiently waiting for plums to fruit on them

M

I have a 3-tiered defense system against voles

1) Hardware cloth covering the soil, concrete blocks around it with electrical wire (they cannot dig under it and get zapped when they climb over the blocks). Here I plant my potatoes
2) Sunchokes on the side of my yard as a trap crop.
3) cornmeal/baking soda in 4-inch pvc pipes in my garden

2 and 3 have these benefits: I kill the voles that don't like sunchokes, so in essence I breed sunchoke-loving voles. Those sunchoke-loving voles are in such a nice and big area somewhat away from my garden and closer to a wooded area, that they can eat and breed to their heart's content, which grows the population and will attract predators. Those predators keep all voles in check.

M

Kim,

I have hard clay myself, so I understand the predicament. Not sure how hard your clay is, but daikon is not some miracle plant, if the clay is tough enough, it will not drill itself into the soil, but will stay in your top soil and just have a fat turnip type form.

I would create pockets of fertility in the area: drill or dig a hole (again, if possible, my clay is pretty easy to work with in the fall/winter as it is wet, maybe yours is different), make it a foot or more deep, fill it with your manure, cover it with your topsoil in a mound form. Next spring, you can plant your melons/squashes in these mounds. Melons/squashes need a lot of space for their vines, but their root system is very local, you don't need to improve the whole area, just the places were roots are.

Now, if you have a lot of time to dig/drill and enough manure/compost/..., you can make those holes close enough so that the worms can travel from one hole to the other holes, so you will also improve the soil in-between the holes (a technique sometimes used to fertilize trees).

M

Kena Landry wrote: Otherwise, what would be our option?

You could use clamshells (the ones you purchase strawberries in). You simply cover the fruit and snap the clamshell shut over the branch (so if the fruit falls, it stays in the clamshell as the clamshell is held up by the branch).

Works well for:
Groundcherries (voles love them, when the groundcherries drop, they are protected by the shell)
Strawberries (protection from voles, you take it off once the strawberry is ripe and put it around the next batch of ripening strawberries)
Grapes (protection from birds)
Apples/pears (protection from squirrels)

The only one where the critters have had success to eat the fruit was with pawpaws. My assumption is that the fruit was just too sweet to ignore, so they ripped open the clamshells. Adding tape around the clamshell protected the remainder of the pawpaws.

It is hard to do it for a full orchard, but if you want to protect some fruit you would love to taste, it is worth it.

M

Jay Angler wrote: But I don't get a more than 3 cherries a year do to all the critters that love cherries and are willing to grab them ALL!

Try Clamshell guards https://www.gardeningcharlotte.com/spring/2021/6/5/clam-shell-guards

I started using these this season and it has helped a lot with my small fruits (grapes/strawberries/ground cherries). Nice thing is that if the fruit drops, it stays in the clamshell, away from critters' lil fingers.

M

"After several people mentioning deer, I now feel very lucky that the deer don't seem to be an issue for me (unless they've come in only at night, and somehow not left a single track.) My only guess is they're less comfortable coming close to my living space, because it's not like there's any shortage of them in the area. And a proper deer fence is probably even more expensive than a rodent fence."

I hope you have lots of adjacent gardens or lots of corn fields in close proximity to your property, because if not, to paraphrase Fields of Dreams, if you build it, the deer will come.

I have lots of deer pressure, so I build a double 5-foot fence (4 feet distance in-between), with T-posts and chicken wire, not cheap, but does the work just as much as a proper deer fence and much cheaper.

I have a vole problem, but by "feeding them" abundant sun chokes, they only cause me issues with other root crops and when I plant seeds, they leave my trees alone. So, I just have to: 1) have a special place for my potatoes they cannot access and 2) knock their population down with traps/... just before planting season. They don't bother me the rest of the year, so I leave them alone the rest of the year, actually I'd prefer to have a big population the rest of the year, as it attracts its predators, so hopefully at some point I will stop having to knock the population down myself and they will do the job.

So, for me, a deer fence makes sense, a rodent fence does not. But your circumstances may differ, or differ for now .

M

Josh Warfield wrote:I'm in my first year of gardening, but did a whole lot of reading before I ever planted anything, and got completely sold on the "landrace gardening" concept.

Part of that concept is that plants should evolve pest resistance if you just don't bother protecting them from pests. Sounds great to me, so I left my garden completely unfenced (besides the cattle fence at the property line). Then I met the rabbits and the pack rats. They eat every single sunflower as soon as it gets to about 6 or 8 inches tall. Beans are gone before they grow their second set of leaves. Lettuce gets wiped out when it's barely done germinating. All but one melon plant was gone within a week of sprouting, and then the one surviving plant had all its flowers eaten. I wouldn't mind a very low survival rate in the first year, but it sucks to have to start from scratch on multiple entire species. The only plants I grew that I'm still fairly hopeful will produce seed are the squash; I guess they just don't like the hairy leaves or something. Some of the casualties are certainly due to my inexperience as a gardener, but that will be less of a problem next year, while the critters are gonna be the same.

So apparently, I was way too optimistic about this. Did I just have really bad luck, or did I fundamentally misunderstand what's meant by pest resistance?

On a related note, is there any such thing as an affordable rodent-proof fence? These pack rats are particularly aggravating, due to their habit of cutting down a plant and then just leaving it sitting there, not even eating it. WHY?!?

Couple of comments:
1) "should evolve pest resistance" You will still have to protect your plants from animals, unless you want to landrace towards plants that are inedible/poisonous to animals, and inedible/poisonous probably to yourself as well. Or you have to make your garden  area bigger, so critters can't eat it all. If you have corn, deer don't walk too deep into corn fields, so if you have a 50 row corn field, the outside rows are devoured, but the inside rows are safe. You seem to have a big garden area, so you could focus on low input seeding. For instance, sunflowers: buy a pack of sunflowers seeds they sell as bird food from the garden center, sprinkle it over a wide area and even if the birds eat 90%, you will still get a nice patch of sunflowers.
2)"while the critters are gonna be the same" Incorrect, critters will change each years, some will be there each year, like deer or field mice, but you creating a garden impacts the ecosystem, pests from last year will have attracted predators this year which may attract other animals that may become your new pests.
3) "I wouldn't mind a very low survival rate in the first year, but it sucks to have to start from scratch on multiple entire species." Yeah, that sucks, been there, but it will teach you the species that will thrive without neglect (hopefully without (2) changing the success) and the ones that will need a little more help during the season. For me, watermelons work really well, I can just drop seeds in the soil, no water/weeding, as long as I give them landscape fabric to climb over (as they have small leaves, they can't compete with my weeds). Squashes don't work well, unless I plant them on a place I buried compost or manure. Squash doesn't need landscape fabric as the big leaves dominate the weeds...

Good luck,

M

Florence Van Vorst wrote:My asparagus ferns block the sun from my strawberries.  My strawberry patch is now in the shade. We are from northern NJ.  

Actually, that seems to be the ideal: as the strawberries blocks the sun from weed sprouts, killing the weeds, the asparagus can establish themselves better, "closing the canopy" of the system the same way a forest does, but as a consequence of this succession, it also kills of the strawberries.

Maarten

Wish there was a "my chicken compost for me" option

M