We're Going to Try an Heirloom Garden This Year

I've heard that sprinkling cayene pepper around the plants will keep squirrels away.

Squirrels have destroyed my gardens every year, such that I haven't bothered the past two.

That does work for a while, but it leaches into the soil and then you have to reapply it every time you water. Guy at the farmer's market told me a great trick - wash out an old spray bottle, fill it with 1/4 cup of olive oil, six squirts of dish detergent, six dashes of tabasco. Fill it the rest of the way with water, shake it up, and spray it on your plants.

Keeps the bugs off as well as the squirrels. Only problem is, it really clings to the vegetables and you've got to scrub them to get it off. Works great for tomatoes and eggplant, but I was hesitant to try it with the lettuce. But it's not too late to start a new crop. I'll teach the little buggers this time!

This is where the rest of Camp Wordforge comes in handy.

Little difficult with my eyesight and the proximity of the neighbors. But there’s one Boss Squirrel as big as a cat that I wouldn’t mind introducing to the business end of a baseball bat.

I tried growing a garden a few times, tomatoes, corn, watermelon, cucumbers, etc... The garden always started well, but with the squirrels, deer, chipmunks, rabbits, and all the other critters around all I did was feed the wildlife.

From what I've read, you can actually train the squirrels to stay away so that eventually you won't need to throw the cayenne out anymore.

Personally, I've got a shit ton of squirrels, and I figured out at what point they went after the tomatos. I just picked them a day or two before.

Break action pellet gun with lethal ammo, still kinda loud, thugh, maybe a slingshot with steel balls.

Lovely suggestions, guys, but, again – wonky eyesight, no skill with firearms (though passing fair at archery), city ordinances, and very close neighbors.

And not to get back to the original topic or anything, but as someone who's done a bit of amateur gardening, my advice would be to start slow. The urge when you buy a new house and have all that lovely fallow ground stretched out before you is to want to plant every square foot of it with exotic things, but unless you're able to devote time to it every single day during the growing season – weeding, mulching, watering, weeding, keeping the varmints off, fertilizing, picking the borers off your tomatoes by hand, setting beer traps for the slugs, weeding – you'll probably be disappointed. Unless you like weeds.

Heirloom tomatoes, for one, will give you smaller yields than conventional varieties, so factor that in, and maybe plant a few conventional varieties as well. See which ones do best for next year's crop. If at all possible, stagger your plantings, unless you're into canning, because otherwise you'll end up with more tomatoes than you can give away when they all start to ripen at once.

Ditto summer squashes, particularly zucchini. No one has enough friends to offload all the zucchini. But you can keep the yields down by harvesting some of the flowers before they seed and using them in salads.

Speaking of flowers, all sorts are edible – rose petals, any variety of violet/pansy, nasturtiums, chamomile. Chamomile flowers for tea, the rest to add color (and a little bite from the nasturtiums) to salads. As an extra bonus, not only are marigolds colorful planted between rows, but the flowers are edible and they repel mosquitoes.

If someone would be kind enough to quote this so Ron Paul can see it, I'd be most appreciative.

Somebody once told me that spreading your own hair around the garden keeps squirrels away, but when I tried that, I saw them gathering it up to line their nest with.

A co-worker of mine stuffs Zuke blossums with ricotta cheeze and deep fries them.

They repel something else too. I can't remember what, but some kind of annoying bug or microbe that lives in the soil.

I don't think it works like that anymore with the new software.

Hmmm, can you use dead squirrels as compost?

Funny you should mention that.

Had a house in Staten Island that, two owners before us, had been occupied by a widower who was apparently an obsessive gardener. The soil in Staten Island is for the most part red clay – great for brickmaking (in fact, there was a brickworks there once upon a time) – but dreadful for gardening. This previous owner had, according to neighbors who remembered him, roamed the neighborhood every fall gathering leaves and lawn clippings, bringing them home and dumping them in the back half of his garden, then mulching them in in the spring. The back half of that yard by the time we lived there was rich, black topsoil – the result of all that compost. So that's where I started my vegetable garden.

First I had to reclaim the soil from the weedy lawn that had been allowed to take over by the previous owners and, as I turned the soil over, I kept turning up these squirrel skulls. Dozens of them in a patch maybe 20 x 30 feet. For years, every time I reclaimed a little more of that yard, there'd be squirrel skulls, way out of proportion to the size of the plot, and most of them buried at least a foot below the surface, as if they'd been killed rather than dying of natural causes.

Weird-looking things, squirrel skulls. Their incisors grow lifelong, and they look more like claws than teeth:



But I have to say, I grew the best tomatoes on the block in that soil, so maybe there's something to it.

Yes.

Thanks!

Did anyone plant a garden this year?

Agree, wordforge is an excellent, eternal source of horse manure! Anyway you must have a pretty big garden to grow this much variety. Hopefully they all do well for you. Don't over fertilize! Too much nitrogen will burn your plants.

No yet.

I have not planted an actual "food" garden this year. I get too frustrated with the weather and bugs. You plant too early, frost messes you up. You wait too late, it gets 90 degrees and burns your plants. Spring is just too short where I live. And there are so many bugs that devour your plants. So I have planted sunflowers, which are robust and hardy, and the seeds provide food for wildlife. And as I said earlier I have half my backyard in wildflowers, again for the critters. My critter collection is one rabbit, one squirrel, two doves, a couple red-winged blackbirds, a couple of cardinals, one blue bird, and a few Carolina wrens. As for fun to look plants at I have several annual flower species in planters. I like planters because you can move them around as the sun changes position to keep them from getting burned as summer progresses. All my actual trees are growing very well after a couple of years of struggling. As for my front lawn lawn I don't care - well manicured lawns are nothing but dead-space. No wildlife eats lawn grass, it's worthless really. So I keep it short enough to keep the home owners association off my ass.

KJ's got some tomatoes, squash, peppers, herbs going again this year. She was going to do a raised garden bed, but it would have been a bit pricy and she's getting used to the pots and buckets scheme anyhow. She did set up a mulched strip of land so we don't have to mow 'twixt the pots anymore.

We're also going to set up a bed around the base of the oak. Tricky because most of the fun flowers seem to want full sun. Also apparently tricky for me to not lose track of the seed packets

My sunflowers are doing great! They grow a couple of inches taller everyday - it's amazing. All the birds are going to owe me big time when the seeds come on in a couple of months.

I should throw some sunflower seeds in the ground and see how much I can get them to grow before the end of the summer. It's better than nothing.

I have had sunflower seeds that spill out from the birdfeeder start to grow right where they fell! Anyway depending on where you live, planting sunflower seeds now may not work. For example where I live it's blistering hot this time of year. That would be very stressful to plants starting out. Mine are already big enough to deal with some extreme heat. Just about two months ago I had to buy mulch to insulate them from the frost as they were just starting to pop up from the seeds. Now they are four/five feet tall (maximum height according to the varieties of sunflowers I bought) and the flowers have opened up. I'm not a great gardener (I like trees versus flowers) but these sunflowers are a complete success!

My garden is booming, with lots of tomato plants over six feet tall.

Tomatoes:
Mr. Stripey (heirloom)
Cherokee purple (heirloom)
Sweet 100 (2)
Bonnie Hybrid grape (2)
Dark cherry (heirloom)
Beefmaster (heirloom)
Container tomatoes (2)
Container cherry tomato
Roma
Heinz Roma (2)
Kosovo (heirloom brought back by US forces)
random volunteer tomatoes from last year's crop (4)
Tasti-Lee hybrid (6)

The Tasti-Lees are the only tomato with their own superhero comic book.

A grew some giant beefmasters a long time ago when I live in Alabama - great for putting on hamburgers or other sandwiches.