It's Coming!! Hide the Cucumbers!!!
The garden is thriving, with our first eggplants appearing and the tomatoes on the verge of being ready to harvest. I’ve been visiting some other community gardens in the city and I realized that while we did well this year in terms of filling up and expanding the garden we were perhaps too cautious, not putting our tomatoes and eggplants in until the last frost was definitely definitely past, which means some more adventurous gardeners have been harvesting for a couple of weeks now and we’re still waiting. That’s a lesson learned for next year, and something that will be easier once we have our greenhouse built. If we’re growing our own seedlings its not such a shame to lose a few to late frosts, and it won’t necessitate another trip (on the bus) to a garden centre. I love visiting other gardens to get ideas and creative inspiration for our own, and also just to find more beautiful green pockets in the city. The Toronto Community Garden Network’s site has a map of all the gardens in the city, many of which are close enough together that you can see several in one day on a walking or biking tour. I’d love to develop a guide for Toronto like the one they have in Vancouver, which is downladable here and shows bikeable routes between some of the citys most beautiful community garden sites.
One thing I need inspiration on these days is protecting the garden from squirrels. A lot of the solutions which might work in a backyard garden (hot pepper sprays, growing strong smelling plants like pennyroyal, or leaving bloodmeal or dog hair out to mimic predators) aren’t really an option for us. Since the garden is in a public park there are just SO MANY squirrels here. There will always be ones brave enough to try. Since I’m getting tired of going to collect our donation for Second Harvest and seeing only sad, dangling cucumber tops, it’s time to get serious. I’m thinking our plan of attack needs to be threefold:
1) attaching some kind of nosemaker, bells or chimes to real problem areas, such as our cucumber patch. Once the squirrels get under the cucumber leaves they seem to feel pretty sheltered and take their time chewing away at everything in site. I’ve been working on removing leaves to make less of an enclave, but don’t want to damage the plant too much. Something that could make an unexpected noise when they approach the patch might be an excellent way to keep them on edge.
2) leave out something else for them to eat in a safer place. What do squirrels like? Besides cucumbers I mean. Nuts, berries, seeds. I’ve heard that setting out squirrel feeders or easy food sources will attract the squirrels more than something more difficult, like our crops. I’m skeptical because I feel like squirrels, with their penchant for taking 2 bites out of melons and leaving them, are eating our crops out of sport, not hunger! I’m also concerned that feeding them would just promote a population boom and leave us with an army of hungry baby squirrels. But I’ll do more research on this one.
3) fortification. This is what I’ve been working on, chickenwiring, netting, screening to my heart’s content. We’ve got our experimental squash box set up, and ready to be expanded to a second level. The idea behind this box is that we chicken wire the sides of it and direct the growing blossoms on the inside of a covered, chicken wire structure thereby allowing the squash to grow and get sunglight, but protecting just the fruit within the box. More on that later, once the squash get bigger and we see if the box collapses under its own weight. Another tactic I’m trying is protecting the individual plants. I’ve put chicken wire boxes around our melons, making a five sided cube with the bottom poking into the soil, which makes it easy to remove and adjust. I’ve also tried buildling an adjustable mesh wrap around some individual cucumbers, and my next plan is to try screen door mesh as it’s light permeable, pliable and inexpensive, but I don’t think squirrels can chew through it. This week is the experimental phase, I’ll report back in the next two weeks on how these protective measures are working.
Any tips or reccommendations from squirrel war survivors out there are welcome and encouraged!
down the garden path 