Paddy's watercress

It’s been a tough week in Paddy’s Garden. The days are still warm but the night time temperatures are dropping, this has lead to another round of pests beset upon eating anything that grows in Paddy’s Garden.

Lets start with the good news, we got a couple of nice tomatoes from the tomato plant…

Paddy's Tomatoes

Now the damage…

Baby capsicums have been eaten by something

What’s worse is that the last cucumber was partially eaten even though it was protected inside the lunch bag we placed over it last week. This is very sad it brings the scores for cucumbers to 0 out of 4. That is – nature took the entire haul of cucumbers :-/

Paddy's marigold's before...

It seems that the mice are back and are now eating the marigolds. We have eight marigold plants in small pots amongst the vegetables to encourage bees to the area to pollinate the veges. The next day Paddy couldn’t believe his eyes…

Paddy's marigold's after...

The plant has been completely stripped. Notice that there is no pieces of foliage on the ground?

Paddy was nosing around the remaining 2 bok choy when he noticed this

Paddy's eggs ala bok choy

A good coating of Pyrethrium got rid of the eggs before the outbreak began

We were about to give it another coating of Pyrethrium the next night and the plant had been completely consumed.

Paddy's eggs ala bok choy - scrumptuous!

Apparently the professional gardeners use wire cages around their crops to stop large numbers of rodents. We’re thinking this will have to be our only option but a more permanent solution could be to use a cold frame. A cold frame is a miniature green house for the garden made from plastic or glass and ave a vent allowing you to grow vegetables in colder climates. The cold frame keeps in the heat and stops plants from getting frost damage.  By regulating the heat carefully you can apparently grow summer vegetables almost all year round in our climate.

Protecting seedlings

If you don’t have space (or permission from your landlord) you can get away with some cheap alternatives using plastic drink bottles PET bottles in the garden.

PET bottles 🙂

The bottles will trap in warm air at night to keep the plant warm but most importantly in our situation it should keep the snails, caterpillars and mice away from the seedlings at least long enough to help them get established.

Planting out the tiny carrot seedlings

Paddy couldn’t believe how small and spindly the carrot seedlings were. He reckoned that there was little chance they would take but we are keen to replace the carrots as they are one of the few things that he wildlife doesn’t seem to eat in Paddy’s Garden.

Paddy says this area should be swept

Another trick i should mention is that if you fill a plastic soft drink bottle with water and leave it on your vegge patch it will prevent dogs from urinating there. I have no idea how this works, but it does.

Check out www.happykitteh.com to see what else Paddy got up to this ANZAC day long weekend.