The Garden Thread - September, 2024

September 1, 2024 | Diana in WI/Greeneyes in Memoriam

[Diana in Wisconsin]

The MONTHLY Gardening Thread is a gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you.

If you have specific question about a plant/problem you are having, please remember to state the Growing Zone where you are located.

This thread is a non-political respite. No matter what, you won’t be flamed, and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked.

It is impossible to hijack the Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table Recipes, Preserving, Good Living - there is no telling where it will go - and that is part of the fun and interest. Jump in and join us! Send a Private Message to Diana in Wisconsin if you'd like to be added to/removed from our New & Improved Ping List.

NOTE: This is a once a MONTH Ping List, but we DO post to the thread all throughout the month. Links to related articles and discussions which might be of interest to Gardeners are welcomed any time!

[Pollard]

Not sure I like the galvanized long term. Needs more cable ties but I didn't want to use up my 8" ties. Will have to buy some 4". Didn't have enough drip line to run the middle but probably not needed. It all gets watered really quick with that tight spacing anyway. Could probably remove the two outer lines.

When these plants are done, I can disconnect a single fitting, pick up the cattle panel with drip line attached, ready the bed for another crop, lay the panel back down and plant. Goat/sheep panels have nothing but 4x4 openings and would work great. Other panels have different spacing and some graduated with smaller vertical spacing at the bottom.

I thought of attaching drip to something when I first dealt with the coiled up drip line.

Even without the drip line, it makes a handy seed/seedling spacer and can be removed immediately. I did that with some of that 2x4 welded wire fence years ago. Shout out to Mel Bartholomew for the grid idea. The plants above all have 6-8" or 8" spacing and the openings on the panel are 6x8.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Looking good! Great spacing idea.

I SHOULD do ‘Square Foot Gardening’ in each of my 16 beds, but I nearly kill myself each canning season as it is, so... ;)

[Paul R.]

Heh, we have mostly shagbark hickory, several oaks (white, red, and one pin), and several walnut trees (One large, several progeny in the 20-40 ft. range). None of these good for nearby gardens!

[Paul R.]

That’s true about the varmints - shoot (pun intended), we get them on our back porch sometimes because we leave food for my daughter’s cats there often.

We’d dragged a water heater that failed out there, and my daughter got the idea that the cats could jump up to the top of it from a nearby railing. (World’s biggest house-cat feeder?) I noticed, however, that they’d always hesitate before jumping back down. That made “the little light bulb” in my head go on, and I tacked a few feet of a small (5/8”?) branch to the side of the water heater. Then I rigged up an old metal pan to put “bait” in - say a half bad tomato or something the cats weren’t interested in — with the pan to fall off the heater and alert us if disturbed. (Ok, this was pretty diabolical, maybe I’m “disturbed” too. :-) Hahaha!)

Yes, the cats would knock the pan down sometimes, but kinda seemed to learn to not to, too often - I’d go out and yell at them. Better yet, in only a couple nights, a ‘possum showed up, and when I cracked the door open, it seemed confused about how to get down. Big mistake - a .22 air rifle pellet did the job. 3-4 opossums and a couple raccoons have made this mistake...

A “dog proof” trap beside the porch gets some too, but, some raccoons in particular seem to avoid it. I prefer shooting the varmints anyway- it’s more humane than having the animal struggle for hours in a paw-trap, which we often don’t hear...

The “chicken tractor” (chicken trailer?) may well help. I’ll be curious if it does. Our smaller coop needs to be rebuilt, and those Harbor Freight wheels are not too expensive when on sale...

[Paul R.]

I agree - I just use the brightest LED shop lights I can find. If you look at the actual spectrum output, the “needed” light energy at the right wavelengths is there (just plus some other light that doesn’t seem to hurt anything.)

Menards often has pretty high output shop lights on sale. The chain mounting makes them easy to adjust. Bright and on a timer, I have even overwintered a few tomato plants, though if they do ok, I have to prune ‘em back*, and they tend to grow long and spindly, and not produce much of anything. They also seem to some time to get going when moved outdoors, so I don’t know if the effort is “worth it”, unless one fears seeds or starter plants for that variety, @ retail outlets, may be hard to get the next spring.

*This year I did some successful starts off cuttings from tomato plants - something I should try more, I think?

One caution about most any LED light, and especially shop lights and sort of similar grow lights: A lot of times (most of the time?) the LED’s are not well heat sunk. Particularly irksome to me are shop lights with nice large metal reflectors, and then the actual LED’s are in a strip in a plastic tube, or tubes, (to simulate a fluorescent bulb?) below the reflector and not contacting it in any way. 25-30 watts in one of these nice insulated (from dissipating heat) tubes, and, yep, that baby may start flickering in a few months (or less) because the LEDs are self-destructing themselves (or maybe connections or components around them) with heat.

When my brother lived in China briefly, he mentioned how many stores, etc., were unheated in winter. Maybe these LED lights are designed with this in mind? Nah, they are just bad designs... China has summers too...

Also, to concentrate light, LED spot lamps or those “foldable” garage lights can work well too. But be careful about those foldable lights - cheap ones can be “the worst” about no decent heat sinking for the LEDs. SOME of these foldable garage lights can be modified to run cooler.

If in doubt, try one out, and “If it runs hot, keep it not!” (One of my own old electronics mantras.)

;-)

[MomwithHope]

Using the dripline with the panel - brilliant. Great pic.

[Menes]

So very sorry to read that 😞

If only I could, but I lost my Mummy to brain cancer fourteen years ago ✝️😞💔

She was cursed with a handicapped son (me), but still she never withdrew her mother’s love from me.

Ladies and gentlemen, please give your loved ones a hug, and never let a day go by without telling them that you love them…

[FamiliarFace]

I’m so sorry for your loss. Moms are special people. One of the last things my Mama said to me is, “Mamas love their babies, and babies love their Mamas.” Then I told her I loved her, and she returned the sentiment. It was very sweet.

*** Ladies and gentlemen, please give your loved ones a hug, and never let a day go by without telling them that you love them…***

Yes, not just for Mamas, but for all your loved ones. ❤️

[Paul R.]

Hah, if individual-to-individual shipping these days wasn’t so crazy expensive these days (partially in order to subsidize those low or free shipping items from China and Amazon, eBay, etc.), I’d just mail you some zip (cable) ties. Through a shipping error by a vendor, years ago, I have a surplus of probably a cubic foot of short (4”) through medium length (8”) black zip (cable) ties.

That’s in addition to whatever I’ll ever use, unless I get creative.

Unfortunately, shipping them in 2024 would cost more than what they themselves cost on sale at Harbor Freight!

[Paul R.]

Arrrggghhh!!! I spotted the Opo plant (etc.) chomper. It is a freaking squirrel. Just like they like to cut off ends of branches in trees, for no apparent reason.

This squirrel is unusually human-shy. It took off, scooting away at least 200 ft. before I lost sight of it, when I was still 75-80 ft. away when it spotted me. Usually the squirrels around here are a little more used to humans, and don’t scamper up, up, and away, until a person is maybe 40-50 feet away.

So, this is a problem: A squirrel will be darn near impossible to block or repel away from the garden. I can try repellent spray on elevated routes in, assuming healthy “jumps”, but, I’m dubious of efficacy. I could pee in a can a few times and spray THAT. Hahaha. I just DON’T have the time to lay in ambush with my .22 airgun rifle. I can probably poison some grain, putting it in spots the chickens would not get into, but I might kill a few wild birds. The grain might kill some other rodents, too - not a big loss.

Temporarily, I have a fairly large dog cage. The weather is nice the next couple days — I could literally put that cage out there with our male cat in it. Give him plenty of his favorite foods and water, and the old “cat bed”, and he will complain a bit, but be ok. That’s only good for a couple days though - then the weather gets rainy. And the squirrel may figure out the cat is caged. Better might be to use the old doghouse as shelter for food for the cats, so they stay out there more. No food near the house, and hope I’ve caught all the other raiders who might eat it. Keep the chickens penned up for now. :-(

I have a small trap I can bait with dry corn and set up, but, I’ve never caught a squirrel in it.

Other ideas?

[MomwithHope]

I would try the trap instead of setting the cat out. I’d put in a few goodies besides corn, a little peanut butter, some acorns.

[Qiviut]

A solution: The Squirrelinator trap.

I used it for a couple of years to trap squirrels that were chewing up the bird feeders. The great thing is that you don’t need to ‘set’ the trap, other than to put bait in it. A cracker with peanut butter & black oil sunflower seeds on top was the favorite around our place. In 2-3 years, I trapped 60 gray squirrels.

My brother just borrowed a trap for his bird feeder set-up, told me he had “4” that were messing up things. I just laughed ... told him it was more than 4. I don’t think he believed me at first, but he just messaged me with a picture of #12 and said “you were right, they keep on coming!”

The squirrels I trapped were not catch/release. My brother is taking his squirrels about 5 miles away and releasing them (that would be 120 miles so far!). His wife won’t tolerate ‘termination’.

Here’s a link ... it’s actually somewhat entertaining to watch the squirrels ... when they finally make it into the trap, they are SO happy ... merrily eating the bait. When they decide it’s time to leave and can’t, that’s when the ‘drama’ begins. You rarely catch more than one gray squirrels at a time ... very territorial. If a young squirrel is in the trap, an older more aggressive squirrel may also go in. The younger one either gets beaten up or killed. ‘Ground squirrels” are a different story & multiple squirrels will go in the trap (pics on the website showing many squirrels in the trap).

Here’s a link:
https://squirrelinator.com/

I would recommend the one with a basin.

[Qiviut]

PS - the traps are not cheap, but they last (if you don’t run over them with a golf cart - thanks, mom!).

[Pollard]

Being in the sun, HF is the last place I’d buy cable ties.

Yeah, I think I’m just going to go with LED lights with the same color rating as fluorescent and highest lumens, in a decent brand.

LEDs do save money on the electric bill.

[Pollard]

Thanks, and I thought of another source aside from Mel’s SQ FT Gardening for my idea. Radiant Floor Heating. They tie the PEX tubing to the 6x6” concrete reinforcement mesh and zig zag it back and forth. If I could keep the cattle panels 1 inch off the soil, they’d last a really long time and I would worry about galvanized coating getting into the soil.

GREENER - Bamboo grids.

[Pollard]

“Wouldn’t worry”

[Paul R.]

A friend of mine got really good durability out of the HF UV rated ties, outdoors, but, I do admit that might vary greatly from batch to batch. I have no idea if the ones I have are UV rated. They’ve been ok in automotive uses, but none have been in direct sun on a daily (well, near daily) basis, IIRC.

Weird as it may sound, my most durable (and most used) LED headlamp is from HF. But, again, buy the same thing 2 years later and they may have switched to a supplier using crap plastic...

[Paul R.]

Noted! An old concept... In fact, I have a conventional trap that a large raccoon tore up the “floor lever” trip mechanism. But it would not be very hard to convert it into something like this. That would get me “in business” by noon tomorrow!

Ditto for one of the smaller traps — I suspect that smaller varmints simply don’t weigh enough to reliably trip the floor lever. The key is to reduce the opening to only big enough for one squirrel at a time. That said, this is for sure a gray squirrel problem.

[Paul R.]

Noted and thanks! Also see my reply to Qiviut, just above.

No acorns handy yet, but, I have plenty of peanut butter and popcorn, as well as cracked corn.

[Paul R.]

The more I look at it...

This squirrel (and possibly friends, but the amount of damage makes me think this is one squirrel) appears to be coming from across the road. It very likely crosses via branches overhanging the road — they come together close enough for easy, for a gray squirrel (quite the trapeze artists!) jumps. Some more branches, a 6’ tall fence (wire grid type), and then another wire grid fence that forms the east boundary of the garden area the Opo are in. The Opo climb the fence and then go up into (effectively) taller trellis (sort of) works. (The latter by design — if the Opo get the chance, I’ve seen ‘em climb 20+ feet into tree branches. You have to get out a ladder to harvest the fruits!)

Anyway, point being... The squirrel never hits the ground. I “could” chop out some fencing, but that has other disadvantages. Also, I don’t really have means to take out branches over 20 ft. up. (Some of these to the north of the garden area are more like 50 ft. up.) Taking out the trees is not an option - some are huge, and it’d be an equally huge project.

The Squirrelinator is pretty clearly a ground trap. And it has to ship here. The Opo may not have the time. I “could” rig it up to sort of sit atop the fencing, but that’s a bit of a project too. However... These smaller conventional traps (7.2” x 7.2” x 24”) would be easier to rig to the fencing. I can do that today. “Fluid Film”* should help with the “stiffness” of the trip mechanism, and I think I can improve the “trip” sensitivity with a bit more leverage.

*A sort of long lasting lubricant / penetrant / protectant. Good stuff.

A bait cup for the trap. I can try peanut butter and or scratch grains, or, juicy fruits: It’s been very dry and the squirrel(s) may be after the Opo partially because the fruits and stems are very “juicy”.

The mad scientist’s desperate plan begins to come into focus...