Gardening- a question re: marauders!

Take some advice Grandma always told me...plant enough to feed the critters and your family, cause they will come. It's a fact.

 

I planted about 25 Georga Sweet Onions about a month ago. Something chewed about a dozen of the small little stalks off at the ground level and left little chewing marks on the ends of the stalk. I'm guessing field mice! Crazy, never dreamed of that one. Rabbits do dig, but not for potatoes, your most likely good on that one, but hey, mine haven't came up yet. But when they do, I'll let you know what I'm fighting against on them!! Haha. But I do always have good results in potatoes.

 

I plant marigolds all around my gardens. Keeps most critters away because of the smell. You can also hang bars of fragrant soap to keep away animals, esp deer. And any predator scent, such as dog, human, bear will keep smaller animals away. You can buy predator scents online, or cheaper yet, pee freely

 

My deer eat the peppers - if its not them, then its groundhogs and rabbits

tried and true method I use to keep deer out (they only got in last year because we went on vacation and my MIL forgot to spray for us) - Irish Spring soap chopped up in pieces and this god awful deer spray made of rotten eggs, cayenne pepper, garlic and a few other nasties . It literally makes me almost throw up when I spray it - BUT...between that and the Irish Spring soap - the deer and other critters stay FAR away from our garden!

Our neighbors have tried human hair, onion peels, fencing, etc and the deer come right up or jump the 10 foot "deer fencing" - when they had finally almost destroyed their garden - they finally took me up on my offer to spray and Irish Spring their area.

It worked

Our garden is probably 30 ft wide by 50 feet long - their garden is twice the size of ours.

Good luck!

 

Read the Farmers Almanac. They have a list of plants that are compatible with other plants that you can plant together. Like root crops, you plant lettuce over the top. There are alot of different varieties. It also tells you what not to plant together or close to eachother.

 

Okay, scroll ALLL the way down to the very most end of the screen and there is a sister board that Nifty has called TheEasyGarden you're going to love that! For the most part it is alot of us BYCers that are there too!

Okay, I'm going to post what I do not have much critter problems with...but rather, just watch the insect world. I think thats really what your looking for anyway. All peppers (bell, hot, sweet), squash, cucumbers, potatoes, tomatos, eggplant, garlic, radish, okra, zucchini and most herbs. The exception is during drought conditions when animals are really hungry.

Critter problem crops: corn (raccoons and deer eat right off the stalk), watermelon (coyotes) yes, its true, bean and peas (rabbits and deer, can make it look like a lawnmower ran over it), lettuce, spinach, turnip greens (rabbits and deer).

I've tryed the scents, they do help but you MUST be persistant on reapplications. The very best defense to deer that I have found is running a strand of thin white string on posts and hanging white plastic grocery bags on them. True. The flapping in the wind, unusual object keeps them out for a few months. Look really closely to the background of this pic of the white bags.