its a sign, i must grow a wall of trichs
none shall pass
even raccoons will have to think twice
or i might just wake up one morning to find some critters stuck between a couple columns
finally know what to do with cuzcoensis kk247s
...
all hail, the mighty Trichs
guardin my garden each 'n every night
may all the vermin who dare to prey
stab themselves and go far far away
...
(hums quietly to self, somewhat to the tune of Cosmic Charlie...)
i didn't have many problems at my last house, but i moved to this house a couple of years ago, and well its been a little different gardening experience. the soils different, the seasons are slightly different, just a different micro-climate, despite only being an hour apart. i have a bit more trouble with garden pests now. last year i really struggled with birds, they would eat all of my sprouts, especially corn & squash. id wake up in the mornings and find all the seedlings uprooted, most chopped in half, and the corn kernel eaten off the base of the plant. some werent chopped in half, and id replant them, only to wake up the next day to find them uprooted again. like jeez birds, you already got this one, just let the lil guy live. really set me behind, ended up getting just a couple of corn plants to mature, had to hand pollinate them. but it worked, crossed "oaxaca green" with "hopi blue", both ways. and managed to get those tropical flour corns to produce way far north, so not all was lost. growing "morado purple" this year, started too early and lost the first round, then started a lil late. also been growing mushrooms in the same bed, and the mushrooms were sucking up a lot of the water early on, but i think ill still get a few corn to make it all the way through to harvest.
but no birds this year, at least not on the corn. why not?
well, i think the mushroom-mulch layer made it much harder to pull up seedlings, first off.
but really, i thought about it, and rather than trying to fight nature- birds, they are fast and smart and they just fly away, and these ones squawk at me hardcore, obnoxious- i decided to try to work with it. give the birds what they want, food, just WAY over there on the other side of my yard. keep a bird feeder stocked, and they were pretty happy. they would still squawk at me when the feeder started to run dry, which i felt was a bit rude, like com'n dudes im already just feeding you for free, this is like ransom or tribute or something, im strait getting extorted by birds here lol. they do have a pretty songbird sound too, i tell them if they want food they better ask nicely. sometimes it works. they did still mess with my berries, which are new additions to the garden this year, but only if i let the berries sit a day past ripening.
this year, slugs really got me early on. i was trying to keep this mushroom patch hydrated, probably overly so, and i think i was just breeding slugs. the slugs ate the mushrooms, they ate the squash starts and other starts, but mostly i was pissed about the mushrooms. slugs die on site in my yard. guess thats what the birds are good for.
how do we convince the birds to eat the slugs?
also whiteflies, idk where they came from, they were inside over the winter, and moved out with the plants when things warmed up. usually outside brings bug balance. going back indoors is going to be rough again this year i fear.
and then now w/e ate my sunflowers. grr... i hope its just moves on now that it finished the sunflowers. im not sure what the appropriate defensive maneuver is, where shall i position the trich wall?
all hail, the mighty Trichs...