So much for no-till......

Well....not really.  But that's kind of how I felt when Mo and I walked into the back yard a couple of days ago and discovered this:

At some point between our morning walk around the yard and the one in the afternoon, Trash Trailer Man's pigs had been back.  Some of the trenches they dug were 6" deep!

Pigs apparently have a good memory.

Piglets eating pecans last fall.

Luckily, they weren't interested in the garden.  

But it's painfully obvious that Trash Trailer Man has no intention of building a fence to keep his animals in.  So that means that I just need to get my fence finished.  

"Good fences make good neighbors," I always heard.  I don't think there's any fence in the world that can make him a good neighbor.

WHY THEY DO THIS?

I had to laugh after my youngest daughter sent me a picture of her car with this commentary:

how and why does my car keep getting bird bombed like this UNDER THE CARPORT

WHY THEY DO THIS

Why laugh?  Because I've been struggling to understand something that's happened in the garden that has me feeling exactly the same way.

So here's what happened.

Earlier this spring, I had a bunch of nice little broccoli and cabbage transplants started.  I set them out in the 4' x 8' raised bed, being careful to put one or two little metal sticks beside each plant to protect them from cutworms.  I covered the bed with insect netting to protect it from the cabbage moths and cabbage white butterflies.  All should be good, yes?

Not exactly.

Brassica seedling after a nighttime cutworm attack.

When I checked the bed a day or two later, every plant - every - single - plant - was dead, decapitated by cutworms! 

I'm not sure why the metal stick trick didn't work unless it was because the plants were set out into compost that was very loose, and that allowed the sticks to move so that the cutworms could wedge themselves between the stick and the stem. 

I was so ticked off!

I had a few more plants that I had held back, and I decided I'd go ahead and grow them on in pots for a bit longer.  Those first ones were pretty small, after all.

One evening last week, I took the two biggest and nicest broccoli plants and put them in that same bed.  Again, sticks beside them, being very careful to get the sticks as close to the stems as possible.

The very next morning:

Poor little decapitated broccoli plant.  When I dug around the base, I found the culprit and relocated it to the platform bird feeder.  I hope a bird had a good meal out of it.

I was furious!  Why????  What did they gain by just cutting the top off the plant?  It's not like the plant  can keep growing and feed them for longer...it will die.  

I actually asked The Google, "Why do cutworms cut?" No one had an answer for that.  There were lots of articles saying things like, "They're called cutworms because they cut the stems of young seedlings."  Well, DUH.  But WHY?  What do they have to gain from that destructive and seemingly senseless behavior?

I still don't know.

But in an attempt to have some broccoli this year, I've resorted to a somewhat drastic approach.  Sticks by themselves?  Out.  Aluminum foil, or sticks with aluminum foil?  In.  Definitely worth a try anyway...anything to protect the little stems.

So the last of the broccoli plants have been put out in that same raised bed and wrapped in foil.

Wrapped in a blanket of aluminum foil.

After doing a bit of reading about cutworms, I think one of the reasons they may be worse this year is because I've switched to no-till.  Apparently, tilling is one method of controlling them. 

Tilling the garden in early spring and fall can help kill cutworms or pupae or expose them to the weather and to predators such as birds.

https://www.pesticide.org/cutworms#:~:text=Controlling%20weeds%2C%20grasses%20and%20plant,to%20predators%20such%20as%20birds.   Accessed 4/15/2024.

So as I work in the garden from now on, I'll be on the lookout for them any time I do any planting.  After I set out the new broccoli plants, in one little 2' section of a row that was about 1' wide - a spot where I intended to plant carrots - I found eight of those rascals! 

Cutworms from the carrot bed.

I kindly relocated them to the bird feeder (most probably escaped over the edge into the front flower bed).

So while I had thought I'd call this post, "Why do cutworms cut,"  I have decided that I like her question better.  

WHY THEY DO THIS?  

Do I even still have a garden?

When I decided to go "no till" back in September 2021, I knew there were parts of the garden where the soil (dirt) just really wasn't very good.  It is a clay/silt soil with low organic content, and even worse, parts of the garden were heavily compacted when I had our cellar installed and had some tree-trimming done back in spring of 2020.  

Ideally, I could have just put a good layer of compost on my rows, and let the earthworms do the work of incorporating that into the dirt.  But I don't have enough compost to do that.  I decided my next best bet would be to try cover crops.

I didn't have very good luck with my cover crops last summer (the only exception was the buckwheat and sun hemp, which both grew very well!).  I got my cover crops planted too late, and they had just sprouted and started to grow when the dry weather hit.  They didn't make it.  I ended up covering parts of the garden with a billboard tarp just to keep the grass from taking over.

By late summer I had decided to rebuild my raised rows so they were wider and flatter.  As I worked on that project, I also planted my fall cover crops.

• I used daikon radish in three of the new raised rows, and as I finished relocating the dirt to build out the rows, I added winter rye and hairy vetch.  In a fourth row, I planted some oats from seed I saved last summer, along with some fava beans seed I had saved last spring.
  
  
• I planted lentils from a bag bought at the grocery store on the Hügelkulture bed, then went back later and added some winter rye and hairy vetch to the edges.
  
  
• I planted daikon radish and crimson clover in the east rows of the garden.

Happily, the cover crops have all done very well this year.  The daikon radish and lentils grew well into the winter, but were finally killed by the repeated cold weather.  The winter rye, the vetch and the crimson clover didn't put on much above-ground growth during the winter but apparently the roots were busy growing, because when temperatures warmed just a bit, the above-ground parts took off growing like gang-busters!  Once the winter rye hits "milk stage" and the crimson clover is nearing the end of its bloom, I'll cut everything off close to the ground and leave it on the rows as mulch.

My wild cover-cropped jungle garden on April 9, 2024.  Yes, there are rows there....

But despite the fact that the my garden is the way it is right now because that's how I decided it should be, no matter where I look in the garden, I almost feel overwhelmed and frantic.

You see, not only have several of the rows been overgrown by my cover crops, I intentionally left the winter weeds as food for the early pollinators.  They were very pretty in full bloom, but now that they're past their prime I have to try really hard to resist the urge to pull them all up.  

Winter weeds, primarily Red Deadnettle and Henbit Deadnettle carpeting the garden behind the cellar.

My Brussel's Sprouts stayed alive all winter, but never made a single sprout.  But when I saw that they were going to bloom, I left them too.  More food for the early pollinators.

Yellow flowers in the foreground are Brussel's Sprouts while the one plant a couple of rows over is the only purple-top turnip that survived the rabbits.

The rabbits nibbled on the crimson clover all winter, but once we had a few warmer days, it started to grow so fast that I guess even they couldn't keep up.  I noticed the first flowers a couple of days ago.

Two rows of crimson clover, just now starting to bloom.

And the back part of the garden by the berry plants is such poor dirt that I am not even going try to grow anything there for a while yet.  I just planted it as one big winter rye patch and plan to follow that up with mix of purple hull peas, sunflowers and zinnias.

Large patch of winter rye, with some volunteer hairy vetch mixed in.

I'm not a "neat and orderly person" - I'm actually the opposite of that.  "Messy and disorganized" is me on my best days.  

But traditional gardening - the gardening method I grew up with - dictates that a garden is supposed to have neat and orderly rows of plants with clear walkways between them.  What has really surprised me this spring is that the "messy and disorganized" state of my garden has bothered me more than I ever thought it would.

I keep having to remind myself of the purpose for the cover crops, and the long term goal.  "Remember why you planted them," I keep telling myself.  "They're almost finished and will be gone soon - just be patient."

And on the recent warm afternoons, a walk through the winter weeds and the cover crops underscores for me just why "messy and disorganized" is the right choice for my garden at this moment in time.

It is still a garden I reckon.  It's just not yet ready to have order imposed on it.

Eclipse

 

Total solar eclipse at about 1:52 pm on Monday, April 8, 2024.

If you plant it, they will come

The Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) vine that I started from a cutting taken down by the creek not only survived, it looks like it thrived and is putting on a spectacular show this spring.

It is absolutely covered in clusters of orange-red blooms.

My little sister told me the other day that she saw her first hummingbird of the year.  I wondered if they'd find the honeysuckle, and if they did, would they nectar on the flowers.  I was afraid maybe the flowers were too close to the ground, and a hummingbird might feel unsafe there.

But today as I wandered aimlessly around the back yard, looking at the plants there for the thousandth time, a hummingbird had found the vine and was moving from one flower cluster to the next.

Ruby-throated hummingbird, nectaring on the Coral Honeysuckle.

If you plant it, they will come.  It's how things are supposed to be.