Hannah is planting a raised-bed garden in Florida - follow along with her if you are in a similar climate!
How is your garden coming along? Here is the most recent picture of ours. As a recap -- I am doing a 4' x 4' raised garden bed. We have planted strawberries, peppers, jalepenos, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, watermelon, and cantaloupe.
As you can see above, we did double up on a couple plants in each square foot. The reason for that was that we weren't sure how each plant would do, so we wanted to "start" a couple plants in each square. Notice that we have 2 lettuce plants in 2 of the squares (4 plants total.... the lettuce is in the center on top of the picture). It appears that all 4 plants have done well, which is good, but they really are too close for optimal growing. So, we will transplant two of the plants, probably to other parts of the yard to see how they do. Hopefully they will mature quickly and we can start eating that lettuce soon. It's starting to get quite warm here and lettuce is mostly a cooler-weather plant (which we discovered after we planted... guess we didn't read up well enough on that!).
Everything else seems to be coming along pretty well. Our biggest concern is keeping the squirrels away... does anyone have any suggestions for that?? We have some pretty crazy squirrels in our neighborhood... one even keeps eating the wires in our neighbors car, costing them hundreds of dollars for repairs. I'm not even sure a net would keep these guys away from our garden. Does anyone have any ideas?
6 comments:
We kept squirrels out of our garden last year by building a large chicken wire cage over/around it. You need to make sure the frame is sturdy because they will climb on it, but they never figured out how to get past it.
Good luck!
i've read, haven't tried, that sprinkling cayenne pepper on the plants makes them taste bad to the rabbits, squirrels, etc. It doesn't affect the plants, and is also supposed to keep away bad pests.
try a plastic owl.
I've got the same problem with something eating my garden...I CANNOT keep my lettuce! I'm going to try Brenna Bee's idea about the pepper...seems simple. I hope it helps!
I tried the cayenne pepper and it didn't work. I also tried a product that my nursery recommended that is essentially dried blood and is supposed to keep critters away - that didn't work either. :S
After nothing seemed to work, we decided to try the chicken wire. That's the only thing that has worked for me.
My husband built a cage around our raised beds over the past two weekends... so far they have worked well... we also have crazy little rabbits that run all over our neighborhood and one of them pulled my cucumber plant up not too long after it was planted. Hopefully this will solve the problem.
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