Allotment pests

I was reading The Cottage Smallholder yesterday and noted that Fiona has to net her fruit not just to keep the birds (and her dogs) from eating the ripe fruit, but because the birds (but not the dogs) eat the unripe fruit too!

We certainly have problems at our allotments, but this isn’t one of them and I’ve devoted most of today, while I’ve been pottering around, to working out why. And I think I’ve found the answer. It’s seagulls!

Yes, while they can be a real pest, I suspect that the seagull behaviour over our allotments keeps the fruit-hunting birds away; they certainly like to land in the mornings and poke around in turned soil, but if they see smaller birds congregating on the site they tend to fly down and scare them off so that they can try and grab whatever the little birds were finding. Of course they aren’t equipped to peck fruit from bushes though. Finally, a use for the pestilential things! One person on our allotments actually has a pet seagull that he feeds with cat food on a fork – rather him than me: they have vicious beaks and always look to me like homicidal maniacs who are trying to remember where they left their axes.

We also have a rat problem, and I’m not sure what to do about it. Rats will, I’m told, dig up my root crops and eat my peas and beans, but putting down poison is a no-brainer (a) because I know it builds resistance in the intended victims and (b) there are too many dogs, cats and children on the site for bait to be safe. So, short of taking the dog up with me whenever possible, I’m not sure what to do. So far the only thing the rat has done is tunnel under the compost bin and eat some of the scraps we put in there, but I wonder what it will do next …

Labels: allotment-birds, allotment-fruit, allotment-pests

Allotment problems

We have an invasion!

Not bodysnatchers, not even ground elder, simply cats.

I think, without any evidence, that one of the allotment cats has had kittens and now those dear little things are old enough to be out and about and what they’re out and about for is their lovely little kitten deposits which are turning up on several plots round and about. It’s a difficult one, because you need allotment cats or you have allotment mice, and any allotment holder knows that once you get mice, you’ve got problems. But nobody wants cat ‘doings’ in their vegetables, and so you have to find ways to discourage the cat, without harming it, or driving it off your plot entirely.

So what are the options?

There’s the encourage/discourage route: growing catnip and having a bowl of nice clean drinking water in an area of the allotment that’s an acceptable cat toilet as a kind of a carrot, while in areas that you want to exclude the cat from, you can grow mint – the really strong, square stemmed kind, in buckets, and cut it hard back every three or four weeks to keep the odour strong – peppermint and eucalyptus oils are really good cat deterrents so if you get a few offcuts of wood, even just small blocks, and you scatter them around the cat toilet area, with a few drops of peppermint and eucalyptus oil on them, you’ll find your cat problem evaporates – but so does the oil, so you need to keep renewing it or the cat will return!

Then there’s the physical barrier route – if there is a place that the cats are using constantly, cut some brambles or rose suckers and lay them across that spot so the cat would have a prickly toilet! It will soon be discouraged from that particular spot.

Cat courtesy of photogirl17

Labels: allotment-cats, allotment-deterrents, allotment-pests

Companion planting

I’m in two minds about this. I do undertake some companion planting: mainly things I remember my granddad doing such as plant French marigolds between tomato plants to deter aphids, growing carrots and leeks together (I think the leeks smell strongly enough to confuse carrot fly, although it could just be that he liked the look of carrots and leeks together, isn’t it odd how we pick up habits without really thinking about them?) and using nasturtiums as a sacrifice crop for cabbages – because the caterpillars eat the nasturtiums and leave the cabbages alone.

But can it really be true that those same marigolds can smother bindweed? I don’t think so. Not on any allotment I’ve come across, anyway. And does celery really deter cabbage white caterpillars from brassicas – I’d love to believe so, but I don’t think I’ve come across anything, except horticultural mesh, that really keeps the caterpillars off. Or rather, keeps the butterfly from laying the eggs that hatch on the plant and become voracious eating machines aka cabbage white caterpillars.

But I’m prepared to be convinced. Especially if it reduces the need to weed between rows and pick or wash off pests. So tell me - do you companion plant, and if so, what works for you?

Marigold by *micky

Labels: allotment-companion-planting, allotment-flowers, allotment-pests, allotment-vegetables

More slugs

Gardener’s Question Time on Radio Four this week dealt with the pestiferous question of slugs (after I had, which suggests to me that they are nicking my material!) and they came up with a very interesting suggestion – throw out grain for your slugs!

The way this was discovered by the reader who wrote in, apparently, was that she would throw down corn for the ground-feeding birds, and if she went out after fifteen minutes or so, she found the slugs were converging on the grain at a rapid (for them) rate. Apparently slugs love grain! And this greed gives two opportunities for slug disposal – you can either gather them up (or tread on them with your nice thick wellies) and dispose of them yourself, or you can wait for the more predatory birds to realise that once their grain-eating cousins have had breakfast, their own food turns up and can be picked off!

Then there’s that microscopic nematode or eelwom that is watered into the soil. The nematodes (Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita) enter slugs' bodies and infect them with bacteria that cause a fatal disease. I’ve never managed this myself, but other people swear by this approach – I think there’s a real issue about nematodes which is that you do need clement weather and for the past three years my watering in has been followed by either unseasonal hard frost (a guaranteed nematode killer) or torrential floods.

I also use copper bands around my most beloved plants – sometimes you have to buy these, but I’ve gained most of mine by skip diving and stripping the copper component out of electric cabling. Costs nothing but time, and can be wrapped around any kind of pot, or even twined around the base of plants with a single stem like globe artichokes or sunflowers – believe me, slugs will not cross copper if they can avoid it.

Labels: allotment-pests, slug-control