Jerk Pests and Their Jerk Hunger
I have seen the enemy… and it likes watermelons. And onions.
Okay, I haven’t necessarily seen the enemy, but I did spot a squirrel, a crow, and a robin all making advances on my garden as I stepped into the back yard to see how my little green beauties were doing.
Foul beasts unknown had torn asunder no less than six watermelon sprouts and two onion starts. The watermelons are unlikely to survive, but the onions may yet live. I don’t have enough sprouts in reserve to replenish all of the downed plants, so hopefully the ones they ate (the tallest, greenest, and fattest sprouts) would have turned out to be the ones that would have produced poisonous, spikey fruit.
Pest Control
Instead of deciding to stake out the back yard with an airsoft pistol and wait for the culprit to return to the scene of the crime, I immediately dashed to Skyy Nursery and purchased some garden knit to hopefully keep out my would-be aggressors.
And then I sat in the yard with the airsoft gun.
Seed Scores
As mentioned several times in the past, I planted a large number of sprouts and was met with varying degrees of success. These are the results of my planting (before the slaughter of Cinco de Mayo).
Two of these varieties were seeds packed for the 2006 season. See if you can guess which ones.
| Seed | Planted | Sprouted | Success Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lettuce - Bon Vivant | 18 | 18 | 100% |
| Lettuce - Butterhead | 18 | 17 | 94% |
| Tomato - Early Girl | 15 | 15 | 100% |
| Tomato - Stupice IPB Type | 20 | 20 | 100% |
| Tomato - Sweet 100 | 25 | 13 | 52% |
| Tomato - Principe Bourghese | 25 | 24 | 96% |
| Onion - Yellow Globe | 25 | 18 | 72% |
| Soy Bean - Sweet Sansei | 25 | 9 | 26% |
| Canteloupe - Hales Best | 15 | 12 | 80% |
| Watermelon - Striped Klondike | 30 | 20 | 67% |
| Watermelon - Charleston Gray | 20 | 15 | 75% |
As you can see, the edamame and the Sweet 100 tomatoes have the worst record. I believe I may have used bad watering technique on the edamame, but the plants that did grow are as long as eight inches right now. If these ones don’t survive the cool soil (they prefer 70 degrees), I might try again but keep them indoors with the hydroponics.
The Hales Best and Striped Klondike were the seeds from 2006. They fared far better than I expected, so I’m glad I hadn’t thrown them away. The peas I planted outdoors yesterday are also from the same year. We’ll see how they do down the road.
Brian said,
May 11, 2008 @ 11:02 am
Hey, I’m a Seattle resident wannabe gardener. I have been finding your posts interesting, I hope I can learn a thing or two from your experiences by the time I can get down and dirty with my own projects.