As you probably know, we recently moved into our house, which means we have a yard and don’t need to garden in containers on the deck any more!
It’s so exciting to have a “real” garden with lots more space. But there are new challenges as well: our house is in a secluded cul-de-sac with a wooded backyard, but there’s no grass in the back yard, just a deck and then woods on a hill. This means that besides not having space in the backyard, we also don’t get enough sunlight for a garden there. In fact, we only get sunlight for longer than a few hours in the side yards between our house and our neighbors. Because of this we decided to put a garden on the north side of the house in the front.
I had gotten a book from the library called Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space!
Then come the “pests” (animals) that being in the woods gives us.
Slugs: When we first moved in I kept the plants in containers and just placed them on the side of the house until I had established a garden. While they were resting there the bell pepper plants and basil plants were mauled by slugs! 
We’ve had so much rain that they were out mid-day and I could see them eating the leaves! (not as bad as this photo, but pretty bad) I quickly put cups of beer in the soil and managed to catch about 8 of them that way, but it wasn’t enough. As I was transplanting the pepper plants to the garden bed I pulled off two more slugs from the bases of the plants. I hope that in the new location, farther from the pacasandra and dampness will save them – otherwise I might have to ring the plants with coffee grinds to stop them from destroying it further. (While listening to Ron Wilson on the radio one morning I learned that there are several ways to naturally control slugs: bury a cup of beer in the ground so they can climb in, they will be attracted to it and drown; place a half a grapefruit on the ground near the infested area over night, they will cluster underneath for easy removal in the morning; and surround your plants with coffee grounds, it’s too acidic and they won’t be able to cross the barrier)
Deer: We also have deer in the back yard, and I’ve seen them eating our neighbors shrubs right next to his front door! So far they haven’t eaten our plants (maybe one carrot was nibbled, but nothing too bad) and we are hoping to keep it that way. Since the garden is in the front yard we don’t want a tall unsightly fence, we also would prefer to avoid sprays and other chemical deterrents. After doing some online research it appears that there is some success controlling deer by surrounding their favorite plants with plants they won’t eat, as well as hanging bar soap near by. Apparently they are so turned off by the strong smell of soap that they won’t come near the it. So we gathered a bunch of sample sized soaps that we had been collecting from hotels over the years and placed them around the perimeter of the garden. We also created a barrier of marigolds, scallions, garlic, green onions, and basil (plants they supposedly won’t touch) around foods we know they will eat. So far so good – I’ll let you know how well it works at the end of the season.
Squirrels and Chipmunks: Another animal that calls our habitat home is the gray squirrel. We tried to put up a bird feeder, which the squirrels quickly found and chewed off to the ground. Twice we’ve come outside to find the bird feeder rolled down the hill and without a single seed left in or around it. They haven’t tried to eat the vegetables yet, but they might. If it becomes a problem we’ll have to work around them. In the mean time we are working on finding a squirrel proof feeder to hang outside our window. I’ve planted a little bit of cat mint and catnip to attract the local cats – hoping they will leave enough of a scent deterrent to prevent the small animals from exploring our garden in too much detail.
Ants: We have a few carpenter ants that have been exploring our house. Typically we find 1-3 per day in random places: on the couch, on the kitchen floor, in the bathtub… It isn’t a big problem but it is annoying. Unfortunately carpenter ants don’t respond to the bait traps the way other ants do, so they only thing to prevent them from entering are nasty pesticides. We’ve put down a powder ring (much to our chagrin) and it seems to have lessened their frequency, although we still find a few walking around. Charlie eats a lot of bugs, but he won’t touch them – I think he tried one and found it too gross to eat.
Having been forced to start so late this year and learning how to live with all these new life forms is quite the challenge for this season – we need to learn what grows best, what gets eaten, and how the layout works. Next year we hope to have established our own compost bin with fresh soil as well as having an established game plan of things to grow.
How are your gardens coming? And if you don’t have one, why not? : )
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
First, a belated congratulations on purchasing your new home!
We have a flower garden in the front of our house and in our back yard. Our challenge is the dogs, who seem to think the garden is their own personal salad bar – lol – so we've had to come up with creative fencing ideas that keep the dogs out but don't take away from the beauty of the flowers.
Another challenge is sun exposure. The front of the house gets western exposure, which means sun all day, but can be brutal in the summer. The back yard has a lot of trees, so sun exposure is spotty at best, and even growing grass in certain areas is a problem. We will be clearing some trees over the next few years in the hopes of starting our own veggie garden; maybe then the girls will be inspired to actually eat a vegetable.
Welcome to home ownership – enjoy and congrats again!
No gardening in the middle of a move for me!
But next year I hope to start some container gardening on the balcony of our new place. I'm going to have get used to the difference in climate, going from Rochester to Virginia! It will be an adjustment, but I'll figure it out (and hopefully keep plant casualties to a minimum…)
You're definitely going to Virginia? It's beautiful there, you'll enjoy it if you can get used to the heat.
Container gardening is pretty easy; there are fewer pests and it's much smaller (so easier) to water and work with. Make sure to water daily, or more, because the plants soak it up!
Thanks CT Mom!
What sort of fencing did you use? I hope we don't have to resort to that but if we did I would want it to be as minimal as possible. I didn't realize dogs liked salad.
We definitely don't have a sun exposure problem – it's actually the opposite, for a while I wasn't sure we would have any place with enough sun to grow more than grass in the front yard, and there definitely isn't enough in the back yard.
Your blog always makes me laugh so much, I love it. I laugh because I feel like I'm living a parallel life. We finally got our square foot garden in last weekend, and gosh it was such hard work we worked the entire weekend! We used the same book but replaced all of the soil because the previous owners sprayed the lawn. So we only got 1 square in, but so far everything is looking well. We also got the compost bin going so hopefully that will feed our garden next year. The tomatoes have little green tomatoes growing the peppers look like they are thinking about doing something, the lettuce we've re-planted because we ate most of it, the zucchini has been bearing fruit (although they seem to be mini-zucchini's) the carrots we harvested and re-planted. We did put up a 6 foot fence around a large area to keep out the deer and I have yet to see a slug but we do have an infestation of Japanese beetles which after trying to squash with fingers (really gross there guts all spill out onto your hands), squash with sticks and pliars (they usually escape) I have been catching them in a jar of soapy water and drowning them (which is also awful.) Good luck with your little garden. Oh, where did you find the best deal for vermiculite in bulk the largest we could find was in 2 cu feet units at the garden place in Victor?
I am also doing square foot gardening. I have found it to be much less work than traditional row gardening.
I have to second the watering daily. Especially down here in the MD/VA area and container gardening in general! My poor herb and pepper plants are STARVING for water by the time i get home!
We pulled up all the grass and flipped it, just putting the new soil on top. We also used basically 100% new soil because we weren't sure about the spray usage, and the dirt here is pretty sandy.
We just got the 2 cu/ft bags of vermiculite from Lowe's (had a gift card) and used one full bag per garden. The garden expert there said it was pretty powerful stuff and suggested that a full 1/3 would be too much.
So we technically don't have a Sq. Ft garden – we don't have the row dividers set up (next year we will), and didn't use a full 1/3 vermiculite, and finally – we have parallegrams and triangles not actual squares – lol. Nothing really square foot about it – but we tried to use the techniques and ideas from the book, and will definitely implement more of his suggestions next year.
I don't have much experience with traditional gardening, as a kid I just experimented with a few single plants, then we had the container garden, and now the 'square foot' (sort of) garden. So far the work (other than watering a lot) doesn't seem bad at all.
Glad to hear your garden is going well!