We have our Garden Giveaway contest winners! Email addresses of our 3 winners have been pulled from our usual Mexican basket-hat by He Who Hogs The Power Tools, and the lucky ones have been notified of their great fortune:

Thanks to Comtech, a CatStop goes to JCF (who apparently has a very specific pesky stray cat in mind for discouragement), a SquirrelStop to Queen Marlene (her songbirds will be happy!), and a SlugsAway goes to Peggie (they say everything is bigger in Texas, so I don’t want to see her slugs!).

Thanks for playing! Your prizes will go out in the mail this week, so cross your fingers for prompt and efficient postal service… And for others, less fortunate, who must now weep over their pest-ravaged gardens in disappointment: Better luck next time! And there will be a next time, you know it!

Ah, Springtime in the garden… from Wordworth’s dancing daffodils to Chaucer’s “grene and lusty May,” it’s all good — except for the harsh reality of garden pests.

Slimey Slugs and Snails, oh my!

Slugs and snails crawl into the garden at night, and leave their sticky slime all over whatever tiny bits of tender lettuce greens and flower petals they might not chew to a ragged edge or leave with great gaping holes…

Cats!

Stray cats take one look at that freshly turned, sweet, friable soil in your flower beds and say to themselves, “hey! check out the giant litter box!”

Squirrels? – please, don’t even get me started!

When all you want to do is lie in a gentle hammock and rest from your labours, watching the lovely songbirds come round for a gourmet meal — that’s when some greedy fat-tailed squirrel comes along to dangle upside down from the bird feeder, scooping out great fistfuls of expensive bird seed onto the ground as he stuffs his little rodent cheeks — guaranteed to scare away that rare shy Eastern Purple Whositbird that you’ve been dying to photograph since childhood…

Sound familiar, any of that?
Hang onto your sun-hat, then, Nelly — I’ve got the contest for you!

Garden Giveaway Contest

Here are the fabulous prizes –

1. 
   

   SlugsAway electronic slug and snail fence

   Keep slugs and snails out of your garden without using chemicals. Safe for children and pets, it can protect your garden all season on a single nine-volt battery.




2. 
   

   CatStop automatic outdoor cat deterrent

   Keep cats out of your garden, safely and efficiently. A motion-activated burst of ultrasonic sound startles cats, and teaches them to stay away.




3. 
   

   SquirrelStop automatic spinning squirrel deterrent

   Keep your bird feeder safe from squirrels. When a squirrel climbs on to the feeder, it triggers the SquirrelStop motor and makes the feeder spin! (Ha! Let’s see you try to stay on that amusement park ride, little seed-stealing rodent!) Works with any hanging feeder weighing up to 10 lbs.

Contech Electronics, based in British Columbia, Canada, is our gracious sponsor. They develop, manufacture and distribute a whole range of innovative technology for pets and gardens, including these three prizes.

Enter for your chance to win!

Read the contest rules here for your shot at 3 great prizes: there are 3 ways to enter. Residents of Canada and USA only for this one, please… and the deadline to enter is Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern).

Sweet spring in the garden, with all the fresh little green sprouts: it’s like heaven from now until harvest! Except for the harsh reality of garden pests. If pesky slugs, cats or quirrels are planting frustration in your lovely garden, my friends, this Garden Giveaway is the contest for you.

3 Great Garden Pest Control Prizes

SlugsAway electronic slug and snail fence

Keep slugs and snails out of your garden without using chemicals. Safe for children and pets, it can protect your garden all season on a single 9-volt battery.

CatStop automatic outdoor cat deterrent

Keep cats out of your garden, safely and efficiently. A motion-activated burst of ultrasonic sound will startle cats and teach them to stay away.

SquirrelStop automatic spinning squirrel deterrent

Keep your bird feeder safe from squirrels. When a squirrel climbs on to the feeder, it triggers the SquirrelStop motor and makes the feeder spin! (Ha! Let’s see you try to stay on that amusement park ride, little seed-stealing rodent!) Works with any hanging feeder weighing up to 10 lbs.

Contest Rules

This contest is open to Canada and USA readers only, sorry — otherwise I’ll go broke on the postage for shipping these things all the way to Uruguay. (Not to worry, there’ll be another giveaway contest for our international friends very soon!)

Deadline to enter: Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern)

Winners will be selected by my usual clever method of matching up email addresses with numbers, writing all the numbers on bits of paper, and putting the bits of paper into a hat (actually, a charming Mexican basket since I’m not a hat-wearing kind of gal). As usual, He Who Hogs The Power Tools will close his eyes, reach into the basket, and draw the winning numbers one by one.

First prize winner gets his/her choice of the 3 available prizes; then the 2nd prize winner gets to pick from the other two; and finally, the 3rd prize winner gets whichever prize has not yet been claimed.

Winners will be notified by email on Monday, 2 June 2008, and announced on DomestikGoddess.com at the end of that week.

3 Ways to Enter

1. Sign up to get Domestik Goddess updates by email, if you haven’t already done so, and you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to win.

or

If you’re already a subscriber, drop me a note (my email address is on the About page) or leave a comment on this other post to say “Count me in!”

or

2. Bonus! Get your name put into the hat twice by posting a note on your own blog to help spread the word about this contest — don’t forget to link back to this page, so I’ll see that you’ve entered!

or

3. Super bonus! Tell us your best story about garden pests for an extra chance to win. You can tell your tale in the comments on this other post, or send me an email, or post your garden-pest adventure on your own blog — whatever works for you — just make sure to let me know about it, so it will count towards a ballot in the giveaway!

All clear?

Good.

Remember, Canada and USA only for this one, please… and the deadline to enter is Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern).

Now, let the Garden Giveaway begin!

So my veggie garden is still under four feet of snow — does that stop a keen gardener from planning for a new planting season? Heck, no!

One of the first plantings that will go in (when Spring eventually arrives in Atlantic Canada) will be the salad garden of mixed mesclun greens and spinach and lettuce, not to mention some tasty lovely snow peas. These are all vegetable crops that prefer cooler air and soil temperatures, and will quickly fade when summer sun grows warm.

Stretch the Summer Salad Days

Did you know that you can grow salad greens in containers, if you don’t have a patch of earth for a garden? They look quite lush and lovely growing in pots, too.

Keep the harvest going by snipping off just the outside leaves, rather than the entire head of your lettuce plants. The plants will keep producing from the centre, and you get super-fresh salad for days and days on end!

Lettuce and spinach and other greens are easy to grow from seed. So easy, in fact, that I never seem to learn to scatter the seeds thinly enough — I’m always making allowances for seeds that might not germinate, and I end up with a crowded planting of tiny plants struggling against each other for light. Not so good for the air circulation, either, and some of my lettuce can end up composting itself if we get a few days of rain.

No big deal, though: just get in there with the scissors and thin it out. Cut off some of those tiny lettuce plants right at soil level when they’re just a few inches high, and start the salad season early. Thinning out will let the remaining plants grow better and avoid those nasty damp-related problems.

Slugs and Snails, Oh My!

Slugs and snails are the biggest threat to a nice salad garden, and you’ll have to be on your toes to keep ahead of them — they sneak out at dusk and can eat their way through a great deal of salad in one night, leaving silvery slimy trails all over the ragged green leaves, while you’re sleeping peacefully and all unawares… Unpleasant!

Some stores sell various kinds of “snail bait” and “slug powder” — but those are just another name for poisons. Nasty ones. And much as I find slugs to be one of the more disgusting creatures on the planet, I have no interest in sprinkling toxic chemicals around the vegetable garden. No amount of washing the lettuce would convince me that it’s not tainted. Some people swear by the new products made with iron phosphate, but I have no experience of them so you’re on your own there!

Here are two earth-friendly solutions that work for me to keep slugs and snails out of the salad garden:

One is the traditional trap baited with beer. You set a shallow dish into the garden soil just so the lip of it is even with the top of the ground, then pour in some beer. (Feel free to use the stale dregs left in the bottom of bottles after a barbecue — no need to waste the good stuff on your slugs and snails!) During the night, the slimey crawlies will come out and head for the lettuce… but they’ll get distracted by the beer, slip in for a drink, and drown. Ha!

The other solution is physical control — and no, I’m not going to suggest going out with a flashlight and hand-picking your slugs and snails out of the lettuce. Although I do know some people who actually do that. Ugh.

No, we’re talking about slug prevention here.

First, you make sure there’s not a lot of litter in the salad garden, such as fallen leaves and such, for slugs and snails to hide underneath in the daytime. Then, you put a little barrier around each lettuce plant.

A sprinkling of “diotomaceous earth” — ground up fossils, as I understand it — will scratch their little slug bellies, so a ring around the lettuce will keep slugs at bay. But I always worry about the cats and dogs getting into it and then licking their paws, and the white granules are not particularly attractive in the garden. Also, I’m not 100% convinced that diotomaceous earth is the way to go from an environmental perspective: surely there’s a finite supply of fossil bones to make it? And what’s involved in the processing and packaging and transportation?

I don’t know the answers, but these are questions that keep coming to mind — and I’d prefer not to do too much in the way of deep thinking when out playing in the garden.

Wood ashes work the same way as diotomaceous earth, by the way — and some gardeners swear by coffee grounds, cornmeal, and natural bran — but all of these barriers will only work if they’re dry. One good heavy dew in the late evening, and the slugs and snails can move right back in. Crushed eggshells and cedar chips are more effective, as they keep on working in all types of weather, but how many eggs can you eat? I don’t use cedar chips mostly because they keep the ground from warming up, and in this short Canadian growing season we really need to let the sun reach the soil as much as it can.

Generally, I just put a low collar of some sort around the lettuce plants. Cardboard won’t do it — the slugs and snails will just laugh merrily and climb right over it. What you want is a strip of copper. Slug slime reacts in some way with copper to basically electrocute the slugs. Ha!

And that’s where this iron plant crown (from Wisteria) comes in.

Granted, the crown is supposed to be for decoration — perhaps to make the lettuce plants feel important? at $39.00 per, they should! — but I say, if you’re going to have slug barriers around a bunch of garden plants, why not make them in a whimsical shape? And if, like me, you like to put the occasional pretty ruffled lettuce plant in among the garden flowers, too, a decorative iron crown might be the perfect finishing touch.

To make the crown a useful slug-proofing solution, however, just plain iron won’t do. Fasten a strip of copper around it to repel the slimy pests.

I’ve also had pretty good luck with previously-enjoyed tinfoil (aluminum foil) in place of copper. Now, I won’t swear that it will work for you, because tinfoil isn’t mentioned in any of my gardening books, but I first tried it because (a) copper can be pricey, (b) I am almost pathologically thrifty, as gardeners go, and (c) I had a slug emergency one year — and it works for me.

Crumple up your scraps of tinfoil left over from kitchen and barbecue use, and make a tiny obstacle course for slugs and snails to struggle across on their way to your plants. And if you hide the tinfoil inside a lovely crown, looking like something out of a garden fairytale, no one will be any the wiser to your frugal trick!

[Thanks to The Finer Things for finding the crown!]

While our friends Down Under are basking in gardening season, we in the Frozen North can’t see our gardens for snowdrifts… ah, but that never stopped a keen gardener from planning ahead for a new season’s harvest!

Me, I’m dreaming of sweet strawberries, fat gooseberries, tart white currrants, raspberries bursting sweet on my tongue, blueberries hanging in dusty indigo clusters…

Too easy, from the vantage point of winter dreams, to forget one of the great frustrations of growing your own food — the constant battle to defend it against wildlife! And birds, in particular, can be quite tricky when it comes to raiding the berry patch.

Sure, you can spread a fine mesh netting over the strawberry beds and currant bushes, but it’s not at all attractive. Plus, if you’re growing a lot of different berries, the cost for bird netting can get ridiculously expensive.

Some gardeners have had good luck with stringing fine line in a criss-cross fashion between poles in the garden, but I am not one of those people.

If the strings is too loose, the poor little birds can get tangled up or trapped down below among the fruiting plants — not nice, either way. And if the strings are too loose, it’s just a lovely perch on which the birds can rest while they decide the best way to get through and eat your berries anyway.

And it’s not that I would ever want to live without songbirds in the yard — I’d just prefer them to go eat the bitter wild chokecherries and leave my garden alone!

There are sticky substances to smear on bird-popular tree limbs, motion activated noisemakers, and all manner of hi-tech electronic devices designed to drive the birds away. And then there are the bright balloons with big scary eyes, and glittering reflective tape that you’re meant to drape about the yard. I can’t tell you from firsthand experience if they work or not — but who wants to see a mess of strange scary objects all over the yard, amongst the pretty fruit and flowers?

A more discreet solution that works quite well for my hobby-farmer friends downriver is to fool the birds into thinking the berry patch is full of snakes. They cut up an old length of garden hose into pieces about 16 or 18 inches long and lay those bits of hose among the garden plants.

Apparently, to the birds, the recycled hose looks like so many snakes, lying in wait for lunch! So the birds stay clear of landing in the berry patch.

But do you know those big plastic owls that some city folk use to scare pigeons away from their balconies? You’ll see a fair number of those out here in the country, too, perched on poles around the kitchen garden. My own experience is that the berry-stealing birds are scared of this watching “predator” at first, but by the time the crop is ripening, they’ve figured out that there’s nothing to fear.

Now they make a version of the owls with rotating heads. Obviously, movement helps… maybe.

At least with the fake garden-hose snakes, you can easily move them around from time to time…

Which brings me to the beautiful copper garden snake I found at Modern Artisans. I’m not sure if it would protect the berries from birds as well as my friends’ old hose sections do, but at least it would be something lovely to look at in the garden…

You know, something more decorative than a lot of bird tracks in the dirt and sad strawberry plants from which every fruit has been stripped!

There is, however, one thing that has worked for me with strawberries, over the years. I have given up completely on the usual large red berries and grow only white strawberries.

Yes, white!

Well, more of a creamy off-white, the colour that normal strawberries are before they start to turn red and ripe…

These strawberries simply stay that colour — they ripen beautifully without ever turning red, so the birds (and kids) can’t tell when they’re ripe and ready to eat.

White strawberries are not quite as large as the more widely grown red-fruited varieties, but they bear a great many berries to make up for it. The tiny Alpine strawberries are available as white ones, too, but mine are a hardy old-fashioned bunch that I swiped from my grandfather’s garden, and the fruit is larger than the Alpine strawberries.

As sweet as you could ever wish for, though, with a faint sun-warmed pineapple flavour — just as sweet as those wild strawberries we used to pick at the sunny edges where hayfields met hedgerows, back in that endless summertime when we were kids…

Technorati Tags: birds, berries, garden

I can live with the adorable little deer eating my apple trees. Well, I can tolerate it because there’s not any practical way to protect the orchard, short of a ten-foot-high electric fence (not practical) — but when it comes to the flower garden, the deer had better keep off!

My pride and joy (and the result of a heck of a lot of digging and weeding) is a 40-foot mixed perennial garden bed. The deer seem to feel that this lovely garden is a buffet table, laid out for their browsing pleasure.

Asiatic lilies don’t stand a chance. Every year I get all excited to see my gorgeous exotic lilies budding up, and then comes a night when the deer tiptoe in and work their systematic way down the length of the border, eating off the top half of every single lily.

This year, even the delphineum plants have been thoroughly browsed, and the heuchera, and the lavatera. The deer have even been eating my daylilies, and I just gave up on growing hosta plants some years ago… It wouldn’t surprise me to go out some morning and find the prickly Scottish thistles eaten down to the ground.

It would break a gardener’s heart.

You know those lists of garden plants that are supposed to be “deer resistant”?
Don’t believe a word of it!

If there are enough deer in an area, they’ll start to eat almost any plant they find.

Adventures with Deer Repellents

There’s no point in using one of the bad-tasting deer repellent products, because the deer have to actually eat the plant in order to know that it won’t taste good. So you’ve still lost the flowers…
Fortunately, there are options.

Now, if I weren’t too disorganized to get myself to the garden centre early in the growing season, and invest in a bottle of Plantskydd, my garden might survive. Because that stuff is one deer repellent that actually works. But you do have to actually have some Plantskydd on hand… and I always seem to be fresh out, when the deer come around.

My Fight Against Plant-Eating Deer

In the absence of Plantskydd, my methods seem to be a combination of:

(a) wishful thinking that maybe this year the deer will find something else to eat;

(b) fingers crossed for good luck, and

(c) desperate attempts to encourage my male dogs to piddle near (but not actually on) my prized flower garden.

The deer around here have gotten wise, though — in a landscape amply supplied with deer-hunting coyotes, Bambi is none too frightened of a few domestic dogs who are kept indoors at night!

(Speaking of coyotes, they say that coyote urine and fox urine can be an effective deer repellent. I just want to know how to get a fox to pee in a bottle, that’s all.)

I’ve been known to run out of the house at night in my rubber boots and dressing gown, waving my arms at the deer and shouting, “I eat venison, you know!” That works for, like, half an hour. The deer just wait for the crazy lady to go to bed. I haven’t asked the neighbours what their impressions are…

I’ve also been known to spray a particularly repulsive no-name highly scented air freshener at the edge of the flower bed. It did seem to keep the deer away, but the smell was so offensive to me that I couldn’t bear to go near the garden until we had a few heavy rain showers to dilute the odor!

So much for that plan…

I wrapped a battery-powered radio in weatherproof plastic and tuned it to an obnoxious talk radio station, and placed it in the garden. After two nights, the deer just tuned it out.

My amazingly life-like scarecrow also worked for about two nights, until the deer realized that this was just another cheap trick.

So, last week, in absolute desperation, I mixed up a batch of my grandmother’s rotten egg deer repellent. Do you know that recipe? It’s one of those hardy pioneer-woman type potions that makes your kitchen smell bad for hours, but it does seem to keep the deer away…

Homemade Deer Repellent with Eggs

Recipe:

Boil up a few garlic cloves in a cup of water, let it cool, take out the cloves (and throw them into the garden), and blend in a couple of eggs. Mix a cup of skim milk powder into this egg-garlic-water mixture, and stir to dissolve. Pour it into a gallon jug and top up with more water.

Now you’ve got to let the mixture sit in the sun for a day or so, to get really rancid. Pour some into a spray bottle — and I really must recommend using gloves, because you’ll never get the rotten-egg smell off your hands if you slop it onto yourself when pouring! — and spray it lightly onto your vulnerable garden plants.

You’ll be relieved to know that the rotten-egg smell goes away when the liquid dries — at least, humans can’t smell it any more. But the deer can still smell the repellent, and they don’t like it one bit!

Yes, it’s pretty horrible. If your garden is under attack by hordes of hungry deer, however, a half-hour or so of rotten egg smell is a small price to pay for saving the flowers you’ve poured your heart into nurturing and growing…

(So then you can cut them to make a nice bouquet. Life is all about the irony, isn’t it?)