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Gardening update

As previously phlogged, this year my wife and I are experimenting with the "square foot gardening" method in raised beds in our backyard, since we unfortunately no longer have access to the extremely generous hundred square metre cheap allotments we had previously enjoyed in Finland. I figured it was about time for an update.

Phlog post: Almost square foot gardening (2020-05-09)

The big success story for us last year was various crops in the squash family, which provided an abundant yield, so we stuck with that albeit naturally on a smaller scale. We planted two squash plants and two zucchini (aka courgette) plants, and they are by far the largest things in the bed thus far. Unsurprisingly you can only fit one of these plants in each square foot space; Perhaps stupidly, we put all four of these adjacent to one another in a 2x2 section of spaces and it's getting very crowded. It would probably make a lot more sense to space these wider apart.

Our two cherry tomato plants are also looking pretty robust. Our two capsicum (aka bell pepper, aka paprika) plants seem healthy enough but are small and growing slowly, perhaps they really want a warmer climate. The same is true of the eggplant, the small and growing slowly part, I mean. Leafy things like rucola (aka rocket, aka arugula) and spinach are also looking great and might even already be ready to harvest soon. We planted some rhubarb, not realising that it takes a few years before you can harvest. It seems to be doing okay, like the capsicum and eggplant isn't exactly thriving. Of our various herbs, surprisingly few actually germinated, but what's there is doing well. I keep meaning to try planting more to fill the empty spaces.

While the squash and zucchini are doing well, they are also the locus of the one serious pest problem we've been having. For a while we were very concerned that the big leaves of these plants were being nibbled at by something, but we very rarely caught anything in the act. We found quite a few small, bright orange crab-looking things, but a little research suggests these are spider mites and that they are, in fact, something you want in your garden because they eat other things that you don't want. As the damage became worse and wors we panicked and bought some eye-wateringly expensive pyrethrum spray, a very ecologically friendly natural pesticide, and started spraying it regularly to no apparent effect.

After observing just how many slugs appeared seemingly out of nowhere overnight on my recent S24O, I wondered whether or not perhaps the culprits weren't slugs or snails that we were never seeing because they only came out at night. So the other week we popped out just before bed when it was dark to hunt around with a torch, and were really very surprised to find some of the leaves literally crawling with earwigs (forficula auricularia)! There had to be about a dozen of them one just one leaf.

Yet more research suggests that they are actually a common garden pest, which was definitely news to us. Not really knowing what else to do we let them be for the night, satisfied that we now at least knew what we were dealing with, which is, of course, half the battle. It seems that a very common remedy is simply to trap the earwigs in a small container, set into the soil, containing a mixture of soy sauce - the smell of which apparently attracts them - and any kind of cooking oil - which makes them slippery enough that they can't subsequently climb out of the container. If you're so inclined, the web can provide you plenty of photos from people who have done this and come out the morning after to find a pretty gross-looking container filled with hundreds of the things! Happy that something so cheap, simple and non-harmful to anything other than the earwigs was a possible solution, we set one of these out on Monday night and yesterday morning found a disappointing first haul of precisely 3 earwigs. We've tried moving the trap closer to the plants having the problem and I hope we can get some more. Apparently, like spider mites, earwigs aren't the worse thing to have around because they are predators of other less desirable things, but it would be good to reduce the local population to the point where our plants are growing faster than they're being eaten.