BONEHEADS.
Nearly every morning for the last week when we would go to check the garden, we'd discover a plant has been brutally ravaged. Decimated even. At first it was a single tomato plant, then fell another. A squash was next. Then lastly, the fourth in four nights, a cucumber plant toppled. That was enough for us. A plant per night is devastating to our small operation. If 30 nights equalled thirty tomato plants, we'd be pretty bummed little gardeners. The plants look like someone was coming into the garden, arbitrarily selecting a transplant to torture, and snipping the leaves off hatefully before leaving them there as some sort of weird pestilent calling card. Our first thought was an over-zealous bird, pecking away at leaves chasing down insects. And that might make sense for one plant, or even two, but not four. Our papa farmer, Eric, said it might be a "damn squirrel," and suggested I should bury myself in the dirt and wait for it. We went through the list of pests it could be and felt completely stumped, until my savvy and beautiful wife found somewhere on the internet that mice fancy this type of M.O..Having mice in your house is one thing, you can tighten up your cleaning efforts, set traps, buy a cat if you'd like––there are things you can do to keep them out of your house. But a field is a much bigger space and we wanted to do things--whats the word?--humanely, so we looked for natural ways to ward them off the plants. One article suggested hot sauce or a garlic/salt/water mixture sprayed upon the plants to deter the mice, or other small menaces, from destroying our precious plants.That seemed like a pretty straight forward and natural approach. As luck would have it, we have some wonderful hot sauce! I made it myself, in fact. Great! We loaded the juice into a spray bottle, diluted it with some water and applied it to every squash, cucumber and tomato plant we had in the garden without a second thought.Now, if you want an alternative to round-up, you can use vinegar...and although our concoction wasn't entirely vinegar, it was pretty darn close. One by one, the plants began to wilt and terror overcame us. We had just, actively and aggressively, applied natural herbicide to our plants. Stupid. We rushed to clean them with water and luckily, in the end, only one plant died because of us. But sadly, the nightly devastation continues, and we've resorted to mouse traps. Which brings us to this...anyone else have good ideas to keep these little buggers out of our plants? Good stories of being a dummy farmer in your early years? D'oh.
- Jesse.