Pests In My Garden

Find the difference between the two pictures!

 

Two days after transplanting my tomatoes into bigger pots, a robin came down and completely dug out two of them!

I don't know if she's trying to make a nest or feed her young, but she keeps coming back and attacking my garden. :( I've never had bird problems before but I'm wondering if I should put up netting, especially on my berry plants. There's a couple of robins that keeps coming into my garden as well as a bunch of chickadees. The chickadees don't seem like they do any harm to my garden at all but the robins are trampling and stealing my beautiful veggie plants!

I have PLENTY more pests in my garden :( My veggies are all gonna be eaten before I can get to them...

My raspberry bush. I'm guessing it's snails, but a couple of the leaves have big holes in them. Very minor damage.

My blueberry bush is getting COMPLETELY eaten up :( So many nibble bites on them! I caught two caterpillar looking things about a month ago when most of the damage happened, but something is recently eating it up again. I hope I find those munchers.

Leaf Miner eggs on my spinach. I hand pick the eggs every day which seems to help out a lot. I get 2 or 3 damaged leaves every day still though.

My lettuce that finally came up is getting attacked too. Maybe snails? Maybe the birds, since I saw a robin trampling over my spinach/lettuce bed earlier today. BOO.

Reinforcement Army

The slug and snail population has GREATLY reduced since making snail hunting in the garden a nightly ritual. :D However every night I still do manage to find 2 or 3 so they're not gone... they're still out there multiplying. There must be some eggs that are unhatched somewhere nearby.

After a little research I've found out that black beetles will eat slugs, snails, AND their eggs, amongst other nasty critters that attack your garden. Even the wormy things that were eating my blueberry bush!

Lucky me, I had an abundance of beetles. Haha, random, right? I have a pet lizard which I feed super worms to, and if you buy too much, the worms eventually turn into cocoons and become.... beetles! Fascinating. So I had 3 cups of worms that turned to beetles and I've been keeping them for months not knowing what to do with them (they apparently eat each other.... they've survived so long!) so I happily set them free in my garden. I hope this will eliminate my pest problems for good! :D

Mystery Pests

Something ate my pea plants... :(

left: eaten pea plants
right: healthy pea plants


I think something was living in the black berry bush hovering over one of my pea-rods. When I cut the black berries out all their leaves were holey and eaten up too :( I shoulda pulled it out sooner! It looks like whatever ate it only ate to top few leaves though so I'm hoping it recovers soon...

My First Seedlings!!

Top left: parsley
Top right: squash
Bottom left: peas
Bottom right: radishes


There's signs of life all over my garden!!! :D OMG this is so exciting!!! Everything is starting out so beautifully! These were taken about 6-9 days after their sown date. As you can tell, I went a little overboard when sowing the radishes so I probably need to thin them out by 70%. Same for all my vegetables I seeded directly into the bed (lettuce, spinach, broccolli, turnips, and carrots).

Half of the seeds in the starter pots are starting to sprout but I'm a little worried about my peppers. I wonder if it's not warm enough or maybe they just take longer to germinate. I think all my herbs have started sprouting (parsley, basil and cilantro), while my spinach started sprouting but my lettuce have not. Either that or I'm just really bad at distinguishing between weed and veggies.

While I was excitedly snapping photos of my seedlings, I almost missed this pest!!!

Dun-Dun-DUUUUHN!!!!

This little rascal was just hanging out on my strawberry plant right across from my vegetable patch. He is the start of my evergrowing snail population in spring :(


Well this time, they're not going to have such a fun time in my backyard like they did last year! With leftover beer from last summer's countless BBQ's, I've set out beer traps by my garden so hopefully they like beer bars better than salad bars!

I want to try and avoid a store bought snail killer the best I can (Mostly for it's cost, but also for the fact that I want to run my garden on household items and steer clear of any chemicals and such)


I can't wait for my seedlings to grow into big tall veggie plants!!! :D