Garden pests

Agriculture and soil. Pollution control, soil remediation, humus and new agricultural techniques.
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Grelinette
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Garden pests




by Grelinette » 08/09/16, 10:18

Hello everybody

This subject will surely interest many of you, especially now in the season when many pests attack the gardens. This is a subject that was tackled by Did67 in the Lazy Vegetable Garden, but I think it is a subject important enough to be discussed separately.

Here is an email that was sent to members of a network of permacultural gardeners and which opens the debate:

Hello,

As every year in September, wild boars devastate the mounds. Multiplied by hunters and chased from the hills by their shots they head towards the dwellings. Thirsty and looking for earthworms, they find the moist and freshly stirred soil of the gardens and in good burrowing animals they scatter what has just been transplanted.

Birds, rats plunder grain and dry bread in the chicken coop. Equally thirsty rats nibble drip, creating jets of water and sometimes silent leaks more difficult to locate.

Magpies attack figs, ants take away seeds, earwigs dig aubergines…

A balance would be established in the long run with predators (raptors eat rodents, lizards and frogs control slugs, ladybugs devour aphids on beans…) but often the balance is broken, so the hunters have eliminated i believe the weasels and therefore the voles swarm.

How much time was spent preventing and repairing the damage! But don't we say that the presence of the “megafauna” (raptors, rats…) is an indication of a restored biodiversity? So we would have to agree to share the surpluses, to give their share to all these stealthy lives.

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To start proposing solutions, here are 2 methods to fight against certain predators:

Boars :
It is a method proposed by a specialist at a conference on permaculture and which consists of installing a small radio in the garden. The principle is to turn on the radio in the evening when leaving the garden so that the sound (music + voice of the radio hosts) keep the boars at bay ...

The specialists in small electronic DIY present on Econologie will be able to also propose a simple assembly allowing to automatically turn on a radio on batteries, in the evening as soon as the daylight has dropped, and recharge the batteries with a small solar panel so that the radio on for as long as possible.

Rodents:
It is a method that I have successfully tested to reduce the number of rodents in a house and garden. I simply put plastic bottles vertically in the places I visited, with the upper part cut and turned over so as to make a sort of funnel to prevent rodents from getting out of the bottle, the bottle containing some bait: hard bread, cookies, pieces of fruit and vegetables.
I also added a small piece of wire mesh around the neck (like a fish trap) making it even more difficult for rodents who entered the bottle to exit. (I can make a sketch for those who have not understood everything).
Each day, I recovered 2 to 3 rodents alive in the bottles which I released far from the garden and the house.

It remains to find ideas for slugs, birds, rabbits and other pilferers.
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Re: Garden pests




by izentrop » 08/09/16, 11:02

Grelinette wrote:the sound (music + voice of the radio hosts) keep the boars at bay ...
But not the neighbors who would like to sleep :( Grilling is a better solution.

To avoid rodents in the henhouse:
  1. no food inside
  2. Close the door for the night. It can be automated http://moncastel.free.fr/forum/trappePoule/
  3. Keep food out of their reach, even outside. I did this with a 5 kg metal paint bucket and a little DIY around. runs on free energy (their own weight). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrG_Y_UeVLA
Each day, I recovered 2 to 3 rodents alive in the bottles which I released far from the garden and the house.
Others will reclaim the territory left vacant. They also have their use in a living garden http://www.limousin.synagri.com/ca1/PJ. ... penElement
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Re: Garden pests




by Christophe » 08/09/16, 11:17

Uh, having a cat at home is easier than a raptor, isn't it? ^^

For slugs, their biggest predator is the hedgehog, you have to find one ... but it adapts very well to "human gardens" (friends had one in a city garden ... and it had come all the way) alone!)

The birds apart from the scarecrows (the old CDs work well, it seems) and the nets, I don't see ... or so also raptors! ^^

ps: also I find the concept of "stealthy life" quite strange (on the part of a permaculturist, so green no?) ... because the man is not stealthy maybe? It's all a matter of perspective and time scale ...
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Re: Garden pests




by Did67 » 10/09/16, 18:25

1) Conceptually, if I may say so, I do not think that a "vegetable garden", even natural, is a system in equilibrium. I spoke about it on the main thread dedicated to the PP (Lazy Garden). It is an anthropized space.

Therefore, relying ONLY on natural balances is, in my opinion, a decoy.

And therefore put everything on the hunters, say, a little bit of myopia.

At my place, they do not hunt enough, the wild boars swarm and obviously had found the worms in my garden. In the thicket located just below, in the middle of natural meadows, on the verge of wasteland, each year, a hen sets up with its young. I can see them sometimes at the end of the day. They look at me, in no way frightened. It's been too long since the residents of the neighborhood who let this fallow leave no longer bother them ...

I confirm that the electric fence model I have is 100% efficient [when I bought it, several people swore to me that it "would not work"!]

2) The hedgehog, although the best known, is not necessarily, I think, the biggest predator of slugs. These are the ground beetles, the staphylins, etc ... which attack the small snails and the eggs ... Invisible, they do not enjoy the notoriety of the "cute" hedgehog ...

3) Scarecrows, CDs are folklore. Birds get used to it very quickly. This can be done for 8 days to protect ripening fruits ...

But the nets work well.

Why guard raptors?

4) Trapping mole rats allows me to maintain balance and limited damage. Otherwise, in a favorable place, it is useless to grow certain vegetables (especially the roots but also parsley ...).

A (deadly) trapping does not shock me. Do not confuse ecology and sentimentality. I could develop. I know it always shocks. But these are the people who are too sensitive - "oh poor beast". To ask the question of what becomes of the 198 mole-rats resulting from a couple in one year ... There will remain, in a system in equilibrium, a couple which will replace the first. All the others (thus 196) died naturally ...

Moving people is silly: it is the capacity of the ecosystem that fixes the population. Putting it elsewhere is ALSO condemning them. Excruciatingly. By hunger, by disease, by predation ...

I speak of course, of invasive species, in no way threatened ...

You should not:

a) apply in this situation, practices aimed at saving or re-introducing species

b) push trapping beyond population control, towards eradication.

The rat-mole, unwittingly, in a PP, "too favorable" conditions: mass food, surface protection. Its natural prolificacy, which is there to compensate for a high mortality, will then lead to disaster!

Remember that the natural prolificacy of a species (the number of young) is "balanced" and takes into account natural mortality. At the end of the cycle, a pair of parents will be replaced by a pair of parents (or at least, a mother by a mother). If she had 1 babies during her fertile period, it is because 000 were "destined" to die! And that it was expected.

So I trap, without exterminating. Without hesitation. Participating in the great natural balances as a super-predator that I am.
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Re: Garden pests




by chatelot16 » 10/09/16, 20:30

when I had 2 dogs there was never a hedgehog ... or when there was one I found myself at night with the dogs barking around the hedgehog ... I locked up the dogs to let the hedgehog go : it remains in a ball for a long time before deciding to move

now there is no more dog and I often meet hedgehogs in my garden: they are not fearful as when there were dogs
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Re: Garden pests




by Did67 » 11/09/16, 11:23

chatelot16 wrote:when I had 2 dogs there was never a hedgehog ... or when there was one I found myself at night with the dogs barking around the hedgehog ... I locked up the dogs to let the hedgehog go : it remains in a ball for a long time before deciding to move

now there is no more dog and I often meet hedgehogs in my garden: they are not fearful as when there were dogs


I buried my dog ​​a year and a half ago ... I built a beautiful shelter, covered with brushwood ... I installed a "hedgehog garden", with only plants "squatted" by the slugs so that he has to eat right outside his door ...

Until then, without success!

But I do not despair...

Perhaps a few foxes that squat the thicket just not low are dissuasive?
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Re: Garden pests




by izentrop » 11/09/16, 22:02

chatelot16 wrote:when I had 2 dogs there was never a hedgehog ...
I have had a bastard rat recently. From the start, he flushed out 2 hedgehogs in broad daylight which I barely saved.
He caught the second in the face when he saw me coming, perhaps an excess of zeal. He didn't cry out in pain, but apparently it vaccinated him.
Since, by 2 times, we met on the ballad path ... He sniffed a blow and goes his way ignoring them. :)
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Re: Garden pests




by Adrien (ex-nico239) » 01/06/17, 01:53

At each corner its predators ...

In the Luberon where I used to live: sucking bugs of tomatoes and wild boars pest of pumpkin fields and vegetable gardens
Solutions
For the bedbugs none other than pick them up
For wild boars, electrify the vegetable plots.

Here where we are in 04
An invasion of not shy rabbits that wander even in broad daylight under your nose or almost
Solution none apart from doubling the garden fence with chicken wire before they have eaten all the roses and so on, since we are quiet
Wire the two entrances to the greenhouse and the outdoor vegetable patch and all the young shoots of various and varied trees outside the garden
Solution of the moment cats: if they don't kill the adults they do a hell of a job at the level of the rabbits (1 every 2 days at the moment)

Illustration of today, they are proud as peacocks to bring them back and they eat them almost entirely ...

Image

For the moment: no slugs (too dry?), No voles, mice but here too they are hatched, some snails but in small quantities, no wild boars, no deer, crickets in the greenhouse but good there are more salads than they can eat.

To be continued...
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Re: Garden pests




by olivier75 » 01/06/17, 08:39

Hello,
Found yesterday in a garlic and small onions, which have grown in the vegetable patch of the house. I didn't find anything on Google this morning.
image.jpeg

6 animals on ten plants. There were no outward signs. I will make a small harvest in the new vegetable garden to see.
Olivier.
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Re: Garden pests




by Did67 » 01/06/17, 09:15

nico239 wrote:
For wild boars, electrify the vegetable plots.



I confirm: 3 years ago, I almost stopped my "Potager du Laesseux" after two wild boar ravages in a row in the space of 8 days ... I was not a good enough teacher to explain to them that the tillage was harmful ...

I had had dissonant echoes: for some, the electric fence worked, for others not!

So I acquired a suitable system:

- with special insulators, with 3 rows of staggered wire

- a special "wild boar" energizer: the spark must be at least 1 cm, so a high voltage; thus, it "passes" through the insulating hair ... Many "ordinary" devices do not have this power, so wild boars are not even "tickled"!

Since its installation, 3 years ago, several times damage a few meters away, in the orchard, but they never crossed the fence.

I also had kids who really liked my rosebuds and ... my strawberries. So there is a boar thread above the boar's thread ...

Only the unsightly and "aggressive" side ("be careful with an electric fence" - it looks a little particularly nice and welcoming!) Bothers me. But not more than that either !!!!
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