Garden Friends: Snakes

As we were walking down to the garden, we saw a big gopher snake (about six feet long) slithering in the wood pile. We were all happy to see him there and hopeful that he would catch some of the gophers or squirrels that were eating all of our tomatoes. 

Suddenly, we heard a high pitch squeak. We thought (hopefully) that it might be the sound of a squirrel that was just caught by a snake. Maya, our dog, was very excited and ran to the wood pile, sticking her nose in a little hole in the woodpile. We called her back so we could see what she was sniffing at through the hole. Lacey was the first to see a bunny's head. She said that it looked like it was laying still. 

As we were all crowding around trying to see what she was talking about, Maya stuck her nose back in and that is when we heard a very loud hiss. Seriously loud, I did not know that snakes could make such a loud sound. We decided that it was probably a good idea to give the snake its space and called Maya away again and found some work to do away from the garden. 

After about a half-hour or so, we went back to see if the rabbit or snake were still around. All we could see was part of the snake's body sticking out of the hole where we had seen the bunny. One less rodent to eat our bounty.

This was a different gopher snake we found previously in a different part of our land.

Pest Control: Earwigs - Round 2

Apparently, earwigs like to live in straw that is used as mulch in your garden. We were providing a safe, comfortable place for the earwigs to live by day with plenty of food to eat by night. Once we got rid of the mulch, the earwig problem became much more manageable. We had added mulch early in the year because we had an unusually warm winter. As summer approaches, we are noticing fewer earwigs in general, so we may try mulching again this summer. We'll see how that goes.

Pest Control - Red Ant Battle: Round One

As anyone in San Diego County (and probably the whole Southwest) knows, we live on a giant ant hill. We are constantly battling ants in our houses and in our gardens. For the most part, ants can be ignored when they are outdoors, but when they come in the house or they infest the vegetable garden, sometimes they just have to be killed. There was a big ant hill in our garden and we had to get rid of them. We are trying to avoid using poisons in the garden since we want to eat the food and we don't want the friendly animals, such as lizards, frogs, birds and our dog, to eat either the poison or poisoned animals, but ants are really hard to get rid of!

We are trying Amdro Fire Ant Bait. The ants take the bait to their home and all the ants, including the queen, eat the poison. The dead ants pretty much stay underground, so hopefully it won't affect the lizards, frogs and birds. We've done two applications. It seems to work at first, but then we see more after a few days. Hopefully this second application will do the trick. 

Pest Control - Earwig Battle: Round One

We think that our vegetable garden is being attacked by earwigs. We see them everywhere around the garden (and house for that matter - which is really disgusting by the way!). Thanks to Google, we discovered a pretty simple trap for them. You put about an inch of vegetable oil and something smelly like soy sauce (some of the articles and YouTube videos suggest the water or oil from tuna) in a shallow container (we used yogurt containers and small cans) and bury the container in the ground so that the opening is at ground level. The earwigs are attracted by the smell and fall into the container and the oil coats them so that they cannot get out. When you go out in the morning to check your traps you will be both delighted and disgusted at the number of dead earwigs in your containers.

We've only done it for a couple nights so far and it seems like there are less holes in the new leaf growth. Hopefully it will help a lot.