Mystery Afoot at the Little Farm

You know how sometimes you don’t realize you’ve got a problem, until it’s almost too late to solve it?

Taking advantage of the winter lull in our garden, I’ve been looking back on this past growing season. While it’s always fun to reflect on John’s and my successes, what stands out are all the wrong turns I made. Especially in one area.

The evidence about the problem was right in front of me, but as I often do, I ignored it. Hoped I was wrong. And paid the price.

I first noticed an issue in my parsnip bed. I planted two rows instead of my usual three, since I’d overplanted last year. I didn’t want a repeat of having too many ’snips to harvest between freezing cycles, and tossing out so many, after the roots had become too woody to eat.

As soon as the tiny seedlets emerged, I looked at the bed in dismay. That’s not many parsnips! I ended up planting a third row after all.

Smartly (I thought), I surrounded the bed with organic garden-friendly slug bait.

The seeds germinated, the first teeny, oblong leaves unfolded. Then disappeared.

Grrr—those were some aggressive slugs, getting past the bait! But slugs being slugs, they are ruthless about devouring seedlings. Luckily, it wasn’t too late to replant. 

Parsnip seeds can take weeks to germinate. I watched the bed eagerly, delighted when this next row emerged. Then one by one, here and there, the seedlings once again disappeared.

Now, I was getting mad. I put out more slug bait, and planted yet one more time.

Same result. You know that classic definition of insanity, about doing the same thing and expecting a different result? (Albert Einstein.) And it was too late in the season to replant, so I wasn’t going to do a dumb thing like sow even more seeds.

The odd thing was, the parsnip seedlings had disappeared sort of sporadically. One or two would be  eaten, the others untouched. Then a day or two later, a few more would be gone, at a different spot in the bed.

In my experience, slugs will sort of pick a spot in your seedlings, and in one night, mow down 1/3 of a row in one fell swoop. They don’t waste time picking and choosing, leaving food right in front of their horrible sluggy faces.

But I had better things to do than figure out weird slug eating habits. I’d have to be content with the surviving parsnips.

Along came midsummer. I was spending more time in the blueberry patches, which need weekly watering. Placing the sprinkler near the base of one of my most reliably productive shrub, I noticed the bark. Actually, the bark that wasn’t there.

Looking closer I saw gnaw marks. Hoo-kay. The mice were at it again.

Mice storing sour white berries under the lavender!

I already knew mice just loved blueberries. A few years back, they’d stolen unripe berries right off a bush and made a little cache of them under a nearby lavender plant. There were a few blue and purple berries, but the pile was mostly white ones!

If you raise blueberries, you know they do best with not only frequent watering, but deep. That lavender plant, which you know are very drought-friendly plants, got extremely vigorous from all the extra water.

You may not be surprised to learn that soon afterward, I consigned that bushy lavender hideaway to the weed composting pile. It was too  large to transplant without damaging the nearby blueberry roots.

John, who studied horticulture back in the day, says that the most nutrient-laden portion of a shrub or tree is the layer just under the bark. So those mice were chewing off the bark to get to the really yummy stuff.

(It’s also worth noting that if mice can chew off bark, it’s no big deal to chew holes in the walls of your house.)

Anyway. Now that I knew mice were damaging my shrubs, I used a natural deterrent I’d heard about: garlic. I cut up some old, woody garlic heads left over from the previous season, and scattered the pieces around the crowns of the shrubs.

It worked!

I periodically examined the shrubs for further damage, but it looked like the mice had moved on. If I’d been smart, I would not have moved on too. I would have put some traps in the blueberry patch.

But the growing season was beginning to wind down—and it stopped raining. Nothing to worry about; August is our usual late summer dry spell. I had to let go of weeding and bed-care, and focus on harvesting. And more importantly, watering.

I don’t have any kind of automatic sprinkler-watering system. It’s just me moving hoses. My main hose bib leaks, so I keep a galvanized steel bucket beneath it, emptying it periodically to hand-water separate plants, then empty it again before I go in for the night.

One day I reached for the faucet to turn on the water, and Blecch! There was a dead mouse in the bucket!

I could only guess it had gotten really thirsty. The mouse must have climbed up the house exterior to jump into the bucket for the few remaining drops of water at the bottom.

Well, at least there was one less mouse to make trouble in my garden. And it was time to plant late-summer spinach for overwintering.

So in went the spinach seeds, out came the slug bait, and the up came the seedlings! Spinach takes a bit longer to germinate later in the summer, so I sure was happy to see those sprouts appear.

Than the same thing happened. Seedlings began to disappear in no particular pattern or order. Just like they had with the parsnips.

I replanted, conscious that the window for consistent germination was closing. Fortunately,, the spinach did come up, and I sprinkled more slug bait around the bed, and added more garlic close to the seedlings. But they continued to disappear.

In this hot, dry weather, I'd noticed the slugs were few and far between. Probably slunk off into the woods to stay cool and moist. Still, before long, I had maybe a dozen seedlings left out of 50.

I was really getting frustrated.

Interestingly, about two weeks after the last mouse dead in the bucket, I found another.

The light went off. It was thirsty rodents, making mouse salad from my spinach greens. And they were the culprits that had eaten my parsnips as well.

My biggest mistake was not realizing that these darn mice were taking over our place until they’d done serious damage.

Well, I wasn’t going to let the grass grow under my feet. I still had some old garlic, and did the same drill: cut it up, and sprinkled it among the spinach seedlings.

It had absolutely no effect. Not enough garlic? Or the mice were enjoying their free salads too much to let a little garlic bother them?

I know I’m a bit eccentric, but surely not insane. It was time to make like Einstein and do something different, to get a different result.

I’d learned from a student in my Homestead-Style gardening class that mice loathe peppermint. So I raided my peppermint patches and pots, cut up the leaves and stems and scattered them all around my poor surviving spinach sprouts.

Then for good measure, I set bird netting over the bed. My two-pronged approach worked! The spinach stayed unmolested through the rest of the fall.

But then came the day, shortly before Christmas, that the mice upped their game…

You can read about it in my latest Substack newsletter, just out this week: Home Invasion & A River Runs Through It. 

As a preview, here's a pic! 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner!

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Now back to mice…any more non-chemical repellents in the garden that have worked for you? I’d love to hear about them!