Garden Report October 16, 2020

%#$@ing gophers…

We recently switched plots at the community garden.

Our previous 10 x 20 garden was doing nicely, but where it was located there was no shade at any time and we were right next to the parking lot and some anusoids found it too difficult to walk 10 ft over to the trash can so they chucked their empty bottles and cigarette packs over the fence and into our plot.

So we handed our old garden plots over to another couple and took on one located on the southern part of the community garden, where it gets nice shade in the morning meaning it’s easier to work before noon on hot spring and summer days (now spring / summer / autumn thanx to climate change).

Two problems:

1. Nutgrass -- you’ve read of our struggles with this scourge before.  This time, since we were taking over an abandoned pair of plots, we covered the entire area with black plastic tarping for a month or so to kill off the nutgrass inside it.  (It mostly worked…kinda.  Certainly dramatically lowered the amount of nutgrass but now we’re finding unidentifiable bulbed plants shooting up and are trying to figure out if they’re chives or onions or something else.)

2. Gophers -- while all the garden plots are subject to rodent scavengers (and the snakes that hunt same; don’t ask Soon-ok how she feels about that), the southern portion of the community garden has a particularly bad gopher problem.

Now, the way to defend against gophers is when you’re setting out your plots you dig down 18-24 inches and make a big basket of chicken wire, not the big hexagonal kind but the small squares.  Then you bury that and build the wooden frame for your garden atop it.

The problem is that once the little beggars find a way in, you’ve either got to dig up the entire plot and redo the basket, or you dig an 18 inch deep trench around it and lay in another length of chicken wire to keep ‘em out.

So today that was my task.  I didn’t encircle the entire plot, but I did dig a trench about 15-18 ft long, taking great care not to damage the irrigation pipe going in (years ago at a church garden I nicked an irrigation pipe and put the entire watering system for the church property out of commission; didn’t want to do that again!).

There was enough scrap chicken wire at the community garden to lay an unbroken length down but I did have to trim it from its 2 ft width using tin snips.

The digging took the most work, and by the time I was done the sun was high enough overhead for me to enjoy the full heat of s SoCal morning.

But I got the whole unbroken length in, which is important because the entry route for the gophers was a section where they hadn’t completely encircled the plot with buried chicken wire but had left a 3 ft gap where the irrigation pipe went in.

They later tried to remedy this by simply overlaying a short length of wire to bridge the gap, but the problem was they didn’t firmly attach it to the existing ends of the chicken wire and as a result the gophers simply elbowed it aside and wriggled into the plot.
So now there’s an unbroken length on that side of the plot (and I cut a small collar to go around the irrigation pipe so that’s now triply protected) and the trench is all filled in.

Still some work to do re stapling it to the base of the existing wooden frame and spreading more mulch around to give it a uniform appearance, but I think we’ve thwarted the little bastards.

For now…

© Buzz Dixon