Beer Baiting

I noticed some holes in some of the leaves in Alice so I decided to try an organic snail/slug trap I'd heard about a few months ago.  Apparently those little slime creatures love beer (I mean, who doesn't?) so if you put some beer out in a shallow container they will flock to it instead of flocking to your plants.  I gathered my materials: small containers for the beer, beer*, something to cover the container, and something to dig a small hole.

Materials

Figure out where you want to put the traps.  I put one near the tomatoes and one near the zucchini since those were the plants that had been getting chewed on.  Then dig a shallow hole so that the top of your container is at about the same level as the ground.  We want to make it as easy as possible for the snails and slugs to get to the beer.  Once you get your hole dug place the container in there and tuck it in a bit so it doesn't spill too easily.

Fill up your container with the beer and then you want to cover the trap.  The perpetrators are more cozy in this dark, cave like scenario.  You can use anything for this as long as there is still an opening for them to get in.  I used to have a couple pet rats so I used their old house as a cover.

*I brief note about beer.  I love beer and generally do not condone "wasting" it.  The beer I used for this was from the beer of the month club.  What should have been the best birthday gift ever turned out to be a lot of very disappointing beers with the same bad aftertaste.  I suspect this has to do with the beer getting too hot in the shipping process but I am not an expert so I'm not sure what went wrong exactly.  Before pouring the beer out I did taste it to make sure it was a bad one. Other possible ways to get beer are:

• Have a party, people always seem to leave half filled beers around.  
• that last bit of beer in the bottom of a bottle that a lot of people leave
• buy some cheap stuff

Elbow Room

The last time I was here I was talking about how amazing companion planting is.  The less exciting part of planning your garden layout is figuring out exactly where plants should go in relation to each other.  It is important to make sure you can easily access each plant without damaging anything but other then that there is a lot of personal preference for design.  Some people like to plant in rows, others group many plants together in one square area.  I tend to be a bit more of a mess and just put plants where ever they seem to fit.  Especially since I rarely have many plants of the same species.  Whichever way you choose, those little plant information tabs come in handy:

Most of these tabs will show each plant's suggested spacing.  Once I know what plants benefit from each other I look at their specific spacing requirements and figure out a general distance that should be left between them.  I like to place the information tabs into the dirt while I'm looking at spacing that way I have a good visual of how everything is coming together and can easily see if plant spaces are starting to overlap at all.  

We learned last time that tomatoes, peppers, basil, and marigolds all do well together.  My garden area has a little southern wall along the back; I decided to put the tomatoes along there since they will be tall enough that the sun will be able to reach them.  Thankfully they are still short enough (for now) that the plants to the north are still in full sun as well.  Using them as anchors I worked my way out determining where my other plants should be placed.  One companion planting site mentioned that it was good for hot peppers to be shaded by other plants to block some of the sun and create a more humid climate.  Because of this I placed my pepper plant a bit close to one of the tomato plants.  I put the basil between the two tomato plants and planted two marigolds on either side of them for protection.  The finished product looks like:

I have decided to name my gardens the way they name hurricanes...I give you: Alice, West

Some times deciding where to place your plants is a pretty easy puzzle and you can start to use other methods to plan.  For example, in the top left of the picture you can see a pea plant.  Since there are two tomato plants I wasn't sure which one to put in the middle.  Then I noticed the tomatoes have different days to fruit maturity but one of them is similar to the pea maturity.  I hypothesize that plants will need more nutrients to sustain themselves during fruit production so I separated the plants with similar maturity dates to make sure they aren't competing against each other at that important time.  I also made it a point to surround the entire garden with marigolds in hopes of offering extra protection.

My final step was to make a quick drawing of Alice's general layout for quick reference:

Alice Layout

Some quick notes:

- Alice ended up being a bit squished since we bought more plants then we actually had room for.  That zucchini to the far left is way too close to the strawberries and marigolds!

- Some of you more experienced green thumbs may be yelling "what about zone information?!"  I am fortunate to be in zone 8b where winter comes late (if ever) and we are hoping to have a greenhouse up in the next month where we can transplant to.  Because of these two things I chose to ignore that part for now and will touch on it in a later post when it is more relevant.
- You may have noticed my tomato trellis is not very conventional.  Instead of going out and spending money on one of those fancy circular tomato homes I used a couple sides of an old dog play area fence.  I'm not sure how the tomatoes are going to go but so far the pea vines seem to love it!

Ta

Making friends

Gardening has always been something I liked doing but I never took the time to really learn how.  I would just throw plants in the ground and wait to see what happened.  Turns out when you're starting a garden there's a bit of planning that should happen before you even touch the ground.

This week's skill is: Planning the layout of your garden.

Initially, you need to figure out what you want in the garden.  A friend of mine is starting some creative gardens based on meals: spaghetti garden(YUM!).  We are not that creative in this house.  We went to the local garden center and picked out whatever was there that sounded good.  We did end up with a few garden oddballs.  Why?  Well because of: "companion planting."

I .L.O.V.E. companion planting!  Who has heard about how marigolds should be planted with tomatoes to help keep hornworms away?  That is companion planting.  I haven't found any exhaustive lists but wikipedia has a good start.  Anything that's not on there you can just type in a search for "[plant] companions" and you should be able to find what you need.  It is so neat how certain plants just love to hang out together!  Plus it's such an easy, organic solution to help you get the best from your garden.

With some quick research I learned:
-Marigolds are great with tomatoes, squash, peppers, well with most plants really.  Wikipedia mentions the benefits of planting them everywhere.
-Another plant that does well paired with tomatoes and peppers is basil.

So when we're planning our layout we now know we want to keep the marigolds, tomatoes, peppers, and basil all close together.  And hopefully there will be some marigolds left over to scatter around the rest of the garden.

Next time: Spacing

Hello!

Day one!  The Skill Bucket is my way to share and keep track of all the random stuff I like to do along with the things I want to learn how to do.  Some posts will be informative while others will be pretty, no matter what I'm confident there will be fun!  My initial goal is to start a new project every week with lots of pictures and regular updates as they play out.


Some themes:
- Anything to do with Gardening
- Food!  (cooking is probably a basic skill for a lot of people, I am not one of those people)
- Knitting
- Creative construction projects
- Saving money