The usual combination of blood & bone and rooster booster went into three while Brad emptied the contents of one of our kitchen bokashi buckets in the fourth.
We left them to rest and began busily propagating our various seeds. Some were proprietary, brand-name varieties and others were heirloom seeds from our friends at Diggers.
Amongst the heirloom packs we have a pumpkin mix and the seeds we planted from it promptly sprouted and quickly became our biggest and healthiest seedlings (cucurbits – which includes pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchinis etc – are a very fast-growing family).
We knew from the experience of last year's volunteer pumpkin in our front yard, that pumpkins take up a heap of room so, in preparation for their arrival this year, Brad sprayed a large patch of long grass at the very back of our garden with a common, chemical herbicide.
The grass dutifully died down providing an expansive mat of dead, dry grass within which to plant our seedlings, in the hope it would create an ideal mulch and well-aerated support for the anticipated fruit.
Everything was playing out exactly as hoped and the time came to finally put our carefully reared seedlings in the ground. I dug out two patches of the dead grass and introduced our baby pumpkins to their new homes.
They quickly adapted and within a day seemed all settled in. Sadly, a few days later one of them suffered a pest-attack and something chewed a hole in its stem, cutting off most of its nutrient and water supply.
It was okay, though, we had another and I figured, since they grow so big we'd see how it went. It was not to be. Only a week or so later, in the middle of a Sunday barbecue, I went back to check on the remaining seedling that had been fine that morning, only to find it snapped-off at the base and left upside-down in the dirt. My hopes of success were dashed.
There was a third, smaller seeding that we'd planted in a pot to give it more of a chance so I figured I'd wait for that one to grow and toughen up and I'd sow a few more seeds in the meantime.
The pumpkins, sadly, were not our only casualties from the initial round of planting as we lost almost all of our brassicas (broccoli/cauliflower/cabbage family) to slug-attack in the first few days as well. A good third of our seedlings met their maker.
As Brad has shared with you all in previous posts, we upped the ante against our now much-maligned pests with beer-filled slug traps and even a slug-hunt one evening which proved most effective against the little blighters.
Those weren't the only weapons in our arsenal, however!
As it turns out, gastropods (that revolting family of godforsaken creatures that includes slugs and snails) cannot stand the touch of copper. Yes, that's right, dear reader; copper.
Since they are made mostly of snot, contact with copper generates a small charge in the slimy, salty little organ-bags they slither around in. This apparently furnishes them with a very unpleasant jolt in a way that can only really be understood in mathy-chemistry terms. It is therefore beyond me to explain further except that it works! They HATE the stuff!
It's effective enough that someone has figured out a way to make money off it and now markets a handy copper tape; an adhesive-backed strip of copper foil that you can ring your pots or collar your seedlings with.
An order was placed, the product arrived and very soon all of our brassicas were ringed in slices of chopped-up plastic cups and bottles, all rimmed around the top with copper.
It seemed to do the trick as the slug attacks entirely ceased.
With great satisfaction, we watched our newly protected seedlings enjoy the safety and security of the COPPER RINGS OF DOOM!! (patent pending)
In the meantime, dear reader, I kept my eye on the rest of our little plants including the peas, lettuces, tomatoes, kales and beetroots, which seemed to be altogether immune to the attentions of slugs.
It was on one of my daily rounds that I noticed a familiar sight appear in the bed that Brad had conditioned with the bokashi-bucket contents.
Low and behold, right throughout the bed, little pumpkin and tomato seedlings were beginning to raise their baby leaves to the sun. Our food-waste was sprouting!
I did a quick leaf-count and found that no less than 7 bubby pumpkins were shuffling onto this mortal coil. Within a few more days, there were 17!
I quickly shelved the idea of propagating more and set about planning for the transplantation of our new arrivals.
As anyone who has ever cut up a pumpkin knows, their seeds are well clustered together and so it is with naturally-sprouting pumpkin seedlings. I chose to override the whole 'survival of the fittest' thing and pulled them apart and plonked them all around our garden including, of course, in our carefully prepared pumpkin patch.
Thirteen new arrivals went into the patch altogether but within a day 5 had already met their doom.
As bad luck would have it, a dense mat of soggy, dead grass is actually an ideal accommodation for slugs (I know, who would have thought it, right?) and the scale of the attack on two of the seedlings was astonishing. The only evidence left of them were the bare patches I had dug out to plant them. They were completed consumed. Two others were damaged beyond recovery and the fifth was just a shred of leaf left in the soil.
All of the others (thankfully) were completely untouched.
Given the abundance of seedlings at my disposal (I left 5 in the original bed for safe keeping) I felt a little more philosophical about these losses but still decided further action was warranted.
Out came the copper tape again and all of our saved, round take-away containers were re-purposed into seedling-saving COPPER RINGS OF DOOM!! (patent pending)
Every surviving seedling sported its very own slug-repellant barrier and as hope sprang eternal, I had envisioned a low forest of pumpkin leaves covering our upper-back garden to the extent that it is not possible to tell where one plant ends and another begins.
Thankfully, that vision has come to fruition and our pumpkin patch is sprawling and sporting quiet a few baby pumpkins.
