WWIII Victory Garden: 5 Enemies to a Bountiful Harvest

Is your harvest at risk? Let's talk about how to protect from those destructive enemies. I'm Kylene and I'm Jonathan and today we're talking about our World War III Victory Gardens and some of the enemies that can destroy our harvests. Good design can make all of the difference especially for us this year because from July through October we are going to be solely dependent upon what we can produce in this garden and so the enemies they're out of here. So we're going to change some things in our design and in today's video we're going to talk about five of the areas that we think are really important to focus on. So let's take you for a little walk through our garden. So our enemy number one is weather. It's true. It's so true. It's April 12th today and as much as we would love a nice beautiful spring day and not that we're not thankful for the snow. We are thankful for the water. But we have snow on the ground and it's cold. So that is something that we really struggle with. So even some of my spring plants because we're down in the 20s last night right the low 20s. Even some of them aren't going to survive this and so I'm really worried about my fruit trees and there's nothing that I can do really about them on this scale. But I can do a whole lot with some of this because if I have high tunnels or low tunnels or some type of way to protect these plants you can usually make a few degrees difference. But right now there there's just not a lot we can do without a full-fledged greenhouse. Now one of the other things that we want to talk about next to temperature is wind. We had crazy wind here yesterday like we thought the house was going to blow away when the storm was blowing in and so protecting this garden is super important. These are goji berry bushes that I have planted here. There are some that a friend brought seeds home from Tibet and planted and gave me some starts and they were really tall but they make this really nice hedge that protects my garden from the wind which is really important. And right behind the camera is our house. So this is on the south side of our house. Perfect little sheltered area now to grow some of our garden. The next thing is water. So when we're looking at water we all have different circumstances right? We tend to be in drought a lot and so we are all into water conservation. Right other people might be in situations where they're just so wet that their gardens flood and they don't do well because of that so that it can go on either end. We want to introduce you to Athena. Lovable, adorable Athena who is highly destructive in our garden and quite frankly the two cannot exist in the same place. So what we've done is we have to fence off this entire garden and we'll do a whole video soon on how our friend is making this welded pipe fence for us but it's going to do a great job. We love Athena. She has lots of energy. Oh yes. But Athena and the garden don't go well together. In addition to Athena we have three beautiful cats who patrol our little homestead for mice and we love them but one of the things that they do is they dig in my garden beds and that's not okay and so we've done a couple different things for the cats. One when we have little seedlings in there sometimes we'll put plastic forks in there or knives or spoons. Something to discourage them and make it so that it's not as much fun for them to dig in the soil. Another thing that's a little bit meaner is I will sprinkle cayenne pepper all over my newly planted seeds because if they start scratching in that and try and go to the bathroom in it then they're going to be licking their paws and then it teaches them this is not a good place for them to be. So so far those have mostly worked. Yeah and some of the other critters that we've had a struggle with one is skunks. Occasionally we'll have a skunk around here and we even had one dig into our garden bed and burrow into it caused some serious damage and just just not the right place for them to be. I love creatures but sometimes they're not where they're supposed to be. And so we created a whole video on how we were relocating this skunk and didn't get sprayed. Since then a few of them haven't been able to be relocated. Not as cooperative. Not as cooperative and if you're not cooperative it could cost you. So skunks actually and they were going through and eating my little seedlings. It was crazy. It was crazy. So another one is the gophers. That has just been such a frustration and I think it is for many people. When we built our new garden beds we actually put hardware cloth on the bottom just to keep gophers from coming up through. So we do what we can. We try and eliminate them as best we can but they are always a challenge for us. They are. They are. And then another one is birds. Birds come in on our grapes. They'll come in on our berries. Just a whole variety of places that the birds are not welcome but they come anyway. So we use things like netting. We have some little shiny twirly things that keep flashing light that helps to keep them away. Sort of. But birds are definitely a challenge for us. Yeah and one of the things I've done is I've planted some sacrificial trees like mulberry trees, fruiting mulberry trees that are supposed to attract the birds and protect your other. I don't know how well it really works but we're trying. Yeah and that's what we can do. We have to try different things to figure out what will actually solve the problem. Voles are another one. We don't have quite as many problems with voles but in some areas they do. Again the cats are probably our best line of defense against them. We will sometimes see them lined up outside the door because they've been busy taking care of what few we do have. And then there's deer. Deer is something that we have some problem with but we have a tall fence. They haven't so far gotten in but one solution is that I think is great. Our friend Tom has what he calls a psychological fence and I never even thought about this but there's a video that you can check out that talks about this and how it might help you. In fact let's just play that video right now. Thank you Tom we really appreciate it. Hey Tom Bartels from growfoodwell.com and today I just wanted to talk briefly about deer fencing in your garden and specifically I'll be going over what I call the psychological deer fence to protect all the plants in your garden from those marauding herbivores that we see so often. Now as I teach the students in my program about aligning with natural systems to make their gardening efforts that much easier and have higher yields with less work the same goes for understanding your predators and understanding their psychological profile. And in the case of deer they are really good jumpers but their legs are not to be jeopardized so their priority is to protect their legs so they can get over high barriers but they also need to think about safety. In this case what we've done is we've created a psychological barrier in that the deer when they're looking at a hurdle like this will say yeah I can clear that seven foot fence but the next thing they do is look at their landing zone and when they see this white line right inside their main landing zone that kind of gives them pause and they're not going to jeopardize their legs by jumping over something like this and getting entangled in some strange thing that they see at four in the morning there's this white line and they can just kind of see it in the darkness. So that's the key to the psychological deer fence is having this interior perimeter with posts about every 20 feet or so and then a simple say a quarter inch synthetic clothesline. I have tried cotton before but it degrades after about a year or two so I like to put the synthetic out here because it lasts a lot longer. So what we're doing is we put a post on the corner inside the main fence line at about three feet so it'll be basically the same shape as your garden but three feet inside that perimeter. That's all you need and that's the landing zone that they see as off limits because if they have to jump this high they're going to hurt themselves coming in on that rope. Now as far as the fence itself you can do with just a four foot regular garden fence with the wire mesh and then what you need are some extra long fence posts. So these are eight foot posts they're buried about a foot under grade and I've just packed that in with boulders to make them good and sturdy and then we've got about a seven foot post above grade there. Then you simply put some really good steel wire that's going to last a long time. I think this is stainless braided wire so it's going to last for years and not rust and that goes right in the middle of the span and one on the top of the span. That way they can't jump here through the middle and you break up this zone here so it makes it too uncomfortable to jump through these small spaces and then they see this barrier as what they need to target to get over the fence. Then they see this interior and they just give up. We have a lot of deer out here in this area and they just end up circling the garden fence and they can't figure out how to get in. Now this method works at just about any scale. Behind me here is about a thousand square feet of garden beds and I know it doesn't look like much at the moment because it's off season but this is what it looks like in the summertime. So the deer always want to get inside and eat those vegetables so it's 100% effective. We've had it up for 10 years and it's a really good answer for keeping deer out of your garden. Now it does require that you have a fenceable shape to your garden. For those of you that are in gardens that don't have perimeters on them or fences that's in a front yard or something then that's a tough situation. You just have to assume you're going to be feeding some of your garden to the wildlife that comes through. Now as far as the human element here, instead of having to go underneath this fence every time I come into the garden, I have a clasp here just inside the garden gate where I can unhook this line and then I simply put that aside while I'm working on the garden and then I just remember that when I'm finished in the garden I clip that back into the fence post and that completes the perimeter and protects the garden pretty much 24-7 for as long as I like. So I hope that helps in your gardening efforts. Now get out there and grow some food. So number three is bugs. Okay they're such a nightmare. Let me tell you sometimes I just want to go crazy especially with things like squash bugs. I'm like I try not to have evil feelings towards anything but squash bugs man they push it they push it. They make me really upset. Okay so the first thing I want to talk about is we do everything organically and as naturally as we possibly can and recently we came across some fantastic books. This is Jadam Organic and this is Pest and Disease Control. The reason why I love this you probably can't see this but here if you flip through the pages for them. Okay so they have pictures lots of pictures of the bugs and then he tells you exactly what you can do to take care of them and it's all organic and most of it is very very inexpensive. This gardening method is one that was developed in Korea and they're having fabulous success with it and so this is what I'm going to try with some of my pest control. We also you know we have problems with aphid sometimes and there's a solution that can be made here that ends up costing once you make it a dollar a quart which is where can you go to get anything that cheap anyway it's about a dollar a quart and it will take care of the aphid problem for you and so and one of the other things he teaches you is how to use the plants that you already have to make concoctions that you can spray that will take care of the bugs. So that's really cool. Now I really like to design my garden so that I have the least amount of problem with bugs that I can. So you look at these flowers and they might be innocent enough looking to you but in reality what they do is they attract beneficial insects like predatory wasps and different insects as well as the pollinators but that create a balance in my garden so that nothing can get out of control because the bugs aren't necessarily bad. There's only some of them that cause some really serious problems. So those are some of the things that I do and these are some of my really cute little plants that are trying really hard to grow that I'm really glad I didn't plant before this snow came because they wouldn't have made it. Even though they're spring crops right this is celery pink celery it wouldn't have made it outside so it's a good thing I didn't plant it yet. One of the other defenses that we have are our chickens and we can let our chickens out and they do a great job taking care of the grasshoppers but they also destroy everything else in their path. So for our garden over here that's one of the reasons we've got the fence for Athena but we're also putting that mesh wire over it so that the chickens can't get in there either and we can control when they have access and when they don't. Yeah so again it's just a matter of identifying like like all the rest of this identify your risks and take actions to help mitigate those. Yep. Enemy number four is people. Now that sounds kind of mean that people are enemies but they're not really but people who don't understand what they're doing sometimes cause problems for example compaction in our garden. People would walk on it that compacts the soil it makes it so it doesn't breathe well it doesn't take in water well so compaction is really an issue and of course kids and grandkids can do the same. We solve that largely by building these garden beds so that they're not right down where people are walking and hopefully they're not people are not up in our garden beds walking but that has helped a lot. Yeah it's more obvious. It's just so much yeah the soil is so much better and things we have fewer problems. Of course there is always the risk that people will come in and steal what you've got and you know we're always willing to share we we love to share we all actually over plant we plant more than we probably use because we want to make available to other people. So again we're always willing to help but we don't like people to come in and just steal so we have a fence and other things to help control that. And one of the things okay remember how I talked about having a trap tree like the mulberry tree that attracts the birds we do the same kind of thing with the grandkids so we specifically plant berries so that the berries are in place where the kids can go snack on all these beautiful wonderful berries and maybe avoid some of the other places in the garden. Enemy number five is nutrient depletion in our soils and that is not something that we sometimes think a lot about but you think about it it does need nutrients to keep going and when we deplete those nutrients out the plants just simply can't do as well but you can tell us about some things that we can do that help with that. Because I love all this stuff okay so first of all I want to say give a shout out to Tom Bartell's class he teaches biointensive gardening and pretty much what it is is you're trying to close the loop on your property no matter what size you have you want to make sure that you're not taking things off your property you're composting them and making some great resources because by putting that organic matter back into your soil you let your soil do what it does naturally and it's fabulous he teaches all about composting and worm composting and has some significant results we bought his class two or three years ago three years ago and I love it because it's all organic and it's all how to create the most abundance with the least amount of financial and physical input. And right now you're hearing about all these fertilizer shortages and you know to a large extent we don't have to worry about that because we're we're keeping everything inside we're composting we're doing all these things that keep feeding the soil and so in large measure you can avoid a lot of that problem of not being able to get fertilizers by simply the way you garden. Yeah biointensive this organic gardening method and okay organic you can be organic but not actually build the soil so so we really really want to focus on building our soil and increasing the life in it and all that okay this is another book if you don't have a good garden book this is one I would highly recommend I was telling John the other day if I just had a day all to myself I would just curl up in my little lazy boy in the room and I would have my pen and I would just read this entire thing just for pleasure because I'm that sick but um so Datum Organic Farming they're teaching you how to farm so that it's sustainably so how to grow your garden sustainably it can use be used on any um size but one of the really cool things that they did is so your soil has to have life in it right and he talks about how to just go up to your to some local mountain and you take some of the soil and you put it in some water and through a method you watch as it bubbles and stuff and just at the right point you take that and then you inoculate your soil with it and what you've done is you've helped put all this good life into your soil so that it can multiply and be what feeds your plants so it's all a big complex process right and we're going to do more videos on that just because I'm walking my way through this but he's got research studies in here and it's just how to make it very very inexpensively so I'll leave links to both of these books in the description of the video and seriously I think they're a fantastic resource and that's a place that I would be willing to invest my money so this is really cool and we are getting all of this stuff together so that we can eat from July through October this year you'll be watching us and we'll either be enjoying the bounty or if we're slackers it's a new weight loss program it'll be my weight loss program so this is our production garden if you remember from last year this was our exciting new addition to really help to boost our food supply so you should check out that video if you want to know how to to build some really cool garden beds using hookah culture check out the video I'll put a link so that you can get to it but so these are the five major enemies that we have to our victory garden and we're going to do everything we can this year to conquer to slay those enemies so that we can have plenty of food for our family and now for the question of the day what are you doing to defeat the enemies for your world war iii victory garden comment below and thanks for being part of the solution