17. The Plot Thickens...

A previous post talked about starting my garden bed, or plot (of land). The problems at first were as follows:

1. The soil isn't so good, so needed quite a bit of chicken poop and compost mixed in to get the seeds to sprout. That seemed to work - the seeds sprouted.
2. Pest problems. Snails, ants, larvae and flying insects love to munch on the first unfolding leaves. The first two leaves that appear are the food for the plant until the roots take hold and photosynthesis starts. If they are eaten, the plant dies.

Here is a photo of early plants displaying their two "food" leaves:

Sprouting plants start with two "food" leaves

In my garden bed, the food leaves are eaten almost as soon as they emerge from the soil:

Yellow soy "food" leaves unfolding...

Yellow soy partially eaten overnight...

Yellow soy leaves completely eaten in two days

So, what to do about it?

I notice a lot of snails in the plot of land, and one way to protect your garden from snails is with beer... or so I have heard. Personally speaking, I think beer is better to drink than to put in your garden. But, I am here to experiment, so I poured out a cup of beer and put it into the garden bed overnight, since night is when the snails get active.

 By morning, the cup of beer was down to about a quarter cup, but no snails around. 

Beer almost all gone!

Hmmm... it seems like something else drank the beer. Just as I thought: beer is better for drinking than putting in your garden!

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Recently some fellow interns visited a farm in Chiang Rai started by a Thai Buddhist monk. They came back with some ideas about how to protect plants by changing the smell of your plants with some other plant smell. First you gather leaves of other plants, maybe weeds, since weeds seem not to be eaten so much, then grind them up with water in a blender and use this as a spray. Here is the process:

Leafy weed used to make the spray

Putting the leaf water into a spray bottle

Spray was clogged so poured a bit of leaf water on sprouts

This technique seemed to work with some plants, but others were eaten as usual. 

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Someone suggested using a cut-up plastic water bottle as protection from the pests in the early stages of growth. So I tried it out. I cut up 500 ml plastic water bottles and put them around the sprouts. 

Cut-up plastic bottles around plants

Early morning condensation on plastic

The next morning the "food" leaves were ok, so it seems to work.

Leaves are ok!

Leaves really grew overnight!

A possible solution at the early stages to protect your sprouts is use cut-up plastic bottles. While plastic bottles might work, if you have a lot of plants it isn't practical, since it is quite labor intensive. I put the cut-up plastic on overnight, since in the daytime it gets really hot and the plastic might heat the plants too much, so you have to put on and take off the plastic every day.

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I'll report back on other methods of pest control, notably the use of EM the other interns learned from their visit to the farm in Chiang Rai. They have a recipe for making young banana plants into EM and then adding rice whiskey to the mix as a way to control pests.