Year One - 2010

The Earwig Salad

We moved here to Northern New Brunswick from Fredericton in December of 2009. After living in apartments ever since graduating college, we were thrilled to find a cheap, though tiny and unattractive, option in purchasing an old mobile home. I don't recall always wanting to have a garden, but when the spring of 2010 rolled around I decided to buy a few packets of seeds and start them in a sunny window in the kitchen. I ordered some seeds from Vesey's: buttercup squash, cantaloupe, spinach, lettuce, beets, fava beans, snow peas, zucchini, patty pan squash and pak choi. I also purchased a few pepper and cucumber plants from a local nursery, as well as receiving some tomato and ground cherry seedlings from friends.  

When June arrived those same friends came over with their tiller and helped me pull up sod and till a 10' square plot in our partly shady backyard. I staked out every square foot, mixed in a dozen bags of manure and some basic 10-10-10 fertilizer, then planted and watered everything in.

The squash and melon seedlings shown here did well for about a week, then I went out one morning to find them all toppled over, snipped off just below ground level. Cutworms were the culprit and my learning experience had begun. After researching the solution, I quickly added a thin stick against the stalk of my tomato and pepper plants. This was successful and there were no more cutworm casualties.

Shortly after that I noticed my Bok Choi nibbled right down to nothing, and then everything was nibbled with the exception of the tomatoes and lettuce. A few trips to the garden in the dark with a flashlight confirmed it was earwigs. Earwigs are usually good for your garden as they are scavengers, eat slugs eggs and refuse and so on. Unfortunately we had a lot of them that summer and there wasn't enough for them to eat, apparently. We fought them for awhile but there were just too many of them in the end. 

We harvested a lot of lettuce that year, but that was about it. The rest fed the earwigs, but it was a good start and I learned some good lessons, mostly about pests. A few highlights from the beginning of the season (I lost interest once everything was annihilated).

Organic Beer Trap (for earwigs or slugs)

Tomato starts from friends

I was so happy to see that this little guy even had a tomato on it already.

This space was pretty much our entire backyard. You can see our neighbor's garden behind on the right and their little greenhouse on the left.

Cucumber starts and lettuces

Peppers and tomatoes

Fava beans

Beets

As you can see, everything started out quite well, but Mother Nature wasn't cooperating. Despite very little to show for my efforts, I was definitely bit by the gardening bug by just getting things to start growing. I wasn't too discouraged because I knew a lot of it was the spot. Little sun, not a lot of room.