When Squirrels Attack

3/8 of my tomato plants were severed Wednesday and/or Thursday night, and I suspected cutworm, one of the few natural enemies of tomatoes. Although that would seem unlikely, since the planters are self-contained and on the roof.

My roof-farming neighbor (with the pools) suggested squirrels might be the culprits.

Squirrels? What would squirrels care for tomatoes? Or corn, for that matter?

Yes, corn as well. I went up to the roof today to find half my little cornstalks had been nibbled away. Grrrr!

N00b. I should have realized that city-slicking squirrels don't really care if it's food or not. They just want to maraud.

So now I have to replant a few things. I'm pretty sure the tomato plants are shot, but fortunately I have a few seedlings left, and the rest I'll start from scratch and hope for a late harvest. The corn, I'll give a couple days to see if it recovers.

And more importantly, I have to build a squirrel baffle. Fast. Which is really not something I'd planned for.

If you look closely, you can see the tomato stem to the left of the upper leaf.

This is the same cornstalk that looked so joyous on Thursday. 

If You Plant It....

... It Will Grow

The largest corn sprout, a Silver Queen.

They're all becoming more visible. 

First Big Setback

I had a few days where I didn't access the backyard planter because we had guests downstairs. It rained in that time, which was good for the roof, but bad for my lettuces. Under the wet plastic sheeting, they, and the rosemary, all began to rot. The cucumber seems okay.

Today I pulled off all the sheeting and planted all my seedling herbs.  I'll give the damaged plants a few days to see if they recover; if not, I'll re-plant.

8 for 8

Hard to see in this pic, but I confirmed all 8 seeds now have sprouts showing above the soil. 

First Sign of Corn!

Checked on the corn planter tonight, and the very first sprout is shooting up! Hooray!

Gimme some sun!

Backyard Planting and Other Tomatoes

Today I planted the other half of the tomato plants, and also got a bunch of the other seedlings into the backyard garden. 

Two Beylik plants, two Thessaloniki plants.

The backyard planter divvied up.....

.... and planted with cucumber, four lettuces, and some rosemary.

After planting, I covered the planter with plastic sheeting to hold in moisture and protect the seedlings from the harshest sun for their first few days outdoors. 

H inspects the plastic. 

Magic!

If, sometimes, you check this blog and nothing new is up, and then all of a sudden there are a bunch of posts showing events from last week, it's because of the current constraints on my time. Occasionally I have to batch-post and then backdate to when things actually happened. Fortunately it's easy to keep track thanks to the timestamps on photos. 

So even though this post says May 8, I actually wrote it on the 16th. You can expect to see many posts from the past week in the next 24 hours. 

Basically, this is a picture I took late in the evening on the 8th of all the plants I started from seed. On the far right you have tomatoes (some of which had already been planted). Then moving left, cucumbers, a bunch of different lettuces, some scallions, and then a bunch of herbs: parsley, sage, thyme, oregano, basil, chives. Yes, there's rosemary as well, but I had to buy a plant for that. 

Everything but the tomatoes will be planted in the backyard planter. 

Parsley, sage, and a bunch of other things.