In our backyard mini-farm, we’ve experience two seedling tragedies in the last couple months. The first I’ll call “The Lettuce Incident.” In one of my first seedling flats, just as I was getting ready to scatter some lettuce seeds, the packet got picked up by the wind and flew end over end. I stared in shock as I saw dozens of tiny lettuce seeds strewn about the concrete. As I scrambled to retrieve as many of the seeds as possible (mind you, lettuce seeds are tiny!), I couldn’t help but look at each seed and think, “This could one day be a full head of lettuce! I can’t leave any behind!” Needless to say, I couldn’t save them all. The ones I could I put out in the flat, and watched them sprout over the next two weeks. Little did I know what awaited.
The Seedling Defense Grid 1.0
One day, I went down to check on the seedlings and was accosted by a horrible scene – lettuce sprout bodies everywhere. I hadn’t protected them from the birds. Out of about fifty sprouts, less than ten remained. It was a sad moment in Kuo seedling history. Lesson learned — build a cage to fight the birds! So off I went, sawing wood, pounding nails in to hold the chicken wire, and building both a platform and a bird defense grid. (Note the creative re-use of baby gates for the top cover.) Never again would the birds ruthlessly peck out our helpless seedlings.
Seedling Tragedy Two happened over the course of the last three days. You see, we had a set of flourishing kale seedlings that had already graduated from the three inch flat to the six inch flat and were just a week or two away from being transplanted into the main bed with their four other brethren. Not only that, but we had about forty turnip seedlings, five brussel sprout seedlings, and 8 nappa cabbage seedlings. Here was one of the kale seedlings happily in his flat inside the seedling defense grid:
Lacinato Kale Seedling, aged 3 weeks
The slugs got to ‘em. They broke through the Sluggo barrier. They slimed their way up the elevated platform. And over the course of two evenings, they chomped their way through eleven kale seedlings, all the turnips, all the brussel sprouts, and all the napa cabbage. And smooshed some of the chamomile to boot. It was a sad, sad morning. I’ll spare you the gruesome images of the seedling remains. Seedlings, I hardly knew ya.
We’re now deploying even more defense mechanisms. Stage one was the crushed eggshell barrier. Stage two will be some combination of beer, coffee grounds, and other home remedies (all organic, of course). Stage three will probably be some copper rings and/or sandpaper. But you know, in a way, I suppose I had to have the seedling tragedies actually happen in order to get moving on it. Sometimes, I guess you have to learn stuff the hard way.
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