 Hi, I'm Charlie Nardosi and welcome to the Hands July Gardening Workshop and talk. We've been doing these every month Since February and this is the July version of it And this one's all about diseases and animal pests that you might be having in your in your garden So thank you for coming. I appreciate it and thank you for watching and supporting hands and for those who don't know about hands It is a local non-profit in the Burlington area, but does work statewide actually And the mission of hands is to get food to adults 50 years and older They provide hands-in-the-dirt gardening workshops the ones that you're participating in right now a meal and gift bag delivery on Christmas Day nutrition education workshops called hands in the kitchen and Support buddies which is a program in partnership with the Heiningberg Senior Center to get healthy groceries and meals to seniors So we'd love to give a special thanks to AARP Vermont CCTV town meeting TV Gardener supply Hanna-Fords and red wagging plants for all their support in these hands-in-the-dirt workshops and all the support they give to hands in general So without further ado, I think I'm just going to dive right into my presentation here all about Excuse me all about diseases and Animal pests that you might be finding in your garden So diseases and animals are organic pest control if you did come or did watch last month's June hands-in-the-dirt Workshop, you know that I talked all about insect pests and if you missed that one You can go to the hands website and they are all archived there all the way back to February So you can you can just binge watch them if you want But last month I was talking about insects this month I want to talk a little bit about diseases and mostly about animals because I know that those are other Problems that most gardeners have in their garden and so we'll kind of launch into that and give you a little more information About that as I go along first of all just like I was talking with the insect control Workshop that I did back in June healthy plants and a healthy garden are essential for the health and the well-being of your plants Healthy soil I probably should have thrown in there too Because the healthier plant the healthier the garden the healthier the soil the less disease problems you're going to get now It's not true. Of course with animals because they'll eat anything especially healthy plants But with diseases it does make a big difference so start there make sure you have healthy soil compost amended soil That's well-drained after all this rain. We've been getting recently It's nice to have soil that's really well-drained so you don't have flooding and you don't have all that rot Happing in the soil and I'll talk more about that in a minute So you'll have healthy plants that will be less susceptible to a lot of these diseases and Diversity is the key. I always love showing this image. This is a former garden Nursery out in Craftsbury friends of ours They used to own this and it was a perennial flower nursery, but they love to cook as well So this is their kitchen garden. Believe it or not. This is their vegetable garden You look at it and you see a lot of rebeccia and flocks and hollyhocks and elissum But if you look closer, you'll see beans and cauliflower and onions and other things the key with this Image is that there's a lot of diversity in this garden and the diversity Helps suppress a lot of those problems you're going to have with diseases Also, what they did is they would grow small little sections of similar vegetables all around their garden So maybe they have a row of beans in the front a row of beans in the back a row of beans behind the flagpole You know in that way if a woodchuck or a rabbit came in they might find one row But not the other row so that idea of being Diversifying what you're growing where you're growing it and growing a wide variety of flowers and herbs and vegetables is really important Also, you need to identify the problem. So you see this poor little specimen here This one was is a you believe it or not you shrub and you might guess already what already attacked this This was eaten by a deer this happened to be, you know, you you always think that oh We're not good gardeners because we have animal problems. We don't take care of them This was at the proven winners trial gardens down in Loudoun, New Hampshire You know, that's pretty big big brand of plants and this was at their trial gardens And they in fact had deer issues and this was one of those shrubs I saw kind of off in the corner somewhere. They didn't want to really highlight it that had gotten munched down by deer So identifying the problem first of all is really an important first step before you go Deciding what to do about it and also making sure it's a pest problem You see something like this on the tomatoes and you think oh look at all that disease that's there But in fact this in fact there is some disease there But the thing that caused that disease to get started was hail This was a weather related pest problem and again like they're saying with all the rain We've had recently in flooding and things of that nature. You might think that they're insect or disease problems that are Causing a lot of this but the underlying problem may be more related to a weather event So keep that in mind when you take a look at a plant. It's not doing so well and it's struggling And then of course there are cultural controls cultural things meaning garden practices that we can do That will make sure the plants stay healthy and minimize any kind of disease attacks Make sure you have a nice consistent water supply again That's not been a issue in the last few weeks or so but earlier in the summer, you know Back in May and June we were complaining that it was dry and there was drought So having a consistent water supply using mulches Using water watering wands watering systems like drip and soaker all those are important to keep your plants healthy Clean sanitation, you know pruning off parts of plants that are not looking so good This was actually a disease an insect problem. That's a leaf miners on beets But it's the same with diseases, too If you have leaves that are wilting leaves that don't look so good leaves have spots on them We'll talk a lot about those in a minute Just cleaning them up can really go a long way to reducing the amount of damage you have on that plant and ensuring that you get a good harvest from that plant Crop rotation is a good thing for insects and disease problems you have in the garden crop rotation Basically means if you have a big enough garden like in this case, maybe you have a dozen beds or even six beds You can rotate around the family of crops that are planted in those beds never planting the same family for three to four years So for example one bed might be loaded up with tomatoes and egg plants and peppers all that family You will not plant that family in that bed again for another three years. Maybe the next year you plant beans in there Maybe the year after that you're planting squashes in there. Maybe the year after that is lettuces So you're using different families of plants So you don't have those disease organisms building up in the soil causing problems as you're planting those new seedlings in the spring and Then finally resistant varieties and this is really important with the disease world and really important in the vegetable and flower world You'll select varieties of bee balm and flocks and basil and a number of other types of plants that are resistant to a lot of those major Diseases that are out there for example with the bee balm There are varieties we grow like Jacobs Klein and Marshall's Delight that do not get that powdery mildew that I'll talk about in a little bit So having those kinds of plants in your garden is going to lessen the amount of work you have to do to keep them healthy You can use sprays, but there are some unique sprays that are out there This is a spray that's used as a barrier against not only diseases, but insects. It's kaolin clay Kaolin clay. It's kind of like a potter's clay. It's very dusty very light very soft You mix it up into a little hand sprayer You know pump sprayer and you just spray it on plants now. I'm spraying it in this case on my grape leaves For diseases like black rot that we'll get after the grapes and this will help with that But it also helps with things like Japanese beetles. They don't like the dustiness of the leaf So that's a very non toxic low toxic way to protect your plants from insects and these diseases using those sprays and of course when you're using the sprays You want to be careful about which ones you're going to be using here's some new biological sprays that are on the market The one on the left is called revitalized. It's actually a bacteria. Actually both of these are bacteria There are bacteria that will fight the funguses that are out there and bacteria other bacterias, too so the one on the Left ear is called revitalized that works at a whole host of different things from powdery mildews to blights to All kinds of different leaf spot diseases and thrachnose and botrytis and all kinds of stuff And the same is true of serenade serenade is one I've recommended that's a Baxillus subtilis the bacteria that fights a lot of these fungal diseases as well Both of these and many of these biological sprays as well as some of the organic ones like sulfur and copper are used as preventive sprays these are not sprays that are going to be curative meaning that you spray them on your plants You try to spray them early before these diseases really get a foothold And you try to make sure you spray the healthy foliage as well as a foliage It doesn't look so healthy because you want to prevent it from spreading there. That's the key in how these work the best So let's talk about some common garden disease problems that you're gonna find out there back This is one that haven't shown up yet It's gonna show up very soon after all the rain we've had and this is called tar spot You find this on maple leaves, especially those big maple leaves like a Norway maple It's a black fungus that kind of creates these spots all over it People always contact me on my radio show asking me questions about this and what should I do? And I heard the trees and they're gonna kill the tree in fact It's not something to worry too much about it is something that happens usually mid to late summer It will cause those leaves to turn yellow some of them Maybe even drop but it will not affect the health of the tree in general because it's a kind of disease It comes later in the season and it's something that this is what I call ubiquitous in the environment You're just gonna get it depending on the weather conditions So you don't have to worry too much about that But there are some other things out there that you can do something about and again you have to properly identify them So this is blossom and rod on tomatoes now blossom and rod is when the bottom end that you're looking at the bottom And that tomato should have held it up the bottom end of that tomato just kind of rots out and Causes the inside of course the rot to this is caused not by a disease But by fluctuation in the soil moisture So this is an important one to keep an eye on because we have just had exactly that We went from very dry conditions to a lot of rain a lot of wet conditions And if it dries out and it gets dry again, which you may very well do we're still only mid-summer here This kind of fluctuation in that soil moisture is not going to be good for your tomatoes Especially as they start maturing especially if you have those Roma type tomatoes the long thin ones They will be very susceptible to blossom and drop Once they start rotting like this There's nothing you can do the best thing to do is actually pick them and just compost them And hopefully the new crop that's coming along after this will not have it So it's important to keep the soil moisture even meaning that when it does dry out start drying out You can put some mulch down or something that's going to keep it there or just just make sure you keep it Well watered by keeping it even you're not going to get this calcium Deficiency that forms in the skin of the tomato which causes it to start breaking down and rotting So eventually it does rot and rot is a disease, but it starts with this moisture problem Which brings us to other problems on tomatoes blight problems. There are a number of different foliar diseases of tomatoes There's late blight which looks kind of like this which will spread very quickly on your tomatoes I have not heard of any late blight in Vermont yet But that doesn't mean it's not going to show up in a couple of a bunch of years ago now It was a big problem because seedlings that came into the state from a big grower in Georgia We're already infected with late blight once it's in fact in an area. It'll spread really quickly So you have to make sure you positively identify the kinds of leaf diseases you have late blight Like I said, it's not that common here, but you want to keep an eye out for it and some unusual things The really the way you can tell you have it is it'll move fast. It'll kill your plant really quickly Mostly though, we're looking at this kind of disease. This is early blight There are other versions of it called septoria leaf spot, which I believe this one is a bacterial spec There's a number of different foliar diseases. They all kind of have the same MO Meaning that they start on the bottom leaves They start with little spots on the leaves the leaves then turn yellow and die and then that process continues up the plant So the key with this like I was saying with a lot of the problems with diseases the key is being preventive Being proactive early on versus trying to be curative after you have the disease So the key with these is to jump on it now even if you don't see this This is what your plants should start looking like by this time of year So what I did here with our tomatoes is I stripped all the bottom foliage all those side branches that are going out I stripped it all up about a foot or two off the ground and You can see the tomatoes are even a little exposed down there, too And I did this on foliage like that in the left-hand corner there. You see that dark green leaf That's what most of my plants look like I did not have much of this blight yet I'm in the plants a little bit here and there but not much But I know through experience that it's going to come and it's going to start and it's going to be a big issue so What I did is being proactive. I stripped all those leaves off put down some hay mulch What this will do is it will prevent that splashing up onto the bottom leaves from the soil Which is where those disease spores are going to originate and once they start splashing on the bottom leaves It doesn't matter what happens after that because then they'll just move all the way up This way I'm starting with no disease on these plants at all and I have the hay mulch as an insulating layer So this hopefully will slow down the onset. Will it stop it completely? Probably not especially after all the rainy weather we've had but it's going to slow it down This is probably your best bet. You can certainly spray the serenade that I showed you a little bit earlier some people use Baking soda-based spray strays and those kind of things But this is probably the best bet and the simplest way to slow down that disease If you start seeing this disease like in August and September Don't worry about it because by then the tomatoes are slowing down anyway But in July you really want to make sure your tomatoes are staying healthy growing really robustly Setting a lot of fruit because that's going to be setting you up for a big harvest in a month or so Now another kind of disease you're gonna see that exhibits the symptoms on the leaves But actually the causes and the roots is this wilting that happens of stems This is a actually one of ice squash one away winter squash that shows that one of the stems is wilting out Now if you look at the soil there looks pretty moist pretty rich and it is it's a no after a rain It's been raining a lot There shouldn't be any kind of drought stress happening and and the other sign you can always look at is our other Leaves on other vines nearby and on the same plant wilting to if they're not then you know that there's something specific to this Now you could look closely at the base of it and see if you see this going on This is the sign of the course of the squash vine borer, which I talked about last month So if you have that that's probably the cause of it But if you don't have that the cause is probably in the soil itself and that will be some kind of wilt There are many different types of wilt diseases fusarium wilt, verticillium wilt If I talk for a wilt there's lots of different kinds It'll be in the soil that'll attack the roots Breaking them down so that they don't get enough moisture up into the stem and that's why they wilt like this Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do about these soil-borne diseases once you see this happening You can just see if the plant naturally recovers sometimes because the weather changes maybe it dries out or something It'll naturally recover If there's only one stem and you have many other stems you could try to just prune it off that might help and hopefully it won't spread To the other stems you have but again, it's in the soil. So it's not going to spread by the top Being spread by insects or anything of that nature So keeping an eye out for wilting stems is a good thing And then there are more kinds of leaf problems You can see like these kinds of problems and the biggest one that you're going to see a lot of very soon If not already is powdery mildew This will attack a wide range of plants from squashes to melons cucumbers And it'll attack things like lilacs. You start seeing little white patches on there Birch trees flocks bee balm all kinds of different plants What will happen is that it likes these kind of dewy mornings that will start getting as we move into August Here when it's cool in the morning and there's dew on the leaves that moisture on the leaves is a perfect setup for this Fungus to start taking hold and it takes hold by spreading this white kind of cottony growth all over it So eventually it could look like this So if this is again is happening say August September I wouldn't worry about it again The plants are kind of wrapping it up for the season slowing down their production on plants like lilacs and birches It's okay. You know, even if these leaves turn yellow from this powdery mildew and start dropping The lilacs are a pretty strong plant and they can come back. It's a very weather-dependent disease Fungal disease if we have a lot of hot dry conditions, you don't see much of it If you start getting some wetter conditions, you see more of it But in any case as we move into the fall when we know that we're gonna get those cooler dewy mornings That's when you start seeing it take off. Now if you really want to start controlling it You know, this is another way that it exists itself by the way is by curling of the leaves So these are tomato leaves that are curled and that disease is the powdery mildew disease You see on them in this case what you could do is just prune off those leaves You know, I was talking about pruning off some of those bottom leaves or side branch leaves If you have just a branch or two like this just prune them off and it's going to remove them There's not a lot you can do as far as preventive in the environment, you know, people always ask well What if I clean up the weeds and all the organic matter and this and that yes Certainly garden sanitation is going to help on one level, but it's one of those kinds of diseases It's just kind of out there So if you want to try to get more proactive If especially where I was talking about the the bee bombs and the flocks before you can grow resistant varieties To this powdery mildew so for bee bomb Jacobs Klein and Marshall so light is nice for flocks David is a nice one. There's there's many different varieties when you're looking at the tags look for mildew resistant varieties That will make it much better because on a lilac We don't really care so much what it looks like because it's not really flowering in the end of summer But a flocks or bee bomb that's going to make a big difference if the leaves all turn white and yellow and start looking ugly It's going to really kind of spoil a little bit your flower garden. So look for resistant varieties and that's going to help Make this not so much a disease a disease issue that you're going to have And of course if you do need to spray again a preventive spray as those Serenade sprays the baking soda spray you can make a baking soda spray by the way with one tablespoon of baking soda Just a little dash of liquid soap in a quart of water mix it up and spray it on those leaves And you'll have to spray it again on the on the healthy leaves and spray it pretty frequently after a rain And that will slow down the onset There's another disease that's probably a bigger problem and that's called downy mildew And it's very specific to the kind of plant and one of the plants that gets it is basil So if you have basil plants and you start seeing that puckering and you flip the leaves over like this and you start seeing it It's almost like it's a white growth underneath that that could very well be downy mildew This became a big issue in greenhouse basil growers A few years back where they were starting to get a lot of downy mildew on their plants and killing the plants And of course it's infecting the leaves, which is what we eat with downy mildew Fortunately with downy mildew there are some resistant varieties out there for basil Prospero is one and Amazon is a new one Ward winning one that just came out So if this is something you suspect is going on in your garden You might want to look for some of these resistant downy mildew resistant varieties of basil for the future The same has been true of impatience. You know, this is a poor looking impatient. Oh my god And this is another strain of downy mildew that attacked in patients plants And it would cause the leaves to drop and all you have is these stems Just like you're seeing here and not a very beautiful plant Because the breeders have been jumping right on this. They've gotten a lot more of disease resistant varieties of this The bounce series is one of those series where you've got them and the sun patient series is another Series where you've got that resistance to this downy mildew. In fact in New Guinean patients You know, the taller ones that tolerate sun pretty well too They are resistant to this too. So again, if you've seen this happening in your yard You might want to go out and go to a garden center and look for some of these disease resistant varieties That's going to be the best case scenario for both the powdery mildew and a downy mildew as far as taking care of your plants and having a healthy garden But try to splite. No, this is a one that you're going to see on peonies, for example But it attacks on a wide range of plants and geraniums and peonies and all kinds of different plants have different flowers It'll exhibit itself with these kind of burgundy or purple coloring patches on the leaves This is a peony in our yard. Actually, it's starting to look a little bit like this Where it's a bigger problem though is in the spring if you see buds forming on the peonies and they kind of Shrivel up before they open that is botrytus blight and botrytus blight likes that really wet Conditions. So this past spring was very dry was not an issue at all on any of our peonies We had a magnificent peony crop. We had peonies out our ears. We had one bush I think it must have had 40 different peony flowers on it. It was so beautiful But some other years if we get a lot of rainy conditions early in the season You'll get botrytus blight and you see these buds will drop So again, a very weather dependent kind of disease And the key with this is to do good sanitation cleaning up really well And then again, those sprays I was mentioning as a preventive spray before you see it that might help A black spot or any of the rust diseases on roses You'll see this a lot on rose plants, especially on some of the hybrid roses Some of the old-fashioned roses too will get them. You could see those spots on the leaves there black spots It's a fungal disease It turns the leaf eventually yellow like one of the leaves is doing there and eventually drops Rust disease has more orange kind of spots to them Again, the key with this Finals resistant varieties a lot of those landscape roses that are out there the knockout series And some of the carpet series roses. They are resistant to this I I grow a number of them rarely Do I see a lot of disease on them? Even if we get a lot of rainy weather which that disease really likes So that's a good place to start and again those sprays that I mentioned earlier is a good place hollyhock rust for people growing hollyhocks Like this one here. You see those bottom leaves are starting to yellow if you flip those leaves over you see all these orange little spots on them That's rust disease. It's called rust because it looks like rust And that will spread from the bottom leaves right up the plant similar to the blight on tomatoes The key with this is don't let the disease spores splash up onto the plant So don't plant your hollyhocks right up near the drip line of your house or a garage or a barn Push them out a little bit so they don't have that splashing coming from the dripping off the roof And mulcher on the base of them. That's going to help. There are some resistant varieties Las Vegas I think is one is a number of other ones out there again Just look for those names and look for the rust resistance when you're buying the plants And viruses this is one that that's not as common, but you you will see it This is a tobacco tobacco mosaic virus on pepper plants But you will see this Characteristics a very classic characteristics of viruses kind of a puckering of the leaves Off-coloring stippling kind of look in the leaves and dwarfing So if you see one of your plants looking odd if you see a tomato plant, it looks just Strange and it's unusual with tomatoes because a lot of them are disease resistant now But some of the old heirlooms are not so you might see this You might want to do a little Culling you might say I know it might be hard But if you have six tomatoes and one of them looks like this I would say it's worth pulling that one out and leaving the other five to survive and produce because it will spread It spreads by insects feeding on the leaves and then feeding on other leaves and spreading the disease And once your plant has a virus is really no cure for it The only thing you can do is just pull that plant out and sacrifice it But that is one just to be aware of that you might see in your garden So those are some diseases common diseases you'll have out there Let me jump into animals here and see what we could do with that. So what about animals? Well You could see that what we've done is created a nice habitat for animals. Look at that. Isn't that romantic? Two squirrels probably a male and female who knows two females two females can't tell But there they are partners feeding on the tube feeders together side by side We created a lot of good habitat. Here's some baby woodchucks. Aren't they the cutest things in the world? But you know where they are is underneath in the lattice work underneath a deck or a patio So we have areas where it's great for them to nest close to our home. It's safe It's a good place for them to go out and forage and feed and then go back in there So one of the things you might want to do is take a look at some of these habitats If you have problems with woodchucks with skunks with some of these other critters Building nests making homes right near your house If you have a deck or a porch like this one, maybe put some wire fencing down Into the soil down a foot or so into the soil and up that way they can't dig in and get in there If you have a lot of brush around you might want to move brush piles further away From your yard. So chipmunks and squirrels and all these other rabbits Don't have places to hide where they can make their forays into your garden And if you have bird feeders you might want to not leave them up in the summer because bears like be bird feeders You know, I love this one because look at the baffle Well, sure the squirrels won't get in there, but the bears are did So bears love of course the bird seed in there and they come wandering around we have them in our neighborhood too There's no real need to feed birds in the summer. There's a lot of native food that's out there for them Come fall when the bears are starting to get ready to hibernate. That's when you can start putting your bird feeders back up again So trying to do things that will change the habitat a little around your house and yard will help prevent a lot of these animals from becoming pests But they do. So this is mice and voles, you know, there's a little field mouse there munching away at a solariac these guys of course Depending on the year there might be tons of them. There might be few of them And you know, they go through population fluctuations and decline Not only do they eat plants that are actually there themselves They also girdle plants in the winter like girdling this tree Which can cause it to die, you know rapids will do a similar kind of thing So there's different kinds of damage. It might be caused by these small little rodents The controls of them well for trees. It's simple You put up some hardware cloth or one of those tree wraps plastic trees Wraps around the plant dig it down into the soil a little bit too And that'll pretty much prevent it, you know You want to get the top of it though up high enough that if you have a really heavy snow Which we do occasionally get there might be a foot or so you want to make sure that the The control the hardware cloth is above the snow line Because a lot of times I've seen where the mice are right below the snow line And they're munching, you know on the bark of their tree or a shrub about a foot up So it's it's something to be concerned about something to watch out for And of course they love to tunnel into the ground and eat your bulbs And this is something that I've started doing because we have a lot of mice and squirrels around in the chipmunks around Is digging a hole and putting my bulbs in a wire cage This is again that hardware cloth a little bigger hole so that you can get the the shoots coming through These shoots of course are small because they're crocus, but I bury that whole cage in the ground Fill it up with soil and I swear this spring It was magnificent the show of all the crocuses because they never got eaten by any of the little critters that are there Of course, you could use bulbs that they don't like like fritillaria for example or daffodil But having a cage or are using some sharp material when you plant like crushed up oyster shells It's another nice material to use around your bulbs and you're planting this fall Because they don't like the sharpness of the edges of those shells Egg shells don't work so well They break down too fast, but something like an oyster shell or a seashell would work really well Now moles often get confused with mice and voles But moles are carnivores meaning that they're mostly after the little critters the beetles the things like that that are in the soil But what they do is they create tunnels that the voles will then follow in there and chipmunks and eat your plants that are underground So if you have these kind of little mounds of soil in your yard or your lawn, that's mole damage You know, that's what they do they leave little mounds of soil where they're digging in the tunnels and they pop up And they go back down again. That's where they leave the soil. But if you have this kind of Situation especially after the snow melts in the spring we see all those surface tunnels and that brown grass there That's mice and vole damage. It's a very different kind of thing They stay tend to stay on the surface unless they have a mole tunnel to go in The key for both of these things as far as control goes Caster oil caster oil is a very fragrant oil It's used a lot of course for digestive issues But you want the stuff you need to get at the garden center. That's has a real strong Odour to it and you will mix it up and this spray it on your lawn areas your garden areas Wherever the moles and mice and voles are active and they hate the smell of it So they'll get very agitated and then they'll take off. This works pretty well It's been actually scientifically researched At michigan state where they did some trials on it and worked really well for those kinds of rodents Some people say it works for chipmunks, too I'm not so sure but castor oil spray is it's safe for the environment for pets for people for the soil Creatures that are there, but it's a good repellent for all those rodents Speaking of rodents. There is a squirrel And everyone's got squirrels, you know, there's munching away. They're causing all kinds of damage They love to eat fruits, you know, I've been I've been watching the squirrels going into my pear trees already The pears are like small yet. They're not even maturing. They're not even sweet and yet they're up there trying to munch on them It's It's unending with squirrels So the things you have to keep in mind with squirrels is that one of the things you can do to control them Is to use a baffle. So if you have a tree you have a fruit tree If you have a plum tree a pear tree a peach tree an apple tree What you can do is get these baffle systems Similar to the ones you would use on bird feeders and put it on the pole or on the trunk in this case Now there's a couple caveats to this though It works really well if you have a tree that the lowest limbs are about four or five feet off the ground Because you could put that baffle right up against those limbs that the The squirrels will climb up and they get stuck in the center there and they won't be able to climb around it Because it's either metal or plastic. They slip and fall right off But if you have lower limbs, it's a problem because squirrels can jump and they can jump from the ground up About four feet tall so they can jump over the baffle and then get into your tree Also, if you have trees that are close to other trees are close to a house or a structure They can jump from the top down onto your trees. So Depending upon your situation the baffles may work pretty well Short of that, there's not a lot of things that are keep squirrels away You know, some people swear by hot pepper and things of that nature and sensual oils You know, I always say, you know, you can get some barriers for some of the fruits that you have You know, there are bags you can put around your fruits on trees Or if you have melons because they sometimes go after squash and melons putting these Metal wire barriers around individual fruits that can help, you know, it can get kind of tedious if you have a lot of fruits That you're trying to protect but but if you only have a few this might work pretty well Or you can hire the local kid To come over with his water gun and spend days just shooting at the squirrels as they run around And irritating them enough to scare him away. In fact, I have a friend who says he spends a lot of time on his front porch With his water cannon just shooting at the squirrels as they come down looking for some food in his garden So you can get creative, right? Witchucks and rabbits. Let's talk about those briefly So witchucks and rabbits Are unique and I put them together because they really kind of have a similar mo as far as how they get into your garden They will come in and they'll cause this kind of damage These are my edamamis from this year caused by a rabbit that got in our garden And you can see the difference between rabbit and woodchuck damage and deer damage by the way that they cut the stems So you can see that stem kind of about let's say maybe one o'clock on the Face of that photo that's cut at an angle and very cleanly that you know Is probably a rabbit or a woodchuck and not a deer deer tend to rip and shred stems when they're feeding So if you see that damage The best thing to do is get a fence and to do a fence So when you're building the fence though, there's a couple things to keep in mind First of all, you want to make sure the holes of that fence are small enough that a baby bunny won't get in We made that mistake once and baby bunny got into the garden was feeding having a great time got so big He couldn't get out of the garden and he ended up spending the summer eating our vegetables So you want to make sure those holes are small Second thing is you want to make sure you have that fence that's erected vertically like that Maybe four feet tall But also you curl the bottom foot or so to form an apron if you look right down there at the bottom Maybe about five six o'clock on the dial if you're looking at that you could see that that the fence is curled down It's right sitting flat on the ground Then you cover it with bark mulch or hay or whatever Because what happens is when a rabbit or a woodchuck comes to a fence their natural inclination is to dig straight down and underneath it If they hit the apron they're not going to get in Now the other thing you don't keep in mind for woodchucks is that they can climb especially the babies So you want to keep the top of your fence unhooked to those posts So that when it gets to the top of the fence the weight of the woodchuck pulls it back Back down to the ground and they get frustrated and they take off So this is probably the best thing to use as far as woodchucks and bunnies I'll talk about repellents in a minute because we're going to wrap up here with uh with deer and deer controls There's a deer over by our our cherry tree just looking around saying we're the cherries So you know you have deer damage when you see this kind of thing. This is my neighbor's Cedars that would have been nicely munched and you can tell their deer only are so high because They form a nice straight line as far as their necks can stretch to eat So that's very symbolic of deer damage. This is very symbolic of deer damage My neighbor had some broccoli that got chewed down by deer More again of that jagged kind of cuts on the edge of the leaves And you'll see the damage is pretty extensive sometimes The best control for deer is a tall fence a six to seven foot tall wire fence is probably the best thing We did that we basically are living in a deer yard You know, we built a house in a field that was a deer yard And so we still have deer wandering through all the time We've had our fence up for 10 years and only twice if deer tried to broach it And each time they were able to get over but they you could see they got caught on the top So I don't think it was a pleasant experience and I don't think they came back because of that Probably juvenile deer this kind of trying things out. They didn't even cause that much damage even when they did get in the garden So having a fence, I know it doesn't look the best and probably not the most attractive thing But having a fence like this is really going to make a big difference if you can't get it that high for whatever reason You could put strands of fishing wire on the top of it or sometimes put streamers on the top that keeps birds away From my blueberries, but also kind of keeps the deer away because they're not sure what's going on there So a fence is really the best thing to use if you want to use two shorter fences You can put them about four or five feet apart And as a perimeter because the deer don't want to jump into the middle of those fences and then over again So that will take up more space of course to do something like that And an electric fence can work as well too, especially if they get trained early on By maybe getting shocked a few times not to go in there You can fence individual plants too, especially individual fruit trees or individual bushes You know this putting some mistakes around it. This is actually that nylon mesh material used for bird repellent. It works really well as a deterrent for deer too And then you can use different sprays and home remedies This is a irish spring soap hung from one of our pear trees This stuff will work for a time, you know, it could be human hair It could be Some people have spread urine around There's all kinds of different cayenne pepper garlic all kinds of different remedies that people use Any of the remedies the key thing to remember is any of the remedies whether it be home remedies or commercial remedies Will work for a time until the deer get used to them the same thing with the rabbits and the woodchucks Once they get used to them then it doesn't work. So the key is to have two or three different types and rotate them around You can use things like predator urine. Yes, you can buy coyote urine Believe it or not. Don't ask me how they collect it. I don't want to know But this again is an effective thing most effective though in areas where there are coyotes I know if you're in the city and there's no coyotes around there a woodchuck or a rabbits Not going to be afraid of them because they're not going to be familiar with the scent so These kind of urines will be one of the things you could use commercial repellents with everything from blood meal to rotten eggs To garlic or cayenne pepper or essential oils. All of these will again work for a time What I do is I have two or three of these and I rotate them. I spray early in the season before there's damage I know I have deer even if they haven't found me yet They're gonna find me So I spray early in the season and I repeat it after a heavy rain and repeated as plants grow Because early in the season you're getting a lot of new growth And that seems to work. Especially like on roses. They love our roses. It worked beautifully this year We had a great show of roses and still they have a nice show of roses for this So that's the best way to use the commercial repellents Is to rotate them around use different types of them or use that fencing to keep them out So hopefully all of this has given you an idea about what diseases you're going to be looking out for If you're not seeing already and how you're going to be able to to manage them in the future And what kind of animal damage you might have and how you're going to manage them now so that you can Have a safe garden and a beautiful garden and a productive garden So let me Stop my sharing here And thank you all for coming. I appreciate it very much. I hope you enjoyed this talk From hands all about gardening and especially about disease and animal controls of gardening next month We'll be talking about planting for fall And it'll be the august monthly hands in the dirt gardening talk and I hope you can join us then