Country Living Skills

Well, the baking soda/ soap mix has a drawback after all: It covers the plant leaves with seasoning for the deer who hitherto were uninterested in our vegetables and rather ate the young maple leaves.

Especially the cucumbers must have been a delicious addition to family deer’s diet for when we inspected our garden this morning, several of our cucumber plants were completely leafless, in others the foliage was a little less severely decimated.

So tonight we put up a deer fence of our own making: We hung a few sheets of plastic (an old shower curtain cut in two, to be precise) in front of the cucumber bed and in front of that we drew another line of string and fastened tin foil to it to further deter our nightly visitors.

Really, as nice as it is to live in a place where you can watch all kinds of wildlife from your living room window, you’d rather not want them in your yard, be it deer, raccoon, or even rabbits, especially when you need to rely on your garden or when you practice for ‘gardening when it counts’.

We started fighting the powdery mildew not last night, but this morning since we read online that watering and/ or fertilizing plants in the evening could be one of the reasons why they get powdery mildew in the first place. Not only did we find affected leaves on zucchini and pumpkins, but also on the acorn squash and on our cucumbers. The luffa gourd that grows right next t the zucchini remained unaffected, which came as a surprise.

So this morning we first cut away all the infected leaves and then sprayed the baking soda/ soap mixture on the remaining leaves and the stems, and now we are waiting for the results.

We also read online that a mixture of 1 part of water and 9 parts of milk would work well against powdery mildew, but we decided to try the baking soda/ soap mix first.