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The cool, rainy (hopefully) weeks of early spring are the perfect time to look through all of those seed catalogs and decide what you want to plant once the weather gets a bit warmer. This is when we usually like to start our seeds indoors so they will be mature enough to plant outside in mid-March.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of critters waiting to eat your seedlings and young plants. Slugs and snails are very destructive to young seedlings. They come out at night, eating their way through your garden, leaving only short stems and slime trails. Since your garden probably doesn’t have a lot growing in it, you’re probably wondering where they came from. If only you could find their secret hideout, perhaps you could stop them from devouring your garden before it even gets started.
Sometimes you can locate their daytime hiding places by following their slime trails. We did this and found an absolutely disgusting sight underneath one of our terra cotta flower bowls. Hundreds of slugs! We scraped them off into a bucket of ammonia water and thought that would be the end of it.
No such luck! The next morning, we found hundreds more slugs under the same bowl. Once again, we scraped them into a bucket of ammonia water (which we dumped into the compost bin once we were sure the slugs were all dead). We ended up repeating this process for several days until the slugs were gone. So, if you find a secret slug hideaway, don’t assume you got rid of all the slugs with the first try. Persistence pays off!
Another early spring menace to young plants is, of course, gophers. Gophers don’t usually eat very young seedlings, but they will take down young vegetable plants. If you look up “how to get rid of gophers” on the internet, you’ll see all sorts of bad or ineffective advice. We’ve tried many things to get rid of our gophers – gopher purge, ultrasonic noisemakers, commercial repellents, and homemade concoctions. None of them worked. One of our favorite suggestions was for pouring used cat litter down active gopher holes. I’m not sure it convinced the gophers to leave, but it was gratifying.
Young gophers can be found above ground in the early spring since this is when the parents kick the young gophers out of the family tunnel. They will waddle around until they find a good spot to start digging their own holes. Make sure you’ve raked up all your fall leaves so you can see the newly dug holes. If the new hole is on level ground, it can usually be flooded with a slow garden hose. Just let the hose run and watch the surrounding ground. Shortly, you will see the ground quiver as the gopher tries to escape the flood. Once he emerges, he can be dispatched quickly with a shovel. This may seem mean, but once you’ve seen half of your vegetable garden disappear in a single morning you will think otherwise.
Have questions? Email gardening@scng.com.
Looking for more gardening tips? Here’s how to contact the Master Gardener program in your area.
Los Angeles County
mglosangeleshelpline@ucdavis.edu; 626-586-1988; http://celosangeles.ucanr.edu/UC_Master_Gardener_Program/
Orange County
ucceocmghotline@ucanr.edu; 949-809-9760; http://mgorange.ucanr.edu/
Riverside County
anrmgriverside@ucanr.edu; 951-683-6491 ext. 231; https://ucanr.edu/sites/RiversideMG/
San Bernardino County
mgsanbern@ucanr.edu; 909-387-2182; http://mgsb.ucanr.edu/
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