My Green Beans are Gone! Raised Bed Gardening

I received a rude surprise Sunday morning as I went to the garden to do some weeding and fertilizing. I had planted pole beans about a week and a half prior to this and the last time I had looked (about 4 days earlier) they had just begun to peak through the soil about an inch or so.

Well I’ll be darned if when I got out to the garden, every one of the 60 or so bean plants I had planted weren’t eaten down to the stem. Something had eaten the tops of every last one of the green bean plant leaves and left a one inch high stem sticking out of the ground. It was kind of funny to look actually. The odd thing about it was the fact that all of the beans were gone, but the tomato, cucumber, squash, and swiss chard plants, were all left intact. Even the strawberries didn’t seem to be touched.

The first thoughts to cross my mind were the obvious things like caterpillars (the local tent worms or army caterpillars are on the move right now) and rabbits! Well I ruled out the caterpillar option as I didn’t see them anywhere in the garden and the job was too completely and neatly done for them to be the cause. When we built this home 11 years ago and I put in my first garden, I quickly realized that we had a very large rabbit population. They decimated the garden with their appetites that first year. The following year I put up 3 foot tall rabbit fencing around the entire perimeter of the garden and haven’t had a problem since then with them. I inspected the fencing in case I had a break somewhere but found nothing wrong with the fence. In the early spring, I did have a ground hog get into the garden somehow, but after scaring him to death while trying to get him back out of the garden, I hadn’t seen him since either.

Since I do “container or raised bed” gardening, I have paths between each of the boxes and it’s very difficult to see foot prints, but it had rained the evening before and as I looked closer, I found out who the culprit(s) were. What I found were actually “hoof prints”. Though slightly less plentiful than the rabbits, but just as marauding around our area are “white tail deer”. One must have been wandering our backyard and decided to stop by for a snack and it evidently preferred green beans. My fence was no match for them.

I simply decided to replant the beans and at this point I’m hoping that it was just a straggler looking for something to eat and it doesn’t happen again. They should be poking there heads up in a few days so we’ll see what happens then. I’ll just consider this a deposit to the fall “venison” stock for the freezer when deer season opens up once again.

A few gardening tips: If you live in an area of rabbits, always use the fencing with small holes to keep the varmints out. Container gardening allows you to plant denser quantities of vegetables per square foot of space and you never have to walk on your planting area. Also if you plant densely enough, the vegetables will crowd out the weeds instead of the other way around and cut way down on you weeding. You can do "raised beds" if you can't bend over with the same results as well. I will be adding information on this topic to my maiin site very soon. One last tip, Marigolds keep the tomato worms and and many other bugs away from your veggies so plant them along with your vegetables. Stop by my main site for more information on raised bed gardening. Happy Gardening! http://www.wm8c.com/square_foot_gardening.htm

garden, Raised Bed Gardening, Container Gardening