I'm in OKC east side and have grown lots of things on my patio for several years now. The only animals I worry about are the possums, which will take chunks out of tomato plants. I share with them and let them do their thing.

When I moved into this house I inherited 9 peacocks, which wreaked havoc on plants. I now have 0 peacocks, but we shall see if some of the peacocks in the neighborhood are imprinted with this location and come back for breeding this spring (surprisingly, these critters do come back to where they were born). Anyway, peacocks are terrible to plants. They destroy them all as if they were barbarians invading Rome. They show no mercy, and destroy all nice, expensive, planted plants. Weeds, however, they ignore. Go figure.

I used regular potting soil for tomatoes last year in planters and they did just fine. I had tomatoes until about the first of November. My problem was ensuring they had enough water and entrusting someone to water them religiously when I was out of town, which was surprisingly difficult (not everyone loves plants).

As a recap: my biggest problem was with peacocks, which can be horrible and can reduce a garden to nothing in minutes. They will pick every blossom off a tomato plant, sever every new shoot on a bedding plant, clip every flower off a bedding plant, destroy every seedling one at a time, pull up bedding plants, devour anything that has a flower on it, and scratch up all the rest, unless it is a weed, in which case they won't touch it.

Sammy,

Did you have pest problems with last year's tomato plants? Generally, your pest problems won't vary much from year to year unless a new group of varmints have moved in.

I'm probably not the best person to talk about what animals eat plants, because here in the Oklahoma Outback of southern OK, I have trouble with the following: deer, cottontail rabbits, skunks, armadilloes, squirrels, turtles (LOVE tomatoes and can sometimes reach the ones in pots if the pot is small enough and the turtle is large enough), possums, birds of all kinds, moles, racoons, pocket gophers, voles, field mice, beaver, and coyotes (they eat melons, all kinds of melons--and eat fruit right off the trees).

I live in fear of feral hogs knocking down the fairly sturdy fence, but so far the feral hogs have stayed at the back of our property when they come on it at all, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they won't discover the veggie garden. I wouldn't think you'd have such a wide variety of varmints there at your house since you live in a more civilized area. With such a large amount of wildlife around (and they are always hungry 24/7/365), we use many approaches geared towards the specific pest: exclusion, diversion, trapping and releasing far, far away, scaring them off with the pet dogs, cats or guineas, (guineas chase the deer away), and even shooting them if we must. (We don't shoot a lot of things, but every now and then you have to shoot something that poses a threat....like a skunk headed for you in broad daylight). So, you usually have to try everything and see what works.

With animals, excluding them via the use of fencing is the most effective way of keeping them out. The fences have to be tall enough to keep them out and have to be tight against the ground where they can't dig under or squeeze under. For a while, I had my fencing buried 6" under ground, which stopped everything from digging under and tuneling under, but keeping the bermuda grass runners out of the buried fencing was a real problem. For birds, either bird flash tape or bird netting works well to keep most but not all birds out. If regular fencing doesn't work, electric fencing usually works pretty well.

If you are having birds pecking at your tomatoes, often what they really want is water, so you can solve that by having a birdbath nearby with water for them. I also keep bird feeders filled near my garden and that satisfies the birds during times when there are not enough insects to make them happy.

Some people use repellents, which usually rely upon a bad odor to repel animals, but I've never heard of them being especially effective.

Don't forget the little critters like slugs and snails. They do like to munch on tender vegetation. I use an organic snail and slug bait that has a non-toxic active ingredient (iron phosphate). Please do not confuse the organic snail and slug bait (sold under many names, and two I often see here are Safer Snail and Slug Bait and Slug-Go) with the toxic chemical one that has metaldahyde as an active ingredient. Metaldehyde is toxic to family
pets. One of the worst pests in my garden in early spring, both with in-ground plants and containerized plants is pillbugs and sowbugs. I have found that the Slug-Go (and esp. the new Slug-Go Plus) also take care of them.

You may have issues with the large green hornworms that are the larvae of sphinx moths. If so, you can handpick them and dispose of them if you wish, or use Bt sprayed on the plants to kill them. There are several Bt formulations and each one is specific to one kind of pest, so be sure you get the Bt that is a caterpillar killer.

My biggest tomato pest is stinkbugs. They usually arrive in July but appeared in mid-May of last year. There is nothing much that works on them except hand-picking, although I've had some success with vaccuming them up off the plants with a small hand-held mini vacuum cleaner like a Dust Buster.

To figure out how much improvement your potting soil needs to make it drain well enough for tomatoes, put some in a pot, water it heavily and then check it daily to see how well it stays. If it stays wet for a prolonged period of time, you can improve the drainage of the potting soil with the addition of compost, peat moss (I prefer compost because it is alive and adds to the soil vitality while peat moss is dead), pine bark fines, composted cotton burrs, etc. You also can use something like Turface MVP or expanded shale or something similar. Randy buys Turface in large bags but I've seen smaller bags in nurseries. How much you will or own't have to add to the potting soil will vary depending on how heavy it is and how well it drains, and it can vary from lot to lot in packaged soils.

If watering the containers is an issue, you can use drip irrigation (simple patio or small home-garden drip irrigation kits are usually sold at Lowe's and Home Depot during the growing season) on a timer and that makes your containers pretty low-maintenance.

And, if you have neighbors like I do with goats or cows or horses, sometimes there's not much that will keep them away from your garden, except barbed wire fencing or electric fencing. There's nothing worse then being inside the garden behind a relatively flimsy fence (it'll keep out rabbits and deer but not cows) and looking up to see a herd of 20 or more cows running right for you and the garden. It isn't even fun to walk out the door and find one cow in the yard eating flowers. You have to remember, too, that whatever pest you're dealing with, be it large or small, the pest or problem animal has literally 24 hours a day to work on ways to get to and eat your crops, while you cannot devote your every waking moment to keeping them out. It is sad, but it is a fact of life that "Mother Nature bats last", so sometimes the critters win.

Dawn

I don't ever want to have a peacock. It never occurred to me that they would be such a problem.

Dawn, your responses are always so thorough and eloquent. Thanks so much.

We plant rose bushes in hardware cages that are 12 inches into the ground because of voles and gophers - moles too, since they dig the tunnels. I am prepared for many of the insects, but I had been wondering about squirrels and rabbits. In the area where we will have the tomatoes, they are in large tubs. We put a fence around them, but the fencing is about 3" square - quite large, large enough for a bird to fly in. THe top of the fence is more than 5' 5". Probably a squirrel could go right through the squares.

By the patio we have 16" pots and larger on concrete blocks.

We have the armadillos sometimes, and the smaller critters. I hate cucumber beetles as much as anything. By the way did any of you have Asian Hackberry aphids in the fall? It was my fist experience with them, and they are awful. The tomato hornworms are a site to behold. Talk about creepy!

Slugs and snails are a nuisance in my garden, but I never notice anything with the roses, just the hostas. We don't have other animals. Often when you write, I realize how lucky I am.

I need to think some more. I am not sure how to support the tomatoes.

Thanks again.
Sammy

Hi Sammy,

You may find that, over time, your garden becomes more and more attractive to pest animals and birds. We had a lot of trouble with skunks (they like to dig for grubs) and armadillos (ditto) the first couple of years, but then we corrected that problem by using milky spore and beneficial nematodes to greatly reduce the grub population. Then for some reason the possums arrived and they were an issue for a year or two. Finally, the deer showed up and I fought with them for years until we raised the fence to 7' tall last year and that worked pretty well.

The smaller critters like turtles that come under the gates get a few low-hanging tomatoes, but the main issue is the raccoons because they can come over, under or through any fence we have errected. I hate trapping them--they're try to kill you while you're carrying the trap to the truck--spitting, screaming, hissing, throwing themselves around, etc. It is just a fact of life that you have varmints in the country though.

Squirrels bother us less than anything, and I suspect they may be more of a problem for you in the city than they are for us in the country. At least, here in the country, we have acres and acres of food sources for them--there in town, your garden may be the most attractive food source around. If you keep a water source available (they drink from our poultry waterers!), that may be enough. If they seem like they are looking for food, you may be able to get them to leave the garden alone by putting up and filling a squirrel feeder. Sometimes, if you give them what they want or need, they won't have to raid your veggie garden to get what they want.

For tomato hornworms, I can't do anything really mean to them because I love the hummingbird moths. So, I always put a leftover tomato plant or two somewhere about 20' away from my tomato plants and, when I find a hornworm, I take it and put it on that plant. The hornworms can eat all they want on "their" plant and we get to enjoy the hummingbird moths later on. I don't care for the hornworms myself, but ever since our then young son told me I "couldn't" kill them because they turned into beautiful moths, I have tried to peacefully co-exist with them. I do love seeing the moths flying around the moon garden at night.

To support our tomatoes, we made cages out of woven wire fencing. I didn't want to use concrete reinforcement wire because it rusts and looks ugly to me, so I just used really sturdy woven wire fencing. With containers in the ground, I have had the best success with making the cage large enough that it fits completely around the container and sets down on the ground around it. Then we use two green metal 6' tall fence posts pounded into the ground as stakes to keep the cage in place. I buy 3' or 4' tall fencing and make a two section cage, using zip-ties to hold the two sections together. So, the cage is either 6' or 8' tall to begin with. Then, for the few monster plants that get taller than the cage, I can add another section to the top, so we have a cage 9' to 11' tall. Most tomato plants don't get that large, but a few (like Black Cherry, Tess's Land Race Currant, and Sweet Million) often do. With a plant that tall, you need a stepladder to harvest the crop from the topmost part of the plant.

If storage of the cages is an issue, make them in different sizes so they will nest inside of one another.

I have tried putting cages in very large containers, but a good thunderstorm can knock over a whiskey-barrel sized container if the tomato plant is really, really large and the wind is really, really strong. If you have buildings and wood privacy fences in an area where they serve as a windbreak for the plants, you may not have an issue with thunderstorm winds. My garden is somewhat exposed to the elements, though, so I have to stake everything or severe storms send my plants to the ground.

Dawn

I need Dawn to come spend a week with me and help me put together my yard and gardens! Hehe! I learn something about gardening, whether it's in ground, containers, tomatoes or flowers, potting mixes or soil amendments every time I read one of her posts! After five years in Oklahoma, I'm still learning and feeling my way. Then I move from Chickasha to Edmond last year and have to start learning all over again. Dawn, your and George's and Ilene's (among others!) advice is all amazing and I greatly look forward to your posts. It's always a learning experience!

Kathy- Making notes for her containers!

Most of what I grow in containers are tropical. So they tend to like our blazing hot summers.

A rule of thumb I like to tell newbies to container growing is when creating a soil mix for pots, a good way to judge the mix is "Will it fall apart when squeezed together in the palm of your hand when the mix is soaking wet?" If it clumps and holds together, it will give you problems in our cool wet spring.

This same mix will require a little more watering in the heat though. I much prefer that to rot and soil disease when it's cool and wet.

randy

Randy,

I agree with you that I'd rather have to water more often in the summer than lose plants to poor drainage in heavy periods of rainfall, so I make a mix that drains really, really well....probably too well for some people, but I don't mind watering twice a day in hot weather.

Until the summer of 2004 (which was wetter here than 2007), I didn't realize containers even could stay too wet with a standard, bagged potting soil, but mine did. (We had 12" of rain just in the month of June.) That's when I started mixing my own soilless mix.

I'm not very good at describing to someone else just how well the mix should or shouldn't hold water, so I'll have to remember your method of squeezing it in the palm of one's hand. For me, I can look at and feel the mix, I can water and see how much it holds and how quickly water runs out of the bottom of the pot and I just "know" when I have the mix right. It is hard to describe that to someone else, though, and I guess telling them "you'll know it when you see it" doesn't help them very much.

When people talk about adding those water-holding crystals to their containers, I almost cringe. I just don't grow many plants that like really wet soil, so I don't use them.

Dawn

Dawn,

Kind of like you, from experience I can tell by looking if something needs watering. Leaves may not be as glossy on some species, but usually a glance at the soil mix and a quick push into the soil with the forefinger tells the story. My mix looks wet when it's wet and looks dry when it's dry. :-) When you water a few thousand containers at a time during the growing season you get the feel for what is the norm. Even when there's not really a norm in Oklahoma.

randy

Randy, do you have a few thousand containers, or am I not reading that correctly.
Sammy

Sammy,

That's a number from a count last December on the plants I overwintered. It will double in about 3 weeks and will triple in 2 months. I have a number of communal pots with hundreds of seedlings in them and I've begun starting about 3 thousand seed the past week.

I only have so much room on my prop mats and have to gauge starting them to match temps outdoors so the greenhouse doesn't get too crowed before things can get moved outdoors.

randy

Hey RAndy, how about a picture. You overwinter all those plants? I am very curios.
SAmmy

Randy,

"Even when there's not really a norm in Oklahoma." LOL LOL LOL That statement has to win the prize for the most accurate statement ever made on this forum.

Nothing about Oklahoma holds true with regards to "typical", "average" or "normal", especially with regards to the climate, weather and soil.

I know that our climate averages are based on 30-year-averages, for example, but our freeze dates, for example, have been later than the "average date" for 9 of the 10 springs we've lived here. I keep thinking the averages will even out, as they "ought to" statistically, but they've shown no sign of it, so I've given up on expecting the "norm" because there really isn't one.

And, how do you explain to an Oklahoma newbie that the Jan. and Feb. daytime high temps "should" be in the 40s and 50s, but may go up into the 70s and 80s some days or may be in the teens and twenties other days. And, how hard is it to "not" plant early if every single day/night in March stays above freezing, because you just know April will have some freezing weather anyway.

Or, how does it make sense we can go a whole month with not one drop of rain, and then have 9 or 10" in one day. It happens.

If I ever think I have figured out what is "normal" here, I'll pack up and move elsewhere to save my sanity, because there is no normal here.

Dawn

Sammy,

Here's a photo from last Sept after most of my plants were in the greenhouse for the winter.

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Dawn,

My out of state friends think we live in an oven. Some from Canada and Minnesota visited a few years ago in July. It was beautiful weather. Upper 90's for highs and lower 70's for night temps.

They couldn't go outside after noon for very long at all for fear of melting. :-) Told them it was a good thing they didn't come when it was hot.

I whine about our winters, but couldn't picture living anywhere else in the states. I could be tempted to move to Belize though.

randy

Randy,

Our first year here, my husband's sister, brother-in-law and their two girls came to visit us in August (1999). While they were here, the high temperatures were in the 106-111 degree range (many people here unofficialy recorded 113 degrees on that 111 degree day). Since they were from Harrisburg, PA, 95 degrees would have been good and hot, and 106-111 was pretty much unbearable. They've only been back to visit in cooler months (like December or March) since then. : ) That was the hottest August I think we've had since we moved here--it was over 100 degrees for 20-something days, and well over 100 on many of those days.

On the other hand, my father-in-law used to come and visit every summer but came in May in 2002 because our son was graduating from high school. That was a cold May and the nights were still in the 40s and the days never really got hot either. My poor FIL had come here from Pittsburg PA expecting heat and sunshine and those few days that he was here, all we had was cool, cloudy days and cold nights. He was so disgusted! Said he could have stayed in PA if he wanted to be cold. Our weather doesn't cooperate much when we have "Yankee" visitors.

Everyone who works with Tim at D-FW Airport thinks we have tornadoes here all the time. If there is a tornado in Oklahoma and it makes the news down in Dallas, our phones start ringing. This last time, with the Lone Grove tornado, he took a vacation day from work and helped with the search-and-rescue operations. Oddly enough, a reporter from the Dallas Fox TV affiliate interviewed him there in Lone Grove and it appeared on the evening news in Dallas, so the phone started ringing. I don't think the officers at D-FW knew where Lone Grove was, but once they saw him on TV, I think they thought the tornado was very close to us. (Clearly, it was not.)

Dawn

The first picture is of the larger pots that will have tomatoes, and other vegetables -- we hope.

The second picture is off our patio where we will line up the cement blocks like the ones we started, and grow lettuce and other greens. Also I intend to try my hand at propogating roses and anything else I can handle.

We intend to also put a fence around the pots off the patio.

I wonder what we are keeping out. This is quite a venture.

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Sammy

You have been growing those since Sept? What are they and what will you do with them. That is a very impressive greenhouse.

Sammy

Sammy,

The bulk of the plants are a various forms of Adenium, a succulent native to different locations across the African continent. I find most of them new homes each growing season.

Thanks. The greenhouse is one place that helps keep me semi content during winter.

randy

First off, let me say I just love pictures. I love seeing what everyone else is doing. Randy, I'm quite impressed with your greenhouse.

Sammy, I live in a small town, not a lot different from Sheriff Taylor's Mayberry. I garden in my back yard. Currently I have three raised beds 4'x 24', a pipe and stock panel grape arbor about that same size, a pipe and stock panel trellis that goes all along the front of my shed, maybe 2' x 36' and a triangle of a herb garden in the 12' space between the shed and the back porch. I have two small raised beds in that space because there was a tree there and it is still decomposing but is not far enough gone that other plants can get their roots down very far. I found last year I could plant in SOME places, so it's getting there. When they cut the tree, we had them grind the stump down, but it was a huge tree that shaded out everything in that area and dripped sap almost all the time, and it had an extensive root system. Several times we had a limb fall that came dangerously close to hitting the house, so we were glad to get the tree removed.

I start plants in several ways. Even though I said I wouldn't do it this way again, I did sow some seed that had to be winter planted in soil in milk jugs. I notice there's already something up in one of them.

Some things, like poppy seed and red clover, I had enough seed that I could just scatter some on top of the soil in one of the raised beds in the herb garden, and cover with chopped leaves.

I noticed a discussion here about how you really don't need to chop leaves, and that's somewhat true, but I find that they blow around, and they have a way of refusing to be buried sometimes. So for me, it's just easier to chop them. It improves their ability to break down, as well. As you can see, some of them don't chop up very well. Those big pieces will probably be in my fenceline by the time the wind gets done with them. I have 2 apple trees, a Santa Rosa plum tree and two Red Haven peach trees (well, one has reverted to the rootstock, but I have kept it around because when the other tree bears, It makes a lot. I will replace it eventually. But anyway, most of the leaves that I get in my yard come from other people's trees, or those out in the park, courtesy of the wind. Last fall and this spring, every time I have seen bags of leaves on the curb on my block, I have taken them before the garbage truck comes. My next door neighbors rake their leaves and just put the bags of them up against my house. Living on the back of the city park has lots of advantages, but if you want a leaf-free yard, that's not one of them.

I have cabbage, bunching onion, tomatoes, potatoes and some jicama planted inside under light, either in trays or newspaper cups, depending on how sensitive their root systems are to being transplanted.

The only critters that I have trouble with are the family pets, a few garter snakes, an occasional vole, and toads.

It has been a struggle to keep Pearl, the cat, out of the raised beds. She just loves freshly dug, soft dirt. So I try to keep a stock panel flat on the ground wherever I have planted anything or she will go right to it and dig into it with those big furry paws of hers. And then there's Sonny, the dog, who likes to pee on everything. Fortunately, he's kind of leery of 'structures' so stock panels standing on their sides will keep him at bay. He doesn't pee or leave other gifts in the paths between the raised beds. I don't know why, I'm just grateful. He likes to make his rounds out there, guard dog fashion.

Once there was a garter snake that lived in one of the raised beds amongst some mature tomato plants. The white fur around Sonny's neck was green all summer from sticking his head in between the plants trying to get to that snake.

The vole has done some major damage in my yard in years past, even getting into the raised beds. It didn't eat my plants, it just burrowed too close to the roots and either uprooted things or caused the roots to dry out. This year I'm going to be putting down some milky spore disease to kill the grubs that are attracting the vole. We get an occasional skunk but usually they're just passing through. There are so many dogs in my neighborhood, one of them always spooks it and we wake up to that smell in the air some mornings. I don't leave my dog outside at night like most of my neighbors do.

Toads abound out in the park, and my neighbor on the south has a koi pond so a lot of them hang out there. But I get my share. If I have plants set out on the front porch, it's not uncommon to look down and see a fat little warty guy sitting in one of the pots. They kind of dig down when they settle in so even though they're not trying to kill the plant that's in the pot, usually they do. Last spring when I was carrying things in and out, I accidentally carried in a toad. I don't know who was more startled, him or me! Wish I had taken a picture of that.

I have a lot of trouble with the birds poking holes in my tomatoes and my fruit, so Dawn I'm going to take your advice and put out plenty of water this summer.