Pulsegleaner
Garden Master
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2014
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- 3,549
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- Location
- Lower Hudson Valley, New York
Maybe, but since a lot of flower plants are ALSO attractive to the animals to eat, it also means making the food supply thicker, and lowering the chance of them not going to an area much because it isn't worth their effort. When the critters come in, it isn't a matter of an occasional raid now and then, they will come again and again and again day in and day out, until they have stripped the area bare.
I recently read something that one of the problems with non-native plants is that they often tend to get a head start on the native ones when spring starts, so by the time the natives get going, the non-natives have already grown so big they have a massive advantage. I think the vegetables have a similar problem; by starting them indoors and then letting them go into the cold frame, I let then start growing FAR earlier than they would if I direct seeded them. So when they go out as plantlets (especially the very first ones), it's at a time when little if any of the background vegetation has really taken off, and with their fresh leaves and still attached cotyledons, they are attractive food sources. But what can I do? If I waited until the rest of the natural vegetation was established, it is not only generally too late for anything I start from seed to finish up by years end (especially tomatoes), but I am sowing seed in areas where annual weeds have already created massive root systems to help them come back again and again as soon as they are plucked (as is, the left hand patio pot needs a full deep weeding every other week or so to keep the carpet of smartweed under control.
Well, many-small versus few-big seems to always favor me, since, the less energy it takes the plant to make a fruit, the more likely it is to make fruit to begin with. It's probably why cherry tomatoes do so much better for me than non cherry, it simply takes the plants less energy to make a single cherry tomato than a larger one, so they can find the energy more often. The year I grew Ramito tomatoes (the ultra tiny, possibly currant types) was the ONLY year I actually produced more tomatoes than me and my family could EAT (we didn't plant them again, but that was because we didn't like the flavor, not lack of productivity.) And when I tried my hand at wild, diploid potatoes, the one plant that made it through to maturity put all its energy into making one tiny fruit, and never set tubers at all.
Plants generally just don't DO well here, or, at least, not consistently. We were drowning in cucumbers last year, this year, we've only gotten two small ones off the vine so far (with a few more on the way, but nothing like the torrent we had last year). Even Garlic, which is nearly idiot proof (in that nothing will eat it, so if you plant it, it isn't going anywhere) and the other alliums don't really work here, since our winters aren't QUITE enough to get the tops to die back totally, but ARE enough to put them under heavy stress, so they wind up using up all the stored energy they accumulated during the spring, summer and fall making it through the winter, leaving cloves that are actually SMALLER than the ones you put in every year (until they are so small they don't have enough energy, and then actually do die, leaving nothing.) For a while I pinned my hopes on the one I had that broke really massively really early (so that you got olive sized heads with 20-30 cloves in them) on the grounds that those gave more chances for some to make it through. But those tiny ones couldn't hold enough stored food, and died en masse every winter. Me getting a ROUND the size of a PEA at the end of two or three years is a miracle.
