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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Before and after: the beet edition

Before


After


Before


After


Before


After


I only got half of them canned yesterday and will do the other half today. Since I'm not sure how much we'll like the greens, I was very picky and only kept about a quarter of them. The "beet pucks" were blanched greens pushed into a measuring cup to shape. I froze them on a cookie sheet and then put them into individual bags.

Saturday's birds: northern flicker, grackle, sparrow, blue jay, mourning dove, white breasted nuthatch, cardinal, downy woodpecker.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Around the garden

The garden June 25th
Things are really growing now. We're having warm weather and still getting rain on a regular basis. I probably could have five rain barrels full by now. By the way, I love having a rain barrel. I'm already realizing that I need one out front, close to my flower beds.

At this point, I know I've learned at least one thing. When the plan says your space is big enough for four potato plants, don't plant six. In my defense, I didn't expect all six to grow. They all did, however, and they are still growing. They look more like bushes than vegetable plants. The fact that they're falling over doesn't help.


I've got a couple cherry tomatoes ripening.


I'm very excited for tomatoes. Before long, I'll have more than I can handle, but I can usually find someone to take the extras. Last year, I learned that the little ones work as well frozen as the big ones. Pop a few of them in some homemade macaroni and cheese in the middle of winter...yum.

I thinned a few green beans today, and I felt bad about it. One of the two cucumbers I planted is doing well. The other is a no-show.


These are bush cucumbers and not good for pickles. We can't eat as many cucumbers as two plants will give us at once, so I might wait a week or so before planting another one.

Despite the grackles' best efforts, I've got some sunflowers growing. I took the fence off completely today.


Sorry for the weird angle. Most of the flowers in the cinder blocks are doing well, too. Look at this snapdragon:


The strange thing is, the four others I planted look like this:


They're right next to each other. You can also see in the above photo that a volunteer tomato found its way into this bed. I have no idea where it came from.

I'm planning to harvest and pickle the beets this weekend. I love pickled beets, so I hope they work out.

Todays' birds: blue jay, grackle, robin, sparrow. I'm out of bird food and hoping the sparrows and grackles will find a new buffet.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

I love growing beans

I planted the beans last Saturday. This is what they looked like by Thursday:


And today they look like this:



As close to instant gratification as you can get in a garden. I'll need to thin them pretty soon, which is something I'm not good at. I hate pulling out seedlings.

In other news, it looks like I might actually get a few peas after all.


With the poor germination and destruction caused by a still-unknown assailant, I didn't think I'd have any this year. I won't have enough to freeze, but at least I'll get to eat a few peas fresh from the garden. Yum.

The beets are getting very close to harvest time, so I should be making some pickled beets soon.


I'm also planning to try the beet greens, which I've never eaten before. I'll have to look around for some recipes or suggestions. Once I pull all the beets out, I'm going to be planting some more basil in their place. You can't have too much basil, in my opinion, because it dries so easily and I use it in so many things.

Last but not least, there was an adult rabbit sitting in the garden when we got home from the grocery store today. Scout and I scared her away. She jumped right through the fence, high enough up where the holes are big enough for a rabbit. I knew this was coming. I didn't see any obvious damage, but it's only a matter of time. I wonder if I could train a cat to live in the garden and never climb out.

Sunday's birds: sparrow, grackle, cardinal, robin, mourning dove, male downy woodpecker with baby!

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

You can't make this sh*t up

I didn't see this one coming.

I was in the backyard mowing, and I noticed that Scout was extremely interested in my potatoes. When I walked over to investigate, I saw this:


Do you know what that is? It's a rabbit nest in my potatoes!



So many things wrong with this picture: baby rabbits, in the garden, momma rabbit has breached the perimeter. What the hell am I supposed to do?

I can tell you what Scout wanted to do. It involved destroying everything between her and the bunnies, including my herbs.


Where there were once sage seedlings, there is now just dirt. Luckily, most of the thyme escaped unscathed.

At this point, I'm yelling and cussing (because I swear like a sailor), and I'm about to cry. The frustration is just so intense. There are rabbits in the garden. Scout has just killed a bunch of plants. I have to do something, and I don't like my options.

Here's the thing: I'm one of those bleeding heart animal lovers. I became a vegetarian at age 18. After 18 years of that, I started eating seafood, and I'm okay with that because I'm pretty sure I could kill a fish or a shrimp. But I can't kill fuzzy things.

My mind clearly isn't working well. My first thought is to set up a fence, so Scout can't climb into my herb box again. I pull out some fencing and some small poles I have in the shed, and I set up a barrier all around the herb box. Then I realize that momma rabbit probably climbed into the herb box and then through the fence, because the holes in the fence get bigger the farther you go up (it's a "rabbit guard" fence designed with small holes at ground level). That means my fence will keep her out, and the babies will die. I don't want dead rabbits in my potatoes.

If I want to save my potatoes and the rest of the garden, I know those babies have to go. There were times in my life when I would've let them stay and suffer the consequences, but the garden means more to me now. I planted that garden for a reason, and it wasn't to feed rabbits. So I harden my heart and I execute "operation bunny extraction". The nest was not very deep, and I was able to basically lift out a big pile of straw and bunny nest. I took them out of the backyard and put the whole pile in a flower bed. The poor little things hardly squirmed at all.

I'm not naïve enough to think that they have any chance of surviving, but at least I don't have to watch them get squeezed by a dog. I have a healthy dose of "out of sight, out of mind", and I'm relying on that and a couple beers to get me past this.

The stupidest part of all is that I should've seen this coming. Two years in a row, some rabbit scaled the two foot chicken wire surrounding my raised beds and built a nest under my chives. The first year the dogs got them. The next year, the babies got big enough to hop around, and I "airlifted" them to my front yard.

Is this karma? Was I a rabbit-killing dog in a former life?







Sunday, June 16, 2013

Finally

I finally planted beans on Saturday. This year I planted both pole beans and bush beans. I've used one of those metal, square bean tower things in the past, but this year I wanted to try something different since I was planting rows. I came up with the bean goal post.


It's made out of pvc. Thanks to D, the tower is reinforced with cross bars and tied to stakes in the ground. I'm not much of an engineer and had only planned on the two upright poles. This will be much sturdier than my version would've been. The posts have been in the ground for a couple weeks, and have already weathered some storms, but we just got it tied down and laced on Saturday.


There are holes in the pvc every eight inches, and jute twine strung between the poles. The plan is that the beans will grown on the twine, and at the end of the year it can go in the compost with the bean plants.

My potatoes are blooming:

but they're also falling over:

So far, two of them have fallen over. From a quick online search, it seems that they might not have been hilled enough, but they should continue to grow just fine. I guess I'll find out.

One of my tomato plants is not growing nearly as fast as the others. It's a Caspian Pink. You can see how much smaller it is than the plant next to it. I had one last year, and I don't remember it being slower or smaller than the others.


The herb seeds I planted are sprouting.
Sage
Thyme
Lastly, despite having witnessed this, I'm still convinced it was a grackle digging up my sunflowers.


These two are too cute to hurt anything.

We might have some rain tonight, but the next several days look warm and dry. I think that will do the garden good.

The garden June 15th
Weekend birds: chickadee, blue jay, grackle, sparrow, mourning dove, cardinal, house finch, white breasted nut hatch.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Awwwwwwwww

How cute is this little guy?


I found him hiding from Scout behind the cinder block garden, with his momma freaking out in a tree nearby. He didn't squirm at all when I picked him up, so I carefully placed him on a tomato cage out of Scout's reach. When I went out later, he had flown off and was in the neighbor's yard, just on the other side of the fence.

As if that wasn't enough, Scout then proceeded to tell me in no uncertain terms that there was something in the downspout going to the rain barrel. Sure enough, after some wiggling of the downspout, out plopped another baby sparrow. He was smaller than the garden sparrow and squirmed a lot when I grabbed him. I did manage to get him out of my yard, and he crawled under the neighbor's bush. I'm not sure he was actually big enough to fly.

I know sparrows are a dime a dozen, and they eat more than their share of my bird food, but I can't stand to see little creatures squeezed by big dogs. I know it's going to happen, but not in my garden. Besides, Scout has already squeezed a nest of bunnies this year. They're not as easy to save.

Today's birds: chickadee, robin, grackle, mourning dove, ringneck dove, and sparrow, obviously.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

I told you it wouldn't be pretty

Sunflowers under chicken wire tent
I also said it was probably a grackle. Within a couple hours of making the tent, I saw a grackle walking up and down along the cinder blocks, probably trying to figure out how to get into the place with the special sunflower seeds buried in the dirt. Take that, you freeloader!

It was another wet, cool weekend, so I still haven't gotten my beans planted. We took a step toward completing the bean tower, but no beans. I'll be out of town for a few days, so it'll be at least Thursday before they're planted. I promise to show you my cool bean tower when it's done.

wet again

I feel bad complaining about rain when other parts of the country need it so badly, but I'm sick of wet weekends. Our weather pattern has been ridiculous. We have sunny and 72 degrees on Friday and Monday, but Saturday and Sunday are raining and 65. This is what my yard looks like with all this rain:


And this is not the worst of it. I almost have a creek under the trees at the back of my yard. I'm pondering digging a ditch and having a wet weather pond. Drainage is bad in my yard, really bad. I've found a few ideas for things that could help, and hope to try some of them in the future. Until then, we have puddles in the spring.

The garden June 9th
Today's birds: sparrow, grackle, robin, blue jay, starling, downy woodpecker, chickadee, cardinal, mourning dove, house finch. Baby cardinals today!

Saturday, June 8, 2013

If it ain't one thing it's another

Remember this?

My soon-to-be sunflower forest. Well, the sunflowers had started to sprout. Then I noticed that some of them were looking a little bedraggled and that maybe some had disappeared, but I couldn't be sure.

One morning this week after I let the dogs out, I caught Scout standing in the bed, digging. So I went to the shed and pulled out all the little bits of fence I had and did this:


Lovely, isn't it? At least it'll protect my sunflowers, right?

Wrong. When I got home from work last night, I found all but one of them had been torn out. I can't blame that on Scout, so now the suspects are squirrel, rabbit and bird (probably grackle because they're obnoxious).

I have planted some more seeds, and will figure out some way to keep them protected until they can grow. It will probably involve chicken wire and be ugly, but I have to try.

Interestingly, no one bothers the sunflowers that sprout under the bird feeders.

Friday's birds: grackle, house sparrow, ringneck dove, robin, blue jay, mourning dove, starling, cardinal. Not much variety these days.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Oh that stings

The garden May 31st.
Something is snacking on my plants. I noticed on Saturday that the peas looked horrible and most of my zinnia seedlings were gone.

chewed on pea plant
I've never had problems with peas, and I never thought I had to worry about my flowers getting eaten. A couple pepper plants have been chewed on, too.


I'm assuming it's bugs, so I got out my neem Sunday afternoon and sprayed the bad looking plants. As of today, nothing looks great, but they don't look worse, either.

Even with the bug damage, the setbacks to date aren't horrible. Not all of the peas germinated, and the carrots are spotty as well. One of the pepper plants got broken and didn't survive. I planted some more zinnia seeds and am still hoping to have some beautiful flowers in the garden.

On a brighter note, some things in the garden are doing great. I've already showed you the potatoes that don't stop growing. Here are some more happy plants.

Pepper

Beets
Garlic
Onions
Baby tomato
This weekend I'm going to finally get my beans planted.

Today's birds: robin, grackle, house sparrow, mourning dove, cardinal, white-breasted nuthatch, blue jay.