Gardens

Sheree ♦ May 30, 2012 ♦ 5 Comments

This is a picture of part of last year’s garden which we initially planted in April.   The tomatoes, yellow squash, and zucchini didn’t do very well at the bottom of the garden.  However, the new potatoes, green beans and peppers were prolific.  It was the third time we had planted a garden.  Every year we had been having problems with ground hogs.

Last year, for the first time, the deer discovered the garden.  Of all things, three deer (if the tracks are anything to go by) ate our cayenne peppers (leaves, peppers, tender branches) all the way down to the main branches.  We couldn’t believe it.  I’d never heard of deer eating peppers.  In fact, there are pepper sprays for plants that are supposed to keep the deer away.  I felt so sorry for those poor deer, thinking they’d have terrible stomach pains.

Well, feeling sorry for them only lasted one day.  The next night they came back and ate our banana peppers.  Evidently they had stomachs of steel.  On the third night they visited again, eating all of our green peppers, leaves and all.

It would seem that the deer did us a favor, though.  After that severe “pruning” our pepper plants received, they grew back bigger and more prolific than before.  It really surprised us.

Going into the middle of the green bean season, the ground hogs came along and gave our green beans a crew cut… down each of three entire rows.  Then they ate a bit out of every single green bean.  You’d think that they would be polite enough to eat the entire bean and leave it’s neighbors alone, but no… they had to nibble on each and every single green bean that they could find.

This year we planted the garden a bit late.  I should say that my husband planted it.   It’s the end of May already and we just finished getting the last of our rows planted.  He made our garden plot even bigger and gave us more space in the main garden by digging up my strawberry patch (which wasn’t doing well at all) and planting all of our tomatoes up there.  We have 18 tomato bushes in the small plot now.   For the first time we have three rows of corn and I’m really looking forward to the time when they’re ready to eat!

Already we have found deer tracks in our garden.  If anyone out there knows how to keep deer out of your garden without errecting an 8 foot fence around it (evidently they can easily jump over 6 feet from a standing position), please let me know.    Clearly after last year’s experience with our cayenne peppers, pepper sprays seem a little innocuous.

My son is experimenting with a peanut plant that a friend gave us.  It grew to about 8″ tall in a container in the house.  He and my husband just planted it in the corner of the garden.  It will be his job to make sure that it is watered and we’ll see what comes of that.  Hopefully the deer and ground hogs will leave it alone for him.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the garden does this year.

Have a blessed week!