Gardening

ByMatt

I can’t believe it’s July already. Time is flying by this summer. June has been a mixture of hot and dry with cold and rainy, and that has been good for my garden. Last year, I built two raised beds, each 8′ x 4′, but I only got one bed filled with dirt. It yielded some nice tomato plants that I had started from seed, until the goat got in and ate them down. This year, I got the second bed filled with dirt and built two more 8′ x 2′ beds which I filled with strawberry plants. The two larger boxes contain tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, cilantro, and basil and some marigolds to help keep bugs away. The photo above was from early last week, and everything is doing well. The lettuce had been looking good, so this weekend, we actually picked a few leaves and had a very delicious home-grown salad. And then, for some reason, that got the chickens interested as well. The next day, we found the chickens eating lettuce out of the long boxes also full of lettuce on the porch. That’s when I ran outside to discover they had gotten to the garden supply first. All that gorgeous lettuce was gone in an instant.

I’m not sure what set them off. They had been in and around the garden area the entire season and not touched a plant. I wonder if by picking off leaves, the lettuce plants emitted a chemical that the chickens picked up on and finally noticed that the lettuce was there. I’ve since taken precautions to exclude the chickens from the fenced-in garden. We got some chicken wire and attached it to the gate, but had discovered that the chickens were still getting in. It turns out that the one side of the fence didn’t actually reach the ground, and the birds were able to walk right under it. So, I blocked that off and so far the chickens haven’t been back to bother the crops. I’m hoping that enough plant material is left for new leaves to start growing, but just in case, I planted some more seeds, though they won’t be ready for consumption for another two months. But by that time, the tomatoes and peppers should be ready and we can have a fully home-grown salad.

On the flower front, one of my natives that I bought and planted last summer had survived, and so the blanketflower is now in bloom. I also noticed a couple of sunflower plants growing. I hadn’t planted any this year, so they must have come from the bird feeder. One was starting to get pretty big when Mower (the goat) decided it was a lovely snack. Mow also loves to eat roses, and I noticed a few blooms on our rose bush had gone missing, so the goat is now grounded from the free snack buffet until the flower season comes to an end. She’s already eaten most of the flower buds from the day lilies, but a few remain in the back of the house.

Now that we had the mud/horse manure compost scraped into a big pile, it’s much easier to load into the cart. I’ll work on adding more raised beds to the vegetable garden, but we can also add some nice compost to the flower gardens this fall to help control weeds and feed the plants. We’re also going to rip out the creeping cedar bush that seems to be taking over and plant the area with flowers to attract hummingbirds and butterflies. I’d like to do mostly native wildflowers, but I’ll settle for a few cultivated varieties.

Similar Posts

  • Let it Snow

    Winter has made a comeback here on the Palouse. After several weeks of warm weather into the 50’s, the temperatures have cooled down, but the precipitation remains. The snow began Monday night, giving us only an inch or two, not much to worry about. But the snow continued throughout Tuesday dropping another two inches on Moscow. However, for every inch of snow that Moscow gets, Deary gets 2-3 times that, and so we had about 6 inches on our driveway when I got home Tuesday night. I got to use our new snow blower for the first time to clear…

  • Hard drives and data storage

    I’ve come into a real conundrum lately. I’m running out of space on my hard drive. Earlier in the year when I thought my hard drive was dying, I bought an external drive which I use to move old files for storage and back up my current system. The problem is that using the external hard drive as a working drive is not an ideal solution when my primary (read: only) computer at the moment is a portable notebook. Thus, I don’t want to be using the external hard drive to store all of my music and photography, the two…

  • What might the native prairie have looked like?

    It’s hard to imagine what America’s prairies looked like when they were unspoiled. Today, more than 95% of our prairies and grasslands have been repurposed for agriculture. The last remnants are so highly fragmented that it’s a fight to keep non-native invasive species from taking over. Prairies and grasslands were once thought to be ecological wastelands, a monoculture of grass with not much productivity. From a distance, the prairie might seem like a boring place. But up close, prairies have the capacity to harbor more diversity than some forests. To really appreciate all that these grasslands have to offer, it’s…

  • 5000 feet

    It snowed in Moscow for the first time this season on Thursday. And although the accumulation didn’t amount to much in town, the mountains were turned white the next day. But two days of sunshine, and evidence of the snow is all but gone. The mountains around Moscow are back to their baren self. But at 5000 feet, winter has begun. Today I drove up to the Bald Mountain lookout tower on Palouse Divide, mostly to find a geocache, but also to enjoy the view, hike in the forest, and see just how much snow may have fallen at higher…

  • Photos

    Mount Adams Summit Originally uploaded by mineral2. Well, I’m finished scanning 5 of 6 rolls from the fall. It sounds pitiful, but there are lots of great shots. Last Fall I shot off 9 rolls between Alabama and North Carolina. In the spring, I topped that with 13 rolls including the hike in Virginia. Add 2 more over the summer and the 6 from the fall and I’m up to 21 for 2006. Actually, I finished off number 22 yesterday, but I probably won’t have a chance to scan that in for a while. Look for a White Mountains gallery…

  • Flight Paths

    [map style=”width: auto; height:400px; margin:20px 0px 20px 0px; border: 1px solid black;” maptype=”ROADMAP” gpx=”http://www.mineral2.com/wp-content/uploads/Flights.GPX”] If you don’t already know me, I have a thing for maps and geography. It’s an absolute delight to see the landscape from the air. I’ve been bringing my GPS with me when I fly, mostly to keep track of flight progress and to identify what I’m seeing out the window. But it’s also interesting to see how the FAA routes flights. Spoiler Alert: it’s not a direct path between cities. The two tracks above show the flight path between Phoenix and Cancun in both directions….