I know. I know. It's important to get in your garden every day. At least, every other day. Not just on weekends. Ashamedly, I've only been a weekend gardener and it shows. I hand-weeded around our small plants this weekend in the blistering hot sun, but still only covered about 30% of the garden. And there are still weeds in the walkways. Ugh. Every day, Erica. Get out there every day. How do you motivate yourself to just do it? Something Different and Exciting Happened Though... But yesterday, instead of freaking out about my three year old walking all over the plants, I just let him come to me in the garden after he got bored with swinging on the hammock. He sat down next to me and watched me pull weeds while we talked about plants and how they would be food soon. He asked if baby rabbits ate their vegetables. What about daddy rabbits? And mama rabbits? Of course, this was after a discussion on the tiny golden nuggets I advised him to avoid. Somehow talking to this kid usually includes a reference to poop. Then he got sleepy and was curling up in my lap, wallowing in my big gardening dress, holding his book over his eyes. That was what I wanted. I wanted to have peaceful gardening time with him, instead of yelling at him not to step on our tiny seedlings, stop throwing dirt, whining. Finally! I need better ways to involve him more, because he loves being outside and I know he's going to geek out over the magic of "seeds in, plants out" as much as we do. Must research: What are some of the garden tasks most suited to toddlers? The Plants! They're Making It! The bean bushes are standing about 9-12" tall and have a lot of tiny white blooms on them. Some of the squash plants are standing 6" tall and already have yellow blooms on them, but maybe they should still be working on getting bigger, rather than putting all their energy into growing fruit right now. We did get a late start, after all. Should i pinch the blooms or just be grateful we have some? On Another Exciting Note - The Ducks Rocky built the duck house yesterday! All the ducks that have been in the "dog Pen" got to see some freedom! I can't wait to share the pictures with you. It appears that the Irish Spring Soap Helped. In hand-weeding this weekend, I only saw one little pile of golden nuggets, instead of many. So, that's great.
What does this mean? It's going to take a bar of soap each week to cover half of the fence line to keep rabbits out of our garden? Maybe I'm cheap, but that seems like too much for me. It's supposed to rain all week, but when it stops, I'm going to sprinkle some hair clippings from my hairdresser's floor. We will see how that does. The seeds Rocky planted last week have popped up already and look healthy, so, progress. I planted the last of the tomato, pepper, & cucumber plants that had more than four leaves on Saturday, but on Sunday, they have wilted and shriveled. Note to self, and I knew better, don't transplant seedlings in the heat of the middle of the day. That was dumb. So, regress. Nothing was harvested this week. Two steps forward, one step back. So. Here are the first three turnips that were planted willy nilly in the garden. They're the first crop to come up. Since it's my first time growing turnips, I wasn't sure what to look for, but two of these were busting out of the ground a half inch, so I thought we were good to go. We didn't eat the leaves since they're pretty holey and really, who wants to stink up the house for eleven scrawny, holey leaves? The pigs were really excited about them, though. I tossed the tiny cut up turnip roots in with a roast chicken, carrots, and onions. We'd definitely eat more. Also, we've got Rabbits. The golden pellets don't lie. I was researching ways to keep them out of our garden and found repeated references to the following: 1. Irish Spring Soap gratings - They don't like the smell. 2. Human Hair - Something about the smell. 3. Dogs and Cats - Reckon they don't like being smelled. 4. Human Urine - I don't know anyone who likes the smell. 5. Something else - I don't recall this morning, but it probably had something to do with smell. So, since the dogs bark all night but never bring me any rabbits, and the cats prefer sleeping on my feet to chasing said rabbits, and I don't have a human hair collection yet, Irish Spring is obviously my first choice. So I went out with my box grater and sprinkled shavings along half of the fence line before running out of bar. I could smell why rabbits don't like the smell of Irish Spring. I don't think I like the smell of it either. I'll let you know if it works. ~ Erica
2. Build a stand-alone goat hut in the pasture. This one is more a chore for my husband. We currently have the goats in a huge plastic thing that used to be a vat of cooking oil or something. There's a door cut in it, and it's sitting under a covered lean-to, which is part of the shed. It's very possible the new pigs have taken this over. Or the flies have booted them all out (we have GOT to do something about them!) We saw some little goat houses on campus at Tuskegee University in March that Rocky thought he could duplicate here on our farm. They just look like someone took a wide sheet of metal and made an arch, then secured the ends in the dirt. It would definitely get a lot more air-flow, which, personally, I believe those little stinkers need. |