Garden Updates

This weekend we tackled some gardening chores. We bought some inexpensive cattle panels. Using t-posts we already had, I was able to fence in the tender young fruit trees to protect them from the browsing sheep, goat, and cows. My efforts even gained my husband's reluctant approval. I think he was afraid I would make the fence out of leftover pallets and odd pieces of board and wire mesh. Right now the panels are being held up to the posts with simple plastic zip ties, but that is only temporary. My plan is to get some snaps that will enable me to remove the panels easily in order to easily access that area to mow the weeds grass. I'll show you what I'm talking about in a later post. (At least the idea makes perfect sense in my head.)

Next up was the out back garden. I was hoping it wasn't too soon to plant plants and I got tomatoes and pepper plants, as well as some bean and melon seeds.

It turns out it was a little too soon. We had a frost Monday night and all the peppers and one or two tomato plants perished. I'm not sure if this poor guy is going to make it or not.

We put a few buckets over the remaining tomatoes overnight and hopefully this will protect them in case of any further frost. (We removed the buckets in the morning.)

Strangely enough, the frost did not affect the side garden, next to the driveway, where we have romaine lettuce, beets, and spinach growing. Maybe those are just naturally hardier or they are more protected by the fence releasing stored day time heat? In any case, the biggest problem here seems to be the snails, which we are keeping a close eye on.

The final garden thing we got done was to rototill and plant the box in neighbor Dean's garden with corn, like we did last year.

I couldn't end this post without a picture of the lambs. Here you can see all eight of them (count the heads). The big guy in the middle is Francine's, the first born of the year.