'Bout Time! The Garden, Bug, and Pest Chronicles

One of the best things about this house is that we have space to put in a garden.  We tried to pick the sunnyest part of the yard that we could and a place that had enough drainage that our garden wouldn't drown when we get the torrential downpours that seem so commom here.  We planted squash, broccoli, three kinds of lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and jalepenos.  We also planted bell peppers in our pots (not shown below).  Our jalepenos never came up so we probably need to get some new seeds.  Right now we have squash, maybe one cucumber, lettuce, bell peppers, broccoli, and our tomatoes surving.  Now I'll tell you the story of what they've had to survive.

One weekend we put in a garden, actually Josh put in the garden and I watched him dig and shook dirt off of grass clumps. 



Digging the garden.

It has a border!! Go Josh!

 Then we bought what we needed and planted.  After a few days Josh came home from work and noticed nibble marks on a squash plant.  He also noticed that our cucumbers were coming up!  We discussed what to do about nibble marks and decided we needed a fence.  Sadly, before the fencing materials were bought all the leaves on one squash plant and all of the baby cucumber plants were eaten.  The fence was put up and the squah plant made a comeback, and one more cucmber plant made an appearance. 

The fence: sqaush on the left end tomato on the right.

We thought the tale was headed for a happy ending, then Sarah watched a bird land in the garden head to the squash plant and snip the leaves off with it's beak and fly away taking the leaves with it.  Now we have netting on top though we don't have a picture of it to share.  Stupid bird, we thought it was just the rabbits and gophers.  

We have these random patches of strawberries growing in our yard.  There's no order to where they pop up, in the middle of the yard, on the edge of the yard, underneath a small grove of trees... you name it.  Some patches are bigger than others but we're keeping an eye on them to see how big they get and if they'll be any worth eating or making jam or something.

 

 

 

Our gopher family is pretty fun to watch.  There's a little one, who got picked up in the first picture, and he's pretty cute.  They pop up every once in a while and we watch them go around our yard eating clover or leaves/grass or whatever it is that they're going around eating.  The little one does eat clover flowers, apparently they're pretty good.