Planting Under a Red Sun

After the last few turbulent months, it seemed fitting to put in this year's garden while wearing a KN-95 mask. Long story short, we moved away for three months, decided it was a mistake, and came back home. That doesn't explain why I haven't posted anything new here in nearly three years, but I hope it gives a little context as to why I'm embracing the weirdness of gardening while the sky is yellow and the sun is red from wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada.

A photo can't do justice to the otherworldly color of the sun and sky

Part of me feels like I'm cheating this year. I have often been lazy in my gardening (hence the three year gap - not that I didn't plant, I just wasn't very active about it) but never have I relied almost exclusively on store-bought plants.

We bought the plants from Lowe's - and they were on sale!

We moved back into our house in early June. After unpacking everything and getting resettled (it was done quickly as I can't stand living among boxes), I turned my attention to the garden. Last summer's growing season fell in a shmita year, so I put in some wildflower seeds and let the garden do as it liked. (Click here to read my post about it.) I had done some cleaning up of the garden last fall, so it wasn't too much of a chore to get it back into planting order.

The garden before

Some flowers had come back from last year including one strong daisy plant (which I transplanted into one of the flowerbeds), and a lovely California poppy that I weeded around. I pulled out the sweet alyssum, forget-me-nots, and pretty little orange flowers that I couldn't readily identify to make room for my veggies. There was also quite a bit of dill growing in one of the beds. I decided to keep it and planted the cucumbers with it.

Dill and cucumbers, a perfect pairing

As has been typical of the garden, it was once again a bunny nursery this year. The munchkins were still resident when we first moved back but by the time I was ready to plant, they had moved out. I did make sure to repair the holes in the fence through which they had been coming and going. I love bunnies but I don't feel the need to actively feed them.

Bunnies hiding under the rhubarb on a hot day

Mama bunny made her nest in the pathway this year

So, with bunnies out and weeds pulled, I put in the plants I had purchased at Lowe's - two types of tomatoes, yellow and green squash, cantaloupe, basil, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes - and a few leftover seeds from previous years - chard and radishes. As I wrote before, I feel a bit like I cheated by using so many purchased plants but I'll just have to live with it.

All planted!

And while I actively made efforts to keep the rabbits from getting back in a eating my garden, I was more lenient with some other tenants - black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. I haven't seen them again since the heavy rains we had a few days ago, but I hope they're still around.

What’s Eating Our Garden? (Besides Us)

 It has been a highly-productive year for the garden. We’ve had pounds of chard, stacks of zucchini, buckets of tomatoes, and more cucumbers than you can shake a stick at. I’m personally up to a 2-cucumber-a-day habit. I fear when we run out, I’ll have to wear some sort of patch to ease myself off of them. While we’ve been eating fresh produce as fast as we can, sharing with friends, freezing and preserving, there’s still a great abundance. That is likely why I am not being particularly strict about all the other species that also happen to be enjoying our produce.

The most blatant offenders have been the squirrels. I don’t think I would mind so much if they just picked one tomato or cucumber and just ate that. But noooo, they have to sample half a dozen vegetables. I hate finding tiny tooth marks on an otherwise perfect zucchini. If it’s not too bad, we trim the chewed off bits, but often it’s too much or we find it too late. I can shrug off one or two ruined pieces of veg, but they’re starting to get out of hand. We’ve finally taken a hard line on the tree rats, but it doesn’t seem to be making that much of a difference yet. 

A squirrel left this half-eaten tomato right on the top of the garden gate!

Here's one of the cagey little jerks. I've found they're rather photo-shy.

The deer have gotten a bit too fresh themselves. I planted some rattlesnake beans along the back of one of the garden beds. I made sure to put the trellis away from the fence a bit, but apparently not far enough. Last year, the yard long beans, planted on the other bed at the back of the garden, were right against the fence. The deer enjoyed them quite thoroughly, but I didn’t really care because I didn’t enjoy the taste or texture of the beans. It seems, however, that I trained the deer to come looking for beans. 

It is fun to see them in the back yard.

Too bad they've been eating my beans!

As this year’s beans grew, the trellis started to lean back against the fence. I didn’t not pull it forward in time, so the deer got a taste. They must have really enjoyed the delicate purple spotted pods because even after I reset the trellis, the deer reached over the fence to continue eating them. They had to step up on some sandbags and stretch to do so. Well, my husband devised a solution with a recycled piece of fence. Let’s see Bambi get to my beans now!

Anti-Bambi technology.

Another unsurprising garden invader has been stem borers. We’ve had problems with those little beasties since we started gardening. I’ve read that the best way to get rid of them is to run a wire into the holes in the stem and skewer the larva. Yeah, no. That makes my stomach turn just thinking about it, so they’ve just had their way with our zucchini plants. In the grand scheme of things I don’t mind too much. While the stems have been just torn apart, we have gotten several dozen zucchini already and the plants are managing to keep going. I imagine we could find some heavy-duty poison to eradicate the problem, but there are too many other insects we actually want in the garden like bees and butterflies.

The stems are a mess...

...but the fridge is full of zucchini!

I have to admit that I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for caterpillars. I blame raising monarchs in elementary school. This year, I gave up a second harvest of dill for a trio of swallowtail caterpillars. My husband and I actually moved them from the dill patch in one part of the garden that they had eaten down to just stems to patch in another bed. I’ve already dried a bunch of dill weed and used some of the seed heads for pickles, so I’m willing to sacrifice for the squishy little guys.

Raawr!

We have monarch caterpillars in our orange milkweed too, so that’s exciting!

One thing that hasn’t been eating our garden is the rabbits. Last year, as some may remember, I neglected the garden to the point that a rabbit raised a litter of babies in our pak choi patch. The perimeter fence has been secured since then, so no one is living in there this year. One bunny did, however, consider having her litter under our clothesline; which would have been a very bad idea. We got to watch her one evening digging a hole and lining it with fur. Fortunately, she seems to have abandoned her efforts. I wonder if she was one of the babies from the garden. She does seem particularly young and dumb.

Her lovely little nest we hope she doesn't use.

The sweet little dumb bunny.