Garden Progress

We have been really slow getting our garden going this year. Between finishing the semester, starting a new job, visiting Ohio a few times, and complicated weather, we finally got all of our seeds and plants in a week and a half ago. We are still working on building our enclosed garden structure for the larger bed.

Here are a few pictures from our garden adventures thus far:

This is what Eliza usually looks like after spending any more than 2 minutes helping in the garden. Keeping dirt out of her mouth is next to impossible, so we just try to make sure she just gets a minimal number of rocks, sticks, and bugs in her doses of dirt.

Note the 2 kids (ages 8 and 10) on the other side of the fence. Whenever Mike is working in the yard or garden, these two are there to ask him a million questions about everything in the universe and to tell him random stories. Mike is so nice to them and answers all of their questions and teaches them cool things. Stopping to show them every bug he encounters definitely makes the work go slower, but it really makes their day to have a such a fun, grown-up backyard neighbor. Oh, and Eliza adores their dog.

We needed some extra hands to help with the heavy lifting, so we had Ellis over. Those 40 lb bags of topsoil were really wearing on Mike's back, so he's glad Ellis was willing to pitch with her young 20-month-old back.

If you look past the grass that needs a serious mow, you'll see our pumpkin and zucchini set-up. When we moved in, this area was a little shrine with roses in each corner and a bird bath in the center. The rose bushes didn't survive the winter so we took them out and used the area for a little more garden space. We also have cucumbers planted along the fence to the right.

This is where we're at right now (even though these pictures were taken nearly a week ago). In case you didn't tune in to the last garden post, the purpose for the complete enclosure is the squirrels. With huge trees come a huge squirrel problem. They ate all of our green tomatoes last year, dug out our tulip bulbs, ate the other tulip heads, and dug out our cucumber seeds, to name a few offenses. And since the garden has been like Eliza's giant sandbox for the past 2 months, the cage will also be protecting the plants from her!

The small bed has some zucchini, peppers, and strawberries. The cage is made in 2 sections of 2x2s and chicken wire. The cage is about 2 feet high and is easily removed for weeding and harvesting.

We had hoped to finish the cage before heading to Ohio this past weekend, but the back center 2x4 cracked and broke when Mike was attaching the roof beam. This cage stands about 8 feet tall. The choice of height was more for the gardener than the plants, in case you were wondering why it's gigantic.

So far in this bed we have planted tomatoes, more peppers, lettuce, green onions, carrots, and spinach. We have some potatoes long overdue to go in, but we're waiting for the cage to be up, otherwise the squirrels will no doubt dig them up.