Yesterday morning, before it got too hot, I went out and pulled up all the lettuce that had bolted. There were a few half empty rows, one where I had pulled out all the radishes . .
Radishes
. . and one where I had pulled out all the spinach, and one where I had pulled out half a row of onions that had the dirt all washed away from them in the last big rain so I planted okra.
Okra Planted
The ground needs to be pretty warm for the okra to germinate so I usually wait til at least the middle of May before planting it here.
Every day that I walk into that garden, which is pretty much every single day of the year, I am reminded how blessed we were to find this place. So much of the ground in this area is rocky and even the ground that isn’t rocky is rarely rich and fertile but the dirt on almost all our land is amazing. I don’t think we could find better gardening soil anywhere in this entire area.
We have an 8′ fence around the garden, and a 3′ chicken fire fence along the bottom. The chicken wire is for keeping chickens and other critters, mostly rabbit, out of the garden. I kept finding rabbits in there and I’m convinced they were tunneling in but still not sure. We walked completely around the perimeter and could not find a spot where they were coming in.
Then yesterday, I saw this inside the garden:
Raccoon Tracks
I was walking along and saw that and said . . what the heck? That’s something I haven’t seen in my garden before. We’re thinking that the fence we had up before the new fence was so rickety (landscape plastic fencing) that the raccoons wouldn’t climb it. Or, it may be that I never had anything in the garden that interested them and since I have popcorn growing in there now and they love corn, that may be the reason or, it could be that we just have a huge crop of raccoons this year. Everyone seems to be catching lots of them in traps right now.
Raccoon Tracks
So, one of the traps got moved from near the chicken coops to near the garden and we’ll see what happens. If it isn’t the grasshoppers destroying my garden, it’s the rabbits and raccoons!
Linda in NE says
There’s always some challenge with gardening isn’t there? Hubby is currently complaining about the pheasants wanting to dig up the sweetcorn seed and the deer tromping all over everything and eating the green strawberries. Coons are leery of human scent so hanging t-shirts and socks that have been worn around the perimeter should discourage them. It works here anyway.
Jannette B says
We have the usual rabbits nibbling on our plants, and birds taking our berries… We had deer and coons on the farm, but nothing like that here in town.’
I’m curious about the radishes though – what do you do with them? We plant them with our carrots and red beets, because they come up sooner, and do a good job of marking the rows. We eat a few, but most of them end up on the compost pile.
Lee says
Bunny slippers and ‘Coon-skin caps ?