Indian summer

We had a hard frost the other night, hard enough to do in the zinnia and marigold but not the bee's friend. I threw a sheet over the coleus on the front porch (which didn't help much) and the herbs on the deck (they survived). Now we are back to more moderate nightly temps as the trees turn and the yard and garden work winds down.

The plants from Prairie Nursery are in place on the south side of the house, and most appear to be doing fine. (Since this is the time of year when they go dormant, I'm hoping root growth is making up for the lack of vigor above ground.) It has been unusually dry, so I water them every two days.

Thanks to Mr. (or Ms.) Woodchuck, the sweet potato harvest was disappointing, especially considering all the trouble of raising them in black felt grow bags. Besides continuing to make my garden less accessible to wildlife, next year I may actually try (once again) growing sweet potatoes in the garden proper, as my SO has doubled the height of some of the raised beds.

I don't feed the birds during the summer, as they seem more interested in dining on fresh foods. While it is too soon to plug in the bird bath, the cool temps and calling jays remind me to fill the feeders. The spilled seed attracts the non-avian clean up crew, including this young squirrel.

Its appearance drove the indoor cat nuts.

Sometimes by fall, I'm a little sick of the yard and garden, but this year I am trying to be more diligent about cleaning out the vegetable beds. Also, anything that can be done now may (hopefully) ease the hectic pace of spring. And in the back of my mind are changes I want to wreak upon the yard going forward.

What plans do you have in mind for your yard and garden next year?

A mighty fortress is my garden

As they say, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. That goes for fences, too, in its own way. Despite the pickets, the hardware cloth at the bottom, the floppy poultry netting at the top, baby bunnies and a woodchuck pup still managed to breach the ramparts via small but vital gaps. Each time I saw a critter in the vegetable garden, I tailed it until it slipped out, then plugged the now apparent hole.

I wasn't too upset about the broccoli, as I had harvested the main heads a while back and the side shoots were petering out. But the sweet potatoes - argh!

And, to add insult to injury, *something* chomped the branches on one of my new cherry trees. Double argh!! I planned to protect them from winter injury by rabbits but I did not expect to have to worry about summer damage.

It looks like whatever did this did it just for spite, as it didn't actually *eat* the branches but just chomped them off, leaving raggedy stubs. Triple argh!!!

On the good news front, I think I have a solution to the pea plant-eating sparrows: mylar tape. If that doesn't work, maybe I will enclose the entire garden in a sparrow-proof, rodent-proof cage. Or give up.

A little frosty

A mild frost Saturday night did nothing discernible to the garden except for some of the sweet potatoes. I decided to empty two bags of peat onto the blueberry bed and top that with the contents of some of the sweet potato grow bags, thereby starting the fall harvest. Those bags of dirt were heavy! To allow the use of a small garden cart, I had to remove a couple of butternut squash and a sugar pumpkin from their still green vines as they were in the way. I managed to muscle three bags over to the blueberry beds before I decided that was enough for one day.

Last year's sweet potato harvest was a total bust. This year's is not quite so bad, but it is not going to be good, either, judging by the contents of those three bags. For one thing, a woodchuck decimated the plants early on, before we built a fortress around the garden. Then my placement of the grow bags and pots turned out to be too shady once the zinnias and sunflowers reached their full height. The never-really-hot temps did not help, either; I don't think we had a single day of 90+ weather.

Now I'm grumpy about the lack of a hard frost. This is the first year I have had such success with squash and pumpkin, and I want them to hold into the winter, which means leaving them on the vine as long as possible. It's difficult to do much of any other clean up in the garden until those vines are done, as they reach into almost every corner and bed.

The weather is usually different from year to year, but the past few years it seems more different in more ways than ever before. Can you say "climate change"?

Deja vu all over again!

When I saw this...

... I thought it was rabbits at work. But with all the fencing, how in the world could they get in? And then I saw this...

...when I should have seen this...

...and I knew. That damn groundhog (or one of its cousins) was back. So the order of the day was to clear out the area behind the garden next to the shed and to make improvements to the movable fence. The bottom was already lined with hardware cloth, to block bunnies and prevent digging. Now it is topped with floppy chicken wire, which hopefully will deter Mr./Ms. Woodchuck. I thought of borrowing my neighbor's Havahart, but I'm afraid all I'd catch would be Finn.

Speaking of which, I saw him stalking something in the garden and from the avian chorus, assumed it was a bird. Now I'm thinking it was the groundhog, as Finn subsequently parked himself between the broccoli and the sweet potatoes for most of the morning. Too little too late, buster.