What the critters won’t eat
Monday June 01st 2015, 11:10 pm
Filed under: Garden,Life,Wildlife

Snap peas and round zucchini: last week we ate green veggies from our own back yard two days in a row and aside from tomatoes I don’t know that we’ve ever done that before in all our married lives. The few times we’ve tried, we had poison ivy winding up around each plant back East and the broccoli I grew here one year tasted horrible nibbled right off the plant. Cooked? All those tiny flowerlets opened up to show a tiny now-dead beetle in each. Yow.

But that explained it. I still have zero desire to plant that ever again and the lack of bugs in farmer-grown broccoli inspires for me a certain reverence.

The sense of at-long-last-success and the relief at it was instantly contagious.

And so, one new $2.79 packet later, a plastic pot a tree had come in, a bit of leftover potting soil, and voila! Way too many spinach seeds got planted tonight. Won’t take but a few cups of water a day, I hope, and the crowding will just make all the more incentive to pick off the extras at the baby-leaf stage. I’ve read that spinach doesn’t like heat but we’ve got air conditioning if need be. One more reason for the pot rather than the ground. Mobility.

That plus I’d probably have to clear away more of those tall flower stalks otherwise and having a hummingbird dance a ballet in and out of the blossoms right in front of you is incentive to let the things stay, prickly sun blockers or no. It put on quite the show last night.

Meantime, someone nearby has a peach or nectarine tree because twice today a squirrel, one gray, then one black, came running down the fence towards our yard with fruit that had just started to get a bit of color to it. What surprised me was watching this one eat till he was full. In years of plenty, squirrels have stripped my apples clean in a day, months pre-ripe, picking and biting them all trying to find that one ripe one they’re so sure must be there.

The little guy wasn’t wasting any of this precious resource this year.

(Photo of its leftovers taken with my unsteady hands above my head.) My peaches were all accounted for and untouched. I wonder whom I should be telling about the clamshells idea.


1 Comment so far
Leave a comment

Our ward has set up a community (organic) garden, and the directors have had all broccoli or cauliflower plants set up under fine mesh poofy covers secured at ground level, because of those bugs. There are a dozen raised beds for the use of those who can’t plant because they’re in apartments or rentals that won’t permit it. Fortunately we added a line enabling a garden in our lease, so we have permission–though we’ve expanded on it. Happy vegetabling!

Comment by Marian 06.02.15 @ 11:29 am



Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)