Posted on 09/16/2011 5:18:08 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Yes! That’s it. I don’t know how well it will work when there is real food hanging on the vine, but it certainly works well for my roses. The deer are still here (routed a big one out of my front yard as we returned home at 10 pm last night). The big circle with the fountain in front is protected. Another, nearby, bed that also contains 2 rose bushes, is not. The unprotected bed gets chewed to death every year. The protected ones are fine.
I bought another kind of deer repellent that works with batteries at the same time I bought the Sweeney’s (which was called something else at the time). I’ve never opened the packages. It’s more complicated to install and requires that I know which way they are coming. You are supposed to install those units on deer paths. They have a scent that attracts the deer and a shocker that scares them away. I didn’t think that they’d work for the veggie garden becuse I was also trying to keep rabbits away.
My fence has worked wellbut the decorative gate and arch has been a real disappointment. This is the end of the 2nd season and the rust is dreadful. It looked like it was powdercoated black iron, and it has the cheapest finish that you can imagine. The finish is coming off in chunks and the rust is eating it away. When the deer broke into the garden when there was 2 feet of snow on the ground they actually sheared the hinge and the latch off one of the gates. My husband fixed it, but the other side will be going next. I was going to look for new gates that would fit, but I see that the whole structure is going.
Woodchucks are around, as I said before, but they have not bothered the veggie garden.
Not quite a monsoon, but enough to mess up the ditch to require one more day of cold showers. ;)
Thank you very much. We wound up the day by eating enchiladas and black beans with cilantro rice with friends at a local brewery/eatery. I don’t drink beer, but eveyone else does. It was my birthday and their anniversary. Turtle sundaes afterward.
The best part of the day was that our shipments were excellent this week which is the first time since June that that has happened. It’s not that we have probelms making shipments; it’s getting orders! Hopefullly the rest of the year will be better.
How many years did you house your son and your daughter? Seems to me that they could make room for dear old mom and dad and dog for a couple of weeks ;^) Did you put your furniture in storage, or just cram it into other rooms?
I think that refinishing floors while living in the house is an agonizing experience that is NOT on my bucket list. We did ONE room (ourselves) back in CA 45 years ago, and I said “never again”.
Very nice pictures indeed. I never heard of the litchi tomato. I’ll have to look into it.
The corn is ready to process today. A deer ate one of my longkeeper tomatoes last night. Must try a trick I heard about the other day. My neighbor puts a handful of bloodmeal in a small container, adds water, places it near her plants and the small is supposed to deter deer. We shall see.
If whimsical flower gardening is allowed here and anyone’s curious about mine, I invite you to peek at my Chicken Expression garden here:
http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/album/580822259BmprZp
Happy real birthday to you. Sorry I’m late. Hope it was great.
Many soil amendments should be worked-in during the fall, as they will be more readily available to the garden in the spring (if, for example, you needed to add lime). A brief phone conversation with your extension agent would help, since he/she is likely to be familiar with the type of soil you are gardening (sand vs clay, etc.)
Dear John Dad
So Sad
Too Bad
You've been Had
The Cads
Oak leaves are wonderful, but decompose a little slower than other leaves, compost made just from leaves is called leaf mold.
Just put your leaves in a trash bag, make sure they are moist, tie up the bag and pole a few holes in it. Make sure and leave it in the sun.
Not usually available commercially, it is a great soil additive, but does not contain much nitrogen (heavy on the carbon).
If you make a pile composed of layers of leaves, grass clippings and kitchen waste peelings etc. you would have a pretty good compost with more beneficial stuff for the soil.
The roses have generally been disappointing, thought I could tolerate the constant thorn pricks but some have done poorly partly because of me and way I garden and partly not. I dug out several; one I hope I got enough root because my back is bad and I can't dig too deep. So that freed up some space.
So I have 6 apricot colored ones I spaced out 5 feet apart I got from Jackson Perkins about 3 or 4 years ago, bare root, own root, die pretty far back here in the winter without a lot of boxes and mulch I can't/won't do. I was thinking of trying to move them or give them away. There's a pretty pink one in front left that's too big for the narrow strip planting areas that line my sidewalk.
The 6 are Austin roses, Crown princess Marguerita, good rebloom but Jap beetles ruin 6-8 weeks of it. They shoot up 4 to 6' canes unpredictably, a short climber. It came to me in a flash the other day what to do with them. Peg them. Went straight to an old video I'd watched I thought I'd never need. The idea is to get the canes lateral or circular so they shoot up shorter canes and tons more blooms. So there's that to try next year. Same idea as training grapes I think.
I'm really really really excited about some glass gem corn I've been promised as soon as it becomes available. From the photo, it looks glassy, vibrant colors and transparent but may have a very short cob, hard to know.
Frost north of us, couple really chilly days, got flowers that have been sitting in plastic cups and some bought in spring planted. Have 5 raspberries left to plant, 2 asters, and one potted little tree to sink into the ground til spring because I don't have a cold frame. A tulip tree. They come up all around my yard from neighbor's across the street, and many come up where they can't be easily separated from something to transplant. They would cost quite a bit at a nursery, don't know why I'm doing it, maybe stick some overflow that doesn't need high maintenance on the farm.
So that's enough for now. Hope to do some beans, Siberian tomatoes and maybe peppers next year and MUST plant about 6 kinds of herbs a higher priority than the veggies even. Growing veggies is sometimes more work than just getting at the store or Farmer's Market (ducking). I have a tiller but no more tilling. Lasagna gardening although it would be nice if I could have a couple raised beds like people here seem to think are a must. Tilling brought up tons of grass and weed seed and does every time you do it. Grass b Gon took care of it one year. I'm told you can mulch with 6 layers of newspaper and old cardboard and catalogs, some soil, then mulch but I don't like the expense of mulch so am going to use grass clippings and oak leaves, will watch for neighbor to put out theirs. Oak leaves are supposed to be really good but don't know why. The things people do. Worm farms for castings. Alfalfa tea. Composting. Cloning, rooting cuttings, controlled hybridizing on their own, have seen some marvelous daylilies and, of all things, zinnias. Takes dedication and patience.
I'm also trying to slowly get some nice stands of iris and daylilies, some setbacks with those. Enough for now.
That hard part is will it cook hot enough to kill the weed and grass seeds? I bag what I can of that, let the city take it, then it gets in their compost :-(.
If you have deer you will almost certainly have rabbits and raccoons. That’s another reason for the “buried” chicken wire. It seems that they give up once they try a few places - because they don’t know how far down (or out) to dig. We haven’t had a groundhog since we did the buried fencing-but we see them all over the neighbors yards. They are like cockroaches around here.
The only reason I got a few bunnies was because I was lazy about putting the chicken wire tight to the yard fencing and zipping it together in a couple of places. A few found some low gaps and hopped through the yard fencing while they were still tiny. I have most of it fixed, and will fine tune it after we strip the garden next week. At one point we had three generations of bunnies hopping all over our back yard.
Season here is about done.
One thing that I worry about with grass clippings is the fert/weed killer that my husband puts on twice a year. So, we don’t use any of our grass clippings for our composer.
I’m going to spread a tarp under our big maple to catch the leaves and then just drag it on over to the garden and throw most of it in, till it in, and the rest goes into the composer. But the trash bag thing works great. I’ve done that in the past and it’s amazing how you start with this big stuffed bag of leaves and a few months later it’s composted down to such a small amount. I love leaf mold.
That is what I think.
We picked up some deer resistant Michigan native plants at one of the parks I mentioned earlier today. A bit premature perhaps but they don't sell them all the time. We got two varieties of fern, swamp milkweed, white indigo and a prickly pear. We have heard that you can protect deer candy plants by pairing them up with similarly sized deer resistant plants.
Well I come from a farming family. One thing I remember my Grandfather doing was always planting a garden four times the size he needed. Another was telling me year after year that none of the things he’d tried - scarecrows, soaps, tin pans, plantings, chemical deterrents - etc., ever worked.
So, he planted the bigger garden in hopes of having about what he needed left over after the wildlife got it’s share.
I don’t have the space or the humanity (?) for that, so I built a fencing system. Screw the wildlife - let them eat what nature provides I say! LOL.
The weather and insects get enough of my crops. :)
green peppers freeze well to be used for sauces, etc....and jalpenos....they last and last for years in the freezer....
my tomotoes for some reason are outstanding this year...I planted a variety of plants and some are producing 1 pound and over tomatoes....I think I'll have pulled in about 300 pounds seriously....but I'm not canning....at least not yet....I'm taking the peels off and freezing them for now.....
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