The Garden Gate

We finally finished building our garden. We made a little gate for the garden fence and put a spring on it so it automatically closes once you go through it. We also have some bird netting to put over the garden if needed, but so far we haven’t really had much of a problem (and you would think that the birds would be going after the strawberries), so maybe we won’t have to use it after all. The squirrels have left the garden alone so far (knock on wood), and I’m hoping that the fence will be enough to keep rabbits out. We’re dealing with some of the strawberries getting eaten a bit (by slugs, we assume), so we’ve been trying to find little forked sticks to prop the berries up off of the dirt, which has seemed to help a lot so far. Some of the tomatoes are now at least 3 ½ feet tall. And the pumpkins and zucchini plants are already trying to take over. There are flowers on the tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, and eggplants. And the biggest broccoli plant is just starting to grow a little broccoli floret. We have almost the entire garden planted now – we’ve just left a few spaces for some more potatoes, beets, and carrots (just so we don’t have them all planted and ready to harvest at the same time). It’s been fun to see this garden grow. And I think that it’ll be even nicer next year because we won’t have any building to do – just planting. Plus we’ve got 36 strawberry plants, and those should last for at least 3 – 5 years, so that’s really nice too. We are learning as we go along. I read a lot about gardening when we planned the garden, and the book said that you could train the tomato plants to vine up a fence, and that you could trim the side branches on these vining tomatoes. So I trimmed all the side branches off, then later read further on in the book that when you trim tomatoes you just cut off the little “sucker” branches that grow in the forks between the main stem and the side branches – oops, when I trimmed I just cut off all the big side branches. Oh well, we still have a good number of flowers, so hopefully I didn’t cut back too much on the number of tomatoes we’ll have this time around. I guess it’s all good to learn, and we’ll just know that much more about what we are doing for next year. But we’ve enjoyed several good big lettuce and spinach salads lately, and we’ve used the basil and cilantro in salads, pastas, and on pizzas. Oh, and we’ve enjoyed munching on the strawberries too. I’m sure looking forward to when more of the vegetables are ready to try.