The Garden

I know I've been pretty quiet lately. I'm working through my feelings of grief over the loss of Gretchen. While I still have my moments of tears, I'm feeling better. Part of the reason is that since the weather has been fabulous, my garden is taking up more time.

This was the 'tomato' garden a couple of weeks ago. You can see the 'walls of water' protecting the plants from a couple of nights of frost. Oh, and the little red wagon is loaded with swiss chard. Bridget is making her rounds to help keep the chickens out of the tomato garden!

Here's part of that garden today...the tomato plants are all loaded with flowers, and the peppers are doing quite well. I got a terrific deal on some cages for the determinate Roma style tomatoes- they were $14 last year and bright red- this year, they were $3 and faded pink...but still sturdy and tall enough for the Romas.
You can also see that we finally got the drip system in on this side of the garden. It's working quite well!

The plumeria 'stick' that I bought in Hawai'i is sprouting beautiful huge leaves. The one downside of being able to leave it outside all day is that the chickens decided they wanted to sample the leaves. Fortunately, only one leaf was eaten and they have left it alone since. It's not poisonous for chickens, so it must taste horrible....as bad as the lemon leaves. They learned to not eat those leaves the hard way last year!

The other bad news is that the beet protection plan has been defeated by hungry chickens. Nearly all the tops of the beets in the raised bed planter are nibbled down to the roots. The girls learned that if they sat on the net, it lowered enough so they could get their greedy little beaks in and pluck all those tender green and red leaves. Argh.

I guess it's a small price to pay for the joy that these funny girls bring to both of us...as well as eggs and LOTS of poop. This is Squirt, the Light Brahma, eyeing the numerous Meyer's Lemons on my dwarf tree.