Rabbits and Carrots

This morning I spotted my garden enemy, the neighborhood rabbit.  Our regular visitors are much bigger, so I'm guessing our rabbits had babies.  Now I have even more critters to keep out of the garden!

You can see the rabbit near center of below photo, hopping straight for the veggie garden!

I headed straight out to the garden to scare the rabbit away and thinned out some carrots.  Two of the carrots look like they became very close...

Vegetable Garden

I am excited to say my vegetable garden is sprouting and thriving!  I transplanted the seedlings a week ago, and they are loving their new home.  I had hoped to build my own planters out of lumber, but found really nice heavy-plastic planters at the hardware store and decided those would be just fine.  I now have about 32 square feet of planting area!

I completely forgot about these wild strawberries that pop up back by our shed.  The berries are so tiny and good, I just need to keep the wildlife away from them this year!

Little carrot sprouts thriving in their new home.

The broccoli is growing like mad!

 And my snap pea plants are climbing away!

The garlic, sweet onions, green onions, sage, pumpkins and potatoes are all off to a good start as well.  I'm really looking forward to eating out of our garden in a few months!

The zucchini starts started off SO strong and I couldn't wait for the end product.  But, with Blake 'helping' me transplant, we ended up losing most of the plants.  He preferred carrying the plants by their stems resulting in decapitation of the seeding! :)  I bought some cucumber starts from the store and hope to buy zucchini starts to replace my seedlings.

I've already had to spray for some bugs attempting to eat our veggies (using a veggie safe bug replellant), but I think we're growing good!

Starting the Garden

Today I planted seeds for a variety of vegetables: zucchini, snap peas, carrots, sweet onions, green onions, pumpkin, broccoli and sunflowers.  We've also got some rosemary, parsley, chives and basil already growing and happy (as well as some watermelon starts from a kit Blake planted - no idea if those will make it in this climate though). I love eating homegrown food, and I think it is even more important when you want to know where your food comes from and what it may or may not be treated with.

I've got 144 dirt pods now filled with seeds, so hopefully I'll get a good crop to plant in the yard.  Where to plant in the yard is another issue... It is me vs. the husband vs. the rabbits vs. the sprinklers.  I think I'll be building a raised bed to solve most of the problems...

Fruit Fly Trap

Today I carried on the tradition of picking blackberries at the cabin. My grandma had this down to a science but still came back with the usual scrapes, thorns and blackberry juice stains. I used her tricks and picked about 10 or 11 cups of wild blackberries just from our property, so ripe they fell off the vine.

At the end of the day we had an infestation of fruit flies. They probably followed me in from the blackberry patch, but who knows. Anyways, had to use the old vinegar trick (again, grandma would be so proud), and wanted to share this on the blog for anyone with fruit fly issues...

Pour apple cider vinegar in to a small bowl. Cover bowl tightly with plastic wrap and poke a few small holes in top. Make them so flies can get in but they can't easily escape. The smell of the apple vinegar will drive flies nuts and you'll be amazed at how many you'll catch!