Vegetable Gardening

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Progress trudges along....

I have the estimates on several of the cheaper-end styles of permanent sturdy professionally installed garden fence. All obscenely expensive, but the fence will last longer than me probably, and be pretty maintenance free and varmint-proof. It'll be 7 feet tall- enough for the rare deer we get passing through here.
Now I have to decide on the fence style among the 5 or 6 choices in my budget range. Then it's wait for the excavator to be able to fit me in his schedule to come with the topsoil and digging.

We now have a red fox living right in our backyard under our shed. He is (so far) too smart to go in the big Havaheart trap set with cat food for the past 3 nights. He really can't stay here since we are pretty much right in the village and he needs to be more in the countryside. There was a litter of foxes and their mother wandering the neighborhood and this one picked our shed to burrow under.

Meanwhile, my little mini-veggie garden is literally exploding in growth now. Lots of baby green tomatoes the size of large marbles, everything looking so lush! I've been staking and pruning the tomatoes up off the baby lettuces, and thinning the many radishes to 1 1/2" apart. I've learned to spread the seed a bit further apart as I plant it. I have baby romaine and bok choy coming up nicely, and my scallions are happy 2" tall green shoots now in a long row. I'm judiciously clipping back some of the stringbean/waxbean leaves too, to continue letting the radishes get sun.

But harvest-wise, I've got plenty of Swiss chard and TONS of leaf lettuce- we are now having fresh green salads almost every day. In fact, I am going to pick some on Monday to give to a lady I know who would love some for her family with kids. We will not be able to keep up with eating it quite fast enough. But then, I just love giving away fresh garden stuff. Several years ago I had so many wonderful tomatoes that we would bring bags of them into town when we went for breakfast, and pick unsuspecting strangers to bestow them on- after an initial moment wondering if there was a 'catch' (which was always funny), people were delighted.

I haven't grown lettuce in about 20 years, and it's a great feeling to be doing it again and having success.