And it begins.....gardening 2012

Went up to the garden yesterday morning and found.....



Time to make Bread-and-Butter Pickles! After being sliced, they went into the syrup and it all got cooked down.



And I got these!



I took a jar to my sister's last night and we ate the entire jar. We just love bread-and-butter pickles.

The cucumber vines are just loaded with flowers, but I probably won't have any more cukes this coming weekend. But I'm thinking that by the following weekend, I'm going to be up to my ears in cucumbers. That's OK....I need to make lime pickles and I really want to try cinnamon pickles this year, too. And more bread-and-butter pickles!

Yum! I love pickles. I want to go to the farmers market and buy some cucumbers and make dill pickles. I wish I could have a garden, but I don't have any room for that here. 

Our cucumber plants are doing well too. Only 3 or 4 that are ready to be picked but TONS of blooms! I've never canned before, but I have a feeling I'm going to be doing it this year between the cukes and the beans (15 plants). I have my mom's recipe for bread and butter pickles but I need one for regular pickles. DH isn't real fond of the bread and butter ones but I love them!

Our cucumbers are winding down for the summer.  Time to plant for fall!!
 

So- you got any good remedies for deer?  SIGH. 

Bambi and friends are having a feast in the garden we planted.  Dh is so mad.  They ate all the bean plants I put out, all the cucumber plants I put out.  Nibbled off the tops of the tomatoes (and there were tomatoes on there grrrrr).  Ate the tops off the pepper plants.  I know it's Bambi- there's hoof prints (and poop) in the backyard. 

The cats are clueless.  There was one out back and Holly just sat on the swingset and watched it.  Afraid to chase them, they've come crashing through glass before. 

Never mind the fact that we back up to WOODS and there's tons of plants in there that they could eat.  NOOOOO- they have to eat our garden.  AND they've started nibbling on the flowerbed we've got in the side- the flowerbed that we put money into to make the house look nice for graduation. 

If hunting was legal here (I don't think it is b/c we're in the "burbs and I don't think you can use a shotgun this close to housing) I'd be telling friends that there's venison here for the taking.

Sorry to sound so heartless.  Most of the time I love the "critters" in our backyard.  I'm just tired of the wildlife thinking my yard is a snack bar.

Cheryl

I hear you, Cheryl. We go through it with the rabbits and the groundhogs. Fortunately the deer seem to be leaving the gardens alone. We do have the veggie garden fenced-in with a 3-1/2 foot tall fence the whole way around, although if they wanted to, they could just bend down over it. I get very frustrated sometimes and have often threatened the animals here with rabbit stew and groundhog pot pie.

We have a 4-foot picket fence around our pool. One night a deer jumped over the fence and ran on the concrete the length of the pool. She got caught on a picket when she tried to make the leap out of the fenced-in area and back into the yard. We looked the next morning, but didn't see any blood, so we assumed that she didn't do a lot of damage to her breast. We think something was chasing her because normally they didn't used to come that close to the house. But it doesn't help that our neighbors put a veritable smorgasboard out for all the wildlife either. The animals are so tame that you can almost walk right up to them and they don't care.

There is a powder that you can put around the perimeter of the garden that supposedly will keep deer away. Liquid Fence, I think it's called. It's good for deer and for rabbits, too. That's if you don't mind chemicals.

I heard that grating soap (Irish Spring specifically) over plants and flowers will keep deer away.....you need to do it early and often.

This is from another site and may be helpful:

Human hair clippings from your local beauty shop sprinkled around the plants.

Blood meal sprinkled around the plants.

Moth ball flakes sprinkled all around.
 

A list of plants that deer won't eat: For annuals, use ageratum, snapdragon, salvia, nicotiana, petunia, alyssum, marigold, begonia. Do NOT use impatiens, geraniums, pansies. (Deer just adore impatiens and pansies!) For perennials, try columbine, coreopsis, foxglove, aconitum, lavender,
salvia, nepeta,rudbeckia, beebalm, babysbreath. No hosta, daylily, any type of mum or shasta daisy.

I've often said that I'd like to plant marigolds around the perimeter of the garden because deer just hate marigolds. And besides, it would make the garden look a bit nicer. I never seem to get around to it. But I can say that my grandmother planted marigolds every place she did NOT want deer to go.

(We were weeding last night and I found some cukes that I swear were not ready to pick on Saturday. But I'm going to have to pick them this week, probably within the next couple of days or they'll get too big.)

Wow, we won't have cucumbers for another month or so!

We had horrid luck this year with our cucumbers..they kept dying.  We finally have some new ones in that are thriving, so hope to have some cukes soon..we love cucumbers, especially in a family recipe for cucumber salad.

Our big producer to date is our arugula (pulling it out, it got so out of control!), kale, romaine and red leaf.  The strawberries are producing, but only 2 or 3 here and here.  The tomatoes have tons of flowers..can't wait.  I think the hubbard plant is surviving but it's not doing much else ;-)

Our first ever celery is growing very nicely - fun to watch <G>.

Last year our tomatoes produced and produced, but a lot of them never turned red. They just sat on the vine, completely green. We thought that maybe we had planted them too close together; either that or all the rain we had last year stopped them from ripening. This year, we planted as many plants and we planted different varieties, planted them farther apart, too. We have tons of flowers and a few tomatoes. But so far, they're not very red at all again. And now we're in for a few days of below normal temps until Thursday when we go back into the 90s.

I really wanted to plant some spinach, but we never got any in the ground. I thought about celery, but didn't know how hard it would be to grow and I was leery.

Our strawberry plants did flower a bit (they're new this year), but I was told to remove all the flowers to keep the plant itself more energy, so as fast as they'd produce a flower, I'd pick it off. They're really running now and we're staking the babies down.

And when I was up there last night, I saw a few cucumbers that I must have missed on Saturday morning. I'm going to use them tonight in a Fire and Ice salad.

Last year, we didn't pick much of anything before around mid-or the end of July. With the wacky warm weather, though, I had picked a few hot peppers around the beginning of June!