The Bounty!!

It's cool inside, but it sure isn't outside. It was ninety degrees in the shade with 63% humidity, I can't imagine how women survived a hundred or more years ago all bound up tight in multiple layers of clothing.

Baby beach plum (and weeds) in protective custody.

I've been busy trying to reduce the impact the deer have on our trees.  Almost every baby tree has 4' high barrier to keep the deer from browsing.  Some day someone will look at our oddly shaped fruit trees and wonder why we ever pruned them that way and the answer would be, "We didn't, the deer did."

As I was out there cutting fence sections early this morning, the deer were hanging along the edges of the property.  I walked toward them and they did not behave as wild deer should.  They just stood there looking at me.  Some serious deer feeding is going on around here, they are not afraid.  There are two does that we see regularly, the larger buff colored doe and the reddish doe.  We see other deer sometimes, but these two are the regulars. 

One nice flower bud on top, tonight they feast!

They find my Julia Child roses very tasty, which is both amusing and annoying.  Each time the rose gets close to blooming, the buds get nibbled off in the night.  I ran out of fencing. I need to get more.

The critter count for this week is pretty high: bunnies, bunnies and more bunnies, one woodchuck (ground hog), two deer (seen repeatedly), crows (trying to steal eggs, but the girls are laying where they are supposed to and the crows are missing out), blue birds, bluejays, cowbirds, a pileated woodpecker, a snake (in the potato patch), cabbage loopers, harlequin beetles, tomato horn worms, skinks, stink bugs, dog ticks, slugs, deer flies and more.

I haven't seen the box turtle yet, he must be hiding from me.

We have had sugar snap peas for dinner almost every night this week, after having some sort of greens every night for the previous two weeks.  I spent a couple of mornings blanching and freezing greens, now we have ten meals worth of greens ready to go. Now a few days have elapsed, I should get out there to pick some more (when it cools a bit). I'll probably blanch and freeze some of the peas tonight, so we can have more variety later. 

Alpine strawberries

Blueberries, not ready!

The mulberries (no work, and they are one of my favorites!) and strawberries are ripe, the blackberries will be ready shortly.  The raspberries will be ready on about the same time as last year, late next week!

Sorry girls, no cabbage loopers this time.

The girls are laying 3-4 eggs a day.  I have been in a bit of a baking frenzy, so we have been keeping up with them.

The bounty!!

Baby Bunnies--The Conflicted Gardener

Finding a nest of baby bunnies turns everyone to mush, but upon reflection the gardener in me says, "Oh, no!!"

My sister and her husband came to visit for several days. After seeing the sights and kicking back they, usually busy people, suddenly needed to do something productive.  My brother-in-law keyed in on the over-grown mass of zebra grass that I had done battle with in May only to extract a tiny piece of it.  So, after dinner one evening he headed out back with a shovel and proceeded to dig out half of the mass for me.  It was only after we had removed one of the two giant clumps and used a pruning saw to chop it into three smaller sections did he head over to remove the second.  It was then he noticed the fluffs of fur, the little ears, the baby bunnies, who nested between the ginormous clumps.  Before he had started the project he asked about the variety of snakes that lived around us, but it never occurred to him to inquire about bunnies.

For the last couple of weeks we had noticed that around dinner time a good sized wild rabbit was hanging about near our back door.  Not usually a problem except for the good sized pointer who comes down the stairs every evening for her walk and bolts across the yard in frenzied pursuit of this bunny  with an unprepared human hanging on to the other end of the leash being jerked down the  three steps and across the lawn, struggling to get a foothold to pull the scent crazed dog back.

We had thought that maybe a neighbor had been feeding the rabbit, because it didn't seem to run whenever we came out the door, it just sat and watched us.  I started calling the rabbit Pierre, it was such a regular.  Well, now we know, I had it all wrong, this was no Pierre, Paige maybe, but not Pierre.  She was just guarding her nest and providing a diversion for the dog.

Standing over the little cuties we all started trying to figure out how to cover them up without hurting them and to encourage their mom to return.  We covered them with some of the straw mulch from an empty bed in the garden (where I had planted cantaloupe seeds only to find that something, probably a rabbit, had chomped the tops off of the two week old seedlings) to simulate the removed grass.

The chickens, sensing freshly turned soil, started scratching away, quickly removing some of our new mulch layer.  I set my daughter to pruning a lilac bush that had not had any care for probably a decade or two, and she laid the leafy branches gently over the nest.  Meanwhile I replanted the zebra grass on the steep hillside on the northwest side of the house to help reduce erosion.

Paige was seen in the yard this morning, not near the nest, but she is still around.  We haven't dared peek in on the little ones in case the worst has happened.  The zebra grass looks like it will take on the hill, I just need to water it a bit today. Now there is a known technique for getting the mass of grass removed and divided, my husband and I will remove the second clump in a few weeks when  the babies are grown and out.

After doing all this I laugh at myself, I'll probably spend the next couple of years trying to find creative ways to keep those little ones, and their babies, out of my garden. Dividing up the grass will create more bunny nesting spaces too!