The last two years I have had a garden. I am currently working on planning and starting stuff for garden number three. I have to say the first the garden looked awesome! Kind of resembled a small jungle of sorts. We didn't get much out of it though because earwigs attacked the corn, and rabbits had a field day with pretty much everything except the tomatoes and beans.
Year two was a hard year. It rained, and rained, and rained. Then a drought, then more rain. Very weird summer weather last year. Everything was either swimming or dying of thirst. I put up a fence in hopes that all the good stuff the rabbits kept eating the year before would be safe and sound. Tomatoes didn't do as well, and there was a lot of splitting, earwigs got the corn...again, but we didn't have as bad of an infestation as we did the year before. Then we were adopted by a duck, Pigpen.
Since I had no place to keep the duck, he got locked in the garden at night and roamed the yard during the day. Yeppers you guessed it, Pigpen ate the remaining stuff that was growing. The only things he wouldn't touch were the peppers and tomatoes.
Year three, here's hopeing that this year is better. Although the weather has been most uncooperative. Winter just will not go away. As I type this we are under a winter storm warning. Parts of Minnesota are going to get a dumping of 12+ inches of snow. Yippy,skippy ...not.
If this weather ever gets straightened out I am going to be moving my garden to a better location. When we moved here, where it is currently located was the sunniest spot, and let me tell you it isn't all that sunny. Last year the neighbors cut down two HUGE trees that were shading the yard so they could build a garage. Now the back end of the yard gets sun all day long! I am going to so rock the heck outta my new garden, that is whenever the weather finally straightens out.
This year I will be trying to do a really lazy square foot gardening with companion plants. I have always just plopped stuff wherever I had room for it. I will also be fencing the garden, and we no longer Pigpen, as he passed away this winter. I should be good to grow. I hope. Three years in a row of disasters will for sure bring me down.
As I was searching for information to chart out my garden, I came across a free PDF book called Growing Guide Making the most of your raised bed garden. It is from a program that Massachusetts has called Build-a-Garden-program. Very cool little book for you to print out or save. It has lots of good information on gardening. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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