Often I only show the best that’s happening around here. Today’s a bit different, I’m sharing the good, the bad & the ugly.
The good:
Tomatoes are picking up, especially the sungolds. I’ve harvested the first of my Pruden’s Purples, Cosmonaut Volkov, Black Prince, Juilet and Rutgers from my early May plantings. We’re also enjoying zucchini, cucumbers, patty pans squash. No beans, see “the ugly.”
The bad:
The garden is quite overgrown with weeds and out of control squash vines. Few of the paths are walkable. I haven’t done any succession seeding since late May. I’m not even sure that I’ll get any fall crops planted.
From this view it doesn’t look too bad.
The ugly:
The deer have found the garden. First the ate the backs of the bean plants off the trellis. I put up netting on two sides. Recently they came through and mowed off the tops of all the broccoli plants and some of the brussels sprouts and kale. We’re currently fighting back with invisible fishing line and Irish Spring soap.
And here’s the explanation for the garden’s chaos, and the quiet around the blog lately. I’m spending as many hours as I can outside scraping and painting the house. It’s slow going. We’re switching from the blue to the green. The shutters will remain off. I won’t show you how neglected the front flower beds are. Here’s the front, including the new front deck Matt built.
And one side that is mostly-finished.
Time for me to get back to scraping paint.
All gardeners can find good, bad & ugly. Don’t feel disappointed about yours. Painting the house takes precedence for sure. The green is a lovely shade for your setting.
The good looks very good. I am sorry about the deer trouble. When I saw your “ugly” photo I recognized the carnage. I walked out to my garden this morning to find my bush beans less bushy. When I looked around I saw that deer also ate 1/4 of my pole bean foliage. Grr.
Deer are such a PITA. Luckily I don’t have any here in the city. My mom had an eleven foot fence around her garden to keep the deer out. Occasionally they still got in. Which was bad. They could get in but the garden wasn’t big enough for them to get out. They needed more of a running start to get back over and the garden wasn’t big enough for it.
Emily, I know all about the ugly weed. I think I showed my harvest of weed in my big veggie garden a week or so ago.
I would have deer problems is I didn’t fence all my gardens in. I also use liquid fence around the perimeter and it seems to hold them at bay.
I know the work of painting a house. Mine is stained and I try to do one side every year. Have the stain sitting here to do at least 2 sides this year but that will wait until fall.
I remember last year you cut the tops off your brussels sprouts but I don’t remember when. I am trying them in the plots this year and they are looking better but want to cut them off.
I sympathize! My beans were defoliated by insects, not by deer. The deer have thankfully bypassed the edibles, but they do like gouging strips of bark off maple and crape myrtle trees!
That is a nice green you guys picked.