Those animals are digging up a storm in the garden. Every night. Z has been constructing a high-cost, not-so-low tunnel to cover that one bed. He made a frame for the base of it rather than sticking the pipe over rebar that goes into the ground, so the 12 or 15-foot section he made was pretty expensive. Plus he put chicken wire (as the closest store to us calls its chicken wire “aviary wire” over… most of it. The animals have to climb about 12″ of fencing to get into the bed. Silly me, I forgot/didn’t prioritize getting this done: simply covering that hole with the row cover that’s been on the ground since we took it off a week or so again.

Sigh. My friend Chris pointed out today that he was surprised to see an inch or two of compost on the ground rather than rototilled in. We don’t have a rototiller, mostly on purpose. I guess it would be better for me to, as I’ve done in other beds in the past, put the compost out a week or more after the plants have gone into the ground. I just hate to leave the ground bare. Other people, it sounds like, often just put compost out and transplant. But they’ve been farming longer.

I have been having trouble keeping up with much of anything, and I often regret doing whatever I did instead of putting my beds back together. For instance, this morning I picked strawberries (less than 1 basket from what used to be my more productive side, and it took a long time! picking every 2 days makes sense, except for in the pest management sense) and finally transplanted the perennials. Then at the end of my morning I took a closer look at the greens beds and saw that the plants I put in yesterday were gone, plus many others. Hardly any of the peas I planted Sunday night had been dug up. Well, that might not be right, since the clods that I use to mark my progress frequently get buried. It’s so discouraging. I planted my last kale seedlings tonight and turned the compost that I started Saturday night. Then I went and checked on the peas. Some of the first ones I planted a week ago are possibly really starting to emerge 🙂

In tonight’s stew, we had our tomatoes, basil, rosemary, and onion. Oh, and chard and kale and maybe a cabbage leaf. I actually found a nice-looking head on one of the broccoli plants this weekend, yay!