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!

I took this one last night. There are signs of at least 2 gophers in the new greens bed.

It was so awful — it sounded like Scout, the Bengal cat we fostered when Tristan was 1-2 years old (around 10 months). My friend Julie moved to Hawaii and that state doesn’t let people bring hybrid cats such as him with them. He was a very nice cat and an excellent farm kitty, but he was SO LOUD! I couldn’t take it anymore and she eventually had to move him to a friend’s place in Utah!!  Here is a video of his regular meow (ok, i haven’t listened to it since i posted it). The meowing that I heard today was like when we returned from a trip and had to drive him 12 miles in a cat carrier on winding roads. It was so awful.

I tried to look into our ditch from the garden, and I had Z look from the street. I really thought the sound was coming from behind the (repaired wooden) fence across the street, but it could have been coming from under the fallen tree limb that’s at the front of the garden. If only we had a chipper. Anyhow, over time the sound turned into a kitten’s mewling (mostly). When I was looking for the video of Scout, I found one of a kitten in a bush outside of our house from September 10th of last year. I’m guessing that they had the same mom! (maybe it was even the stray female Bengal that we’ve seen here and a half-mile away)

It was so sad! I wish I could have found it. Grey Kitty hates cats, though, and would probably hate a kitten. I almost had to go back into the house because the sound was so distracting. Poor kitty. Julie thought it could be a cat in heat, but I think that the mewling means it was probably an increasingly desperate kitten.

I didn’t harvest anything today! I may have eaten a purple green bean and a strawberry, but that’s it.

I planted a sixpack each of dino kale, Champion collard greens, a green cabbage, and a red cabbage. T and I also put out some zinnia (worth a try this late?), dill, bunching onion, and rosemary seeds. This season’s 1st greens bed is toast:

Yesterdayish, then tonight:

Today I put out 5 or 6 wagonloads of compost. Yesterday I put out 3ish loads of dirt at the head of the bed to try to even out the surface (I didn’t put dirt too close to the pumpkins, so you can see a mess in the bottom left of this photo). I’m trying to put the compost out much thinner than in the greens or pea beds. This looks like it covers half the 100′ long bed, but it’s really like 15 feet or something.

Speaking of the peas, there are like 3 plants in the whole 100 foot row, and no radishes (or carrots or lettuce). The raccoons are relentless. I think I made a newbie error and had fertilized the bed. If I had time, I’d hoe the old garlic bed right next to the pea bed and move the t-posts and trellis over there and only put out a very thin layer of compost and just plant more peas there. But maybe I should focus on getting greens into the middle of the above potentially three-bed section.

I have too much produce in my house- too much squash, too many strawberries, too many tomatoes (and way more in the field). Need to sell/distribute. My in-laws are no longer in town to bring stuff to my friend in Berkeley. I’m having trouble getting ahold of my neighbors (I think they have people visiting), and I wonder if their tenants have moved (that would break my heart, since they have kids around T’s age).