I Love My Garden

Every year is a perfect garden year when the garden is in the planning stages. As the greenhouse gets going, little failures creep in. Then comes the spring planting and some things don’t come up. If everything comes up, Bambi and Bugs Bunny come in and have a feast on the small plants, which leaves nothing. Several improvements this year have helped maintain the garden quality. Of course it is very early in the season.

A new greenhouse was purchased and assembled before the greenhouse season really got going. This tripled the amount of surviving plants. Everything planted came up and flourished except for the basil and the nasturtium. A Bambi fence has so far protected the garden from Bambi. Bugs still comes to dinner, but so far he hasn’t eaten much. A big red-tailed hawk is a welcome visitor to the garden. He does eat some of the songbirds, but his favorite dish is rabbit. The asparagus bed was loaded up with about 4” of compost at the end of the last season and asparagus is being cut at the rate of about 4 per day.

The biggest disappointment each year generally comes from the spaghetti squash. It usually has a poor germination rate, producing only 1 or 2 plants. Then there is a low fruit set, and finally there are pickle worms. This year a new bed has been made around about 1/3 of the garden. Everything in that bed has come up extremely well except for the cucumber. There are actually so many spaghetti squash plants that they will have to be thinned.

David Segrest is an International REALTOR in Charlotte, NC. His email is david@segrestrealty.com , His webpage is http://davidsegrest.com , and his international real estate blog is http://dointernationalrealestate.blogspot.com/