Wednesday, August 13, 2008

I Love Fresh Tomatoes!

I grew up out in the country, and we always had a large garden in the summer. I have now lived in town for five years, and I sure miss that monstrous country garden!

Though I will probably never have a garden as big as the ones I had growing up, I am growing edibles at my house. A very nice raspberry patch came with our house when my husband bought it three years ago:

The raspberries have just finished up, but it's an ever-bearing raspberry patch, so we should have more berries this fall. Mmmm, mmmm!

This spring, I planted two "large tomato" plants and one "cherry tomato" plant. I love cherry tomatoes and have been enjoying them for about two weeks now.


My husband really likes the larger tomatoes. We just took the first two off the plant last weekend (in the picture below) and my husband had them in tacos. He was very happy.


At my first "city" house, I tried cucumber plants, which are another of my favorites. Between the deer and the rabbits (I had a wooded ravine in my backyard, so I had deer in the middle of the city), I could NOT keep the cucumber plants alive. I haven't tried them at my new house, but I think I'll give it another go next spring. We don't have deer here, just the rascally rabbits. I plan on having my husband build a wire mesh cage around the plants to protect them from the rabbits. I have no idea if that will work. Any tips?

2 comments:

Engineer said...

We have a lot of rabbits around our house also. In the winter they chew all of the bark off the bottom of every one of our shrubs.

Our neighbors, that have gardens, just put up a 2 or 3 foot chicken wire type fence to keep the critters out. They're garden is huge so it must be doing a good job. The fence is short enough that you can just step over it and not have to worry about a gate or anything when it is time to get in there.

I've heard that human hair clippings (if you cut your own hair) and mums can help keep rabbits out. They don't like the smell. [citation needed]

Engineer said...

Quick follow up. Here is a co-workers gardening blog. It hasn't been updated in a while, but it has some interesting stuff from when they were getting started.