Deer in the garden, fox in the hen house

Shit! First we have deer jumping in our vegie garden eating our cauliflower, then I wake up to my husband yelling, "We only have one hen left!" Damn! I meant to close up the hen house last night right after dinner. My husband woke up to two "shadows" in the hen yard, turns out they were fox. One ripped the head off of a hen and dug straight into her abdomen to dig the egg out of her body. And people wonder why farmers want to kill off predators. I guarantee if most of these citified wanna be enviro's saw what we saw this morning, they'd be praying to their porcelain gods and plotting their revenge.

Gardening Again

Well, after taking a break from writing and gardening, I'm back at both now. My garden was a mess and my pages have been blank. A lot of catching up to do. With a lot of help from my husband we now have a happily growing vegetable garden full of lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, and many other things. Celery, once again this year is doing extremely well, as is the Pak Choy we tried out this year. Our pole beans aren't fairing too well though. I think there may not be enough sun where they're at. I'm giving asparagus a shot this year. I've heard it's difficult to grow, but that's what they said about celery too. I'll have to be patient for the asparagus. I won't see any harvest until next spring. The peas seem to be doing fairly well so far. Our squash and pumpkins are looking extremely happy as well. One of my happy surprises is that my basil is doing very will this year. I try every year and it just suffers along. But, thanks to the "drought" and all the extra sun we're getting this year, it's doing very well.

My next project is to get some more lettuce starts rolling so we can keep lettuce growing year round. Unfortunately tomatoes are out of the question here until I get a green house. I didn't event bother to try this year. So I'll have to buy all of my tomatoes at the Farmers Market. I'm hoping I can get the energy and gumption up to do some more canning this year. I'd like to have canned tomatoes, peaches, apples etc etc.

So, here we go.......garden on!!!!