Sunday, May 10, 2009

Garden gone

The bad news: either the wind of the last few days blew open the garden gate (which has a sometimes tenuous latch) or I didn't close it properly -- or a combination of the two. The deer enjoyed a lovely salad luncheon, including the almost-ready-to-be-harvested leaf lettuce and swiss chard, radish sprouts, cucumber plants, a sweet pepper plant, delicately tendriled sugar snap pea plants, and even the new mesclun and onion sprouts.

Most of the yet-unpotted flowers -- although they're not fond of marigolds nor lantana, I discovered. And a good helping of rhubarb leaves, although they left the stalks, mostly.

I hope they got sick. Not fatally, just uncomfortably. They've been spending their days under the carport, in little beds they scrape out from the gravel there. Watching the garden grow, probably, and waiting for their chance.

So Monday I will be back out there, replanting lettuce and chard and cukes and peppers. Planting the rhubarb and hoping that it will survive. Salvaging the flowers. And making sure the damned gate latches tightly.

I also have new prayer flags to top the fence. Let's hope the rising prayers will protect the new plants from the deer, but also from moles, bugs, and other things that like new veggies.

1 comment:

MaryContrary said...

We sympathize. We have often wished we had a space for a large garden. But perhaps there is a good side to having a container garden on a cement patio surrounded by a six foot fence in town. No deer.