Starting a garden Post # 16

I like how Ecency prompts "Tell your story..." My story always starts with a flower 🙂 Painted Daisy this week. Welcome to my blog Starting a garden Post # 16.

Painted Daisies are really delivering the goods this week 😍

We planted these from seed and there is a nice variety of colors. We focused heavily on planting perennial flowers this year. Its the first year in a new house and we want to start building up some perennial beds.

On to the garden... First the good news. We have started harvesting a few things - Basil, green beans, zucchini, radishes, green garlic.

The cucumbers are doing really well.

We added some a trellis last week. The cucumbers quickly reached the top and put on lots of flowers.

And baby cucumbers 😘

We added an extention to the trellis (on the left side of this picture). The sloping part we added last week, the more vertical part is new.

Now the bad news...

Japanese beetles! Of all the fruit trees we planted the cherry trees were doing the best. I guess the Japanese beetles agreed and decided they looked delicious ☹️ I watch my trees daily and most of this damage was done in one afternoon. I applied a soapy water solution. Either it worked or the beetles just moved on.

Bad news story number two. Bunnies 🐰 We have a couple bunnies near our house and apparently they found their way over to the garden. We added chicken wire along the bottom of the fence.

You can see the chicken wire on the bottom 2' of the fence. So far so good 🤞

And final bad news of the week. Squirrels. I mentioned squirrels harvesting our sunflowers on Wednesday's post - @steven-patrick/sunflower-heist-wednesday-walk. That was in a bed, now they have also struck the sunflowers in the garden. Not sure we can win this one so we cut down some sunflowers and brought them inside to enjoy.

The weather has been really nice so we have been eating lunch on the screened in porch lately. We also cut some more mature flowers to dry and collect seeds. And we haven't totally surrendered...we are also trying pepper spray on the sunflowers to keep off the squirrels.

We still have a lot of sunflowers left so this could be a long drawn out battle 😆

I caught this pollinator at work 👍

A little good news...

I've been wanting some milk week to attract butterflies and other pollinators. I realized that one of the weeds I keep mowing down around the garden is milk weed 🤦‍♂️

Another group of milk weed on the other side of the garden.

I started a milk weed preserve lol. I stopped mowing a couple areas in the field around the garden. Fortunately milk weed grows really fast.

It was a little bit of a frustrating week, spending most of our efforts on fighting off pests. But time outside in the garden is always good 🌻☮️🙂 Thanks for checking out my post this week 🙏

Bonus pics:

Another of the perennials we planted - Phlox.

And the wildflower of the week, Queen Anne's Lace. Queen Anne's Lace is very prominent in the fields right now in my part of Vermont.