Meanwhile, back at the ranch...: How Does Your Garden Grow?

Oh goodness, I'm exhausted! It's been a crazy, mad dash to get the garden together and everything planted before it's too late in the season. Even so, I'm afraid that my short growing season will prevent me from harvesting some of what I've planted.

Remember this little low tunnel/hoop house that trucked along bravely through the entire winter?

I took the whole thing down to replace the hoops with ones made from 3/4" PVC.

To make it look nicer, I've spray painted the PVC with Krylon Fusion paint. You know, so it doesn't look like a bunch of plumbing pipe.

The first color I tried was a brushed steel, but rejected it since it looked like metal conduit. Still looked like plumbing pipe.

So I went with a hunter green.

Looks a lot better than the white PVC.

The next project was going to a rabbitry and an alpaca ranch to pick up poop to add to the garden. Both of those animals' poop will not burn plants so you don't have to compost it before you add it to the garden. You can just mix it right in.

I got about 300 pounds of rabbit poop. The lady who owned the rabbitry called them "Bunny Berries". She had it all neatly bagged up for me. Stunk to high heaven, though!

Bags o' Bunny Berries

Then it was on to the Silken Suri Alpaca Ranch. This was a 'shovel your own' deal.

I didn't even make a dent in the poop pile at the alpaca place. She has about sixty alpacas and the pile of poop was huge! The lady invited me to come back any time to take more.

After these two poop runs, the truck was a bit fragrant. A poo-pourri, if you will.

I also added some store-bought compost to the planting mix. This one apparently thinks "no poop" is a big selling point.

Makes me laugh...I just finished unloading two truckloads of it but this particular compost is poop free. Maybe there are people who don't want poop in their garden? Not even composted poop, which has no germs?

In between the poop runs and painting the PVC, I started planting.

Silver Queen sweet corn.

Some of the tomatoes and the eggplant safely sheltering in wall o' waters. The night I planted these, the temperature dropped to 32 degrees. The wall o' waters did their job and the plants are just fine.

A tomato plant inside it's wall o' water.

I also put in some carrots and a couple varieties of lettuce.

Two days later, a deer discovered a hole in the deer netting and got into the bed where I'd planted all the lettuces, spinach and green onions. Once it was inside, I don't think it could figure out how to get out and panicked. It eventually got out, but between what it ate and what it tore up while trying to get out, the entire bed was devastated.

I replanted everything, patched the hole in the deer netting and am starting all over again. I'm kicking myself though because I knew that hole was there and put off repairing it. All my fault!

Over in the perennial garden things are coming right along.