The Gardening Thread

Here's a photo of the front side garden, before and after.

In the after the big tree straight forward is coming out and getting replaced by a dogwood. The pathway is going to be properly finished and the little white section is a porch they closed in around 2011 which is going to be coming down in about 2 weeks and being made back into the original porch which is still intact underneath everything.

 

For reference, here's the area the veggie beds I posted earlier looked like before we started. The rusted shed is now where the chicken run is and the building right next to the shed is their coop.

 

Squash!

 

And Callendula.

 

Yea it has been fucking wild out. Normally i would have shut the furnace off until the fall, but it is still pretty cold in the mornings.

 

Yea, i was planning on taking the winters off the wife's explorer but she is going to PG to hang out with a friend for the long weekend. And looking at the weather, i will leave them on until she gets back.

 

This was my day today.

We've been wanting to run water out to the carriage barn / garden area since last year and we finally got around to doing it today. Had to dig down under the frost line, but we are good to go.

Found out that the back of the house had an original stone foundation which someone at some point poured a new slab of concrete over. There is also an ash line about a foot down which is really weird. We are guessing the original barn or something which was attached to the back of the house burnt down and instead of trying to use the old foundation, someone made a new slab to go right over the top. Just a little more history to investigate behind the house. This back part of the house isn't original to the main house. It was probably done in the 40's and then possibly redone in the 2000's after a flood.

Glad to have this project mostly completed. Now it's onto redoing the driveway starting Sunday.

 

Anyone have some ideas about keeping rabbits/chipmunks away from veggie beds? We will be installing a fence in the next week around the entirety of the veggie patch area, but I'd also like some extra protection incase something slips through or digs under. They've already eaten all of my lettuce and munched on the stems and leaves of my broccoli and brussels sprouts. The lettuce is kind of whatever as it will grow back, but the others can't actually do any growing of fruit if the leaves and stems are missing. I don't want to go down the trapping or killing route, but if there is something to spray on the plants or some other plant or thing to put around the perimeter, I'd like to start there.

 

Mom has a 6' chain link fence for the deer with about a foot of chicken wire buried at the bottom of it for the little critters. It's literally just 6000 square feet fenced just for a vegetable garden.

Is that something you might want to do during install of the fence?