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Our 2021 garden: transplants surviving the downpour

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I gotta say, I am so glad we got those transplants in, yesterday! I’m also glad we’re just getting rain today, and not the severe storms that other parts of our province is getting. Not that far south, either. The motion sensor on the garage security camera gets triggered by lightning. While checking the files, I could track the storm, over the span of a couple of hours, as it swept past us. None of the late night lightning was quite as dramatic is this one.

It was at about 6am when I woke to hear the rain coming down, hard. Of course I was concerned about our new transplants, and checked on them as soon as I could do my morning rounds.

Happily, none of the summer squash appeared damaged. In fact, a couple that were still looking droopy yesterday evening were looking tall and strong. Without a mulch to protect them, though, we’re going to have to add more soil to the mounds before adding the straw.

Even the littlest melon transplants at the squash tunnel were looking quite strong.

In checking these, I realized I made a goof in posting about them, yesterday. I’d said the two types of gourds were planted opposite each other at the far end of the tunnel. I completely forgot that, at the last moment, I changed my mind. Both types of gourds are on one side, with both types of winter squash, opposite them.

It was the corn I was most concerned about, and not just because of the downpour. I’m happy to say that none of them are looking at all drooping or stressed from root disruption. Some did look a bit tipsy from the pounding rain, though! We’ll see how they look, after a few days.

I’m thinking of leaving the little flags for a while. They flutter quite a bit, and might help dissuade deer from approaching.

These Crespo squash were planted a little while ago, and I’m just including them because I’m so happy at how strong looking they are. Even the little one has gotten noticeably bigger and stronger. A lot of things are. The bush beans are looking so fantastic, so quickly! The peas are getting tall enough that we’ll have to start training them up their trellises soon. The carrot sprouts are getting big enough that we can be more vigorous in weeding around them, and not be as concerned about accidentally pulling them up. The two spinach beds we were able to cover over first are looking downright succulent. The third one looks like it had been nibbled on more than I thought, but even so, it’s doing pretty darn good, too.

We don’t seem to have any purple kale coming up; they were pretty much the first things we planted outdoors, and should have come up long ago. The purple kohlrabi planted between the onions and shallots also doesn’t seem to be coming up, either. The onions are doing all right, though I have no idea how big they should be by now. The garlic, meanwhile, is growing like gangbusters.

We’d seen strawberry spinach seedlings earlier, but it seems only a few are still growing, though with those, just a couple of plants would be sufficient. It’s hard to tell them from the weed seedlings, though. The poppies are in a similar situation. I see a few seedlings that might be poppies, but it’s hard to tell with the weeds. That’s one down side of buying garden soil by the dump truck load. It may be a premium mix, but it’s also from a giant pile outdoors, so of course, it came with weeds. At least most of it is a local weed I well recognize, having pulled many of them from my mother’s garden when I was a child! :-D

The lettuces are a mixed bag. Some seem to finally be doing all right, while others seem to have just died off. We need to do a successive sowing of those, anyhow. The seed packets, which were in a Ziploc bag, ended up upside down and some of them spilled, so future sowing is going to be a mix of seeds! Which I don’t mind at all. :-) The beets meanwhile, are doing quite well, in all the beds. Even with the cats walking across them, and sometimes lying on them! The tomatoes are also looking really good, including the itty bitty transplants. Even the potatoes are coming up in all of the grow bags, now, and looking very healthy.

After doing my morning rounds, the girls and I made our trip to the city. We even used my mother’s car, partly to give it a good run on the highway, but also because it has air conditioning that works. ;-) I was very happy for those new tires when we found ourselves driving through some very solid rain. It was definitely coming down harder, the further south we went.

For now, we have a break from the rain, but we will likely get more again, before the system finally passes. I think everyone around here is breathing a sigh of relief. We needed this rain so much! And our

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: first seeds

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No, that is not a typo!

While we have extra seeds that we got for this year’s garden that we will use next year, yesterday I bought the first seeds specifically for next year’s garden.

While going through seed sites with my daughters, we spotted these Yellow Pear heritage tomatoes and we all agreed that they were a variety we wanted to try next year. When I was helping my mother with her shopping yesterday, I spotted them in the seed displays and grabbed them. It’s too late to start tomatoes for this year, particularly in our zone, but I didn’t want to pass them up when I had the chance.

They look absolutely adorable! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: good news, bad news

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Just a quick post about what I found during my morning rounds, before I have to head out. It’s a bit of a mix!

Before I go into this morning, though, here is the progress I got last night in the new corn block.

I got about 2/3rds gone turning the sod before stopping for the night. It was past 10pm by then – the temperatures were lovely, but it was starting to get too dark! LOL I am hoping to get it done today. The corn really needs to be transplanted soon.

This is what greeted me this morning, when I came into the dining room.

Cheddar and Keith, enjoying the morning breeze while watching the birds outside. :-D The cats just LOVE this set up.

The door is secured with cord, just in case. Although it is locked, sometimes it simply pops open on its own. Which is not a problem when the inner door is closed, but would be kitty disaster otherwise!

After feeding the outside critters, I started taking the plants out of the sun room. One of our disappointments was that one tray with 3 different gourds in it had not germinated. Still, I kept them watered, and have started to take the tray outside, too. This is what I found this morning.

A single Ozark Nest Egg gourd has sprouted!

It’s way too late in the season, but when the time comes, it’ll be transplanted out and we’ll see how it does. Who knows. We might have a long summer this year.

Also, do you see all those seeds scattered about? They are EVERYWHERE!!! And this is why I’ve developed a hate-on for the Chinese Elm trees. We’re going to be fighting these in just about every single garden bed. :-(

While checking out the furthest garden beds, I had a bit of a disappointment.

Four Mongolian Giant sunflowers in one row had their heads chopped off. The one that had been eaten and pulled up before was in the other row, which originally had 13 transplants in it. This one had 11. So of the 24 we started with, we’re down to 19. At least the direct seeded ones are coming up, so we do have more. As long as they don’t get eaten, too!

My daughter and I had moved the trail cam over to this corner, but it’s not the wide angle camera, and I wasn’t sure if it caught this area at all. In fact, I was pretty sure it didn’t. So I shifted it and it now faces down the corn and sunflower blocks only.

When I checked the files, I found I was right. This row as off frame. I never saw what ate the leaves, but I did find this!

We had a raccoon pass through! Until now, the only evidence we had of raccoons here was the tip of a tail going past the camera when it was facing the tulips. It just wandered through, sniffing at some weeds.

The raccoon would not have been responsible for the sunflowers, though. I’m sure that was a deer. There was one other night time video, but whatever triggered the motion sensor was no longer in frame by the time it started recording. If a deer had jumped the fence nearby, it could have walked right past the camera and out of frame before it started recording. That’s the down side of setting it to video. It takes more time to start recording than just taking a still shot. I’m not using still because the shortest time delay between triggers is 15 seconds, regardless of whether it’s set to still or video. That’s a long gap, and much would get missed. At least with video, there’s that 15 seconds (or up to 1 minute, if I wanted to) of video to catch what’s going on.

Finding the damaged sunflowers was a disappointment, but I wanted to end this on a more positive note.

The honeysuckle bush in the old kitchen garden is looking amazing! It’s in full bloom, and absolutely dense in foliage and flowers. When we dug up along the house and laid down blocks and bricks to make a path, much of the soil that was dug up ended up around the bases of the honeysuckle and two rose bushes nearby. Between that and the extra watering they’ve been getting this year, they’re all looking better than ever. I’m very happy with how great they are doing this year! Even the little pink rose bush that got broken by something over the winter (likely a deer) is doing very well, after having the tree branch that was shading it pruned away, and a garden bed built up around it. There was just one stick of it left, but it’s now full of the biggest, healthiest leaves it’s had since we moved here!

So overall, we’ve had more increases than losses, so far! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: unexpected things

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Yesterday, one of my goals was to start on the lawn. We have yet to mow the lawn this year, but with how little rain we’ve had, it’s not really that overgrown. Other than some straw we still have left, we’re out of organic material to layer and mulch with, so it would be good to have grass clippings again. At the very least, I wanted to get out the weed trimmer and do the edges.

Then I got a phone call.

My mother was letting me know my sister was on her way to visit her, and they were planning to go to the cemetery, which is just a few miles away from us. They were planning to come here, after.

*sigh*

We had talked about this possibility just the day before, so I can’t say it was too unexpected, but I had advised against doing a cemetery trip when we were supposed to get so very hot again. She also knew that I like to have a lot more notice before visits, so we can be prepared. My mother actually sounded apologetic when she was telling me they were coming over, and added that she was good with not going into the house if we didn’t want her to. Which isn’t the problem, but whatever.

So the girls did a quick rush to try and prepare things, like making sure everything was clear from the sun room doors, though the old kitchen, to the bathroom (so my mother wouldn’t have to use the main doors, with all the little sets of stairs), while I quickly used the weed trimmer around the yard, between the main garden beds, and a few other places that I thought my mother might want to get at with her walker. I had thought to move the picnic table to a shady spot in the south yard, but my daughter reminded me that, when we moved it to where it is now, after it was painted, it was pretty rickety, so it probably couldn’t handle being moved so far, again. So she set up some camp chairs in the shade, and we used an overturned bin for a table. :-D My mother and sister had even brought some fried chicken, so we had ourselves a picnic lunch in the shade, before touring the yard and garden beds.

When they arrived, my sister passed me something my mother had for me. At her apartment building, they have garden plots available. My mother doesn’t do much gardening herself anymore, but she does tend the perennials that had been planted by some of her friends and neighbours who have passed on. The caretakers, unfortunately, have a habit of digging everything up at the end of the year, including a bush my mother described as having beautiful yellow flowers, followed by black fruit. She had no idea what it was; it was planted by someone who passed away some years ago. No one ate the berries, but it was lovely, and the caretakers dug it up and got rid of it. This spring, while tending some plants, she noticed that part of the bush had survived. Not wanting the caretakers to kill it off, she dug it up and put it in a pitcher with some soil. She wanted to give it to me to plant somewhere near the house. We have a grocery shopping trip arranged next week, and I was going to get it then, but with my sister coming over, they were able to bring it over early.

I’m pretty sure it’s a currant, though my mother says it’s different than what we have here. My sister, who is the one that gave my mother the currants that are here, thought it might be a gooseberry. Whatever it is, I made sure to transplant it as soon as things started cooling down a bit. I picked a spot right near where we’d had our picnic lunch. There is a flower bed with white lilacs taking up about half of it. After it was cleaned up, a couple of years ago, we were left with an empty spot that I decided to take advantage of.

I scraped away the wood chip mulch we’d put in, first – it was about 3 inches deep – and started digging. I had to shift the hole a few times, after hitting tree roots, but after clearing out a few bigger rocks, I finally had a space I could transplant into. It was bone dry. We don’t water this bed regularly, but I have been trying to water the lilacs and a low growing plant with variegated leaves I like. From how dry the soil was, you’d never know it had been watered recently! So I filled the hole with water, then got a wheelbarrow load of new garden soil.

After transplanting it into the hole with fresh garden soil, I put back some of the mulch and gave it another thorough watering.

So we now have a new, unplanned, fruit bearing bush in the yard. :-) Hopefully, it will survive.

Backtracking a bit; my mother and I had talked about her coming out to see the gardens later in the season, when things were more grown in, but she got a bit of a tour yesterday. I did appreciate her very visible efforts to not say anything negative, which is usually the only thing she’ll say. I think it’s a generational thing, or maybe a cultural thing, but my mother seems to believe in NOT saying positive things. Like it’s somehow bad to compliment people or something. I suspect it has to do with believing it would lead to pride or something along those lines, though I doubt that’s in any way on a conscious level. She did, however, manage a backhanded compliment on how healthy the garlic looked! So that’s progress. :-D

She was not up to taking the walker to the furthest beds, of course, but my sister did, with her ever-present camera, and she got lots of pictures. It was a long day for my mother, so they left almost immediately after touring the yard. Going to the cemetery, then coming here, was probably too much for her. :-(

After I’d taken care of the transplant my mother gave us, I started hearing thunder. We’ve been having thunderstorm warnings for a while, but they kept getting pushed back. We were hoping to at least get some rain! I could see the storm clouds, and the wind was picking up, so I brought our hardening off transplants back into the sun room early, and we even shut down our computers, just in case.

We got nothing. Not even a spit of rain.

By 9:30pm, I finally went back outside to water the garden beds. The rain did finally come, but not until about 5am this morning.

When I headed out to do my morning rounds, it was still raining! A lovely, steady rain. I got completely soaked. :-D So no pictures this morning. ;-)

While checking the garden beds, I had some more unexpected surprises. The sweet corn is coming up already!! New shoots, in all three corn blocks. I also found more Hopi Black Dye sunflower sprouts, but also some Mongolian Giant sunflowers have already sprouted! Clearly, they are loving our heat wave. The bush beans, meanwhile, are coming up like crazy. The purple ones are still a bit slower in coming up than the yellow and green beans, but once they do come up, the sprouts seem to be leafing out faster than the others.

I’m finding it awesome that so many things we direct sowed is sprouting already. We haven’t even finished putting out our transplants, yet! :-D

Of course, while checking the garden beds this morning, I was looking for deer damage. When I’d watered last night, I tied some plastic grocery bags onto a couple of the stakes supporting the Mongolian Giant transplants, as a noisy deterrent. Happily, there was no new damage.

Then I checked the trail cam.

There was one file triggered during the night. Off in the shadows, a single deer could be seen, walking through! It looked like it was going down the path between the corn/sunflower blocks, and the pea/bean beds. It didn’t stop or pause, but kept walking towards the spruce grove.

Today, I’m moving the camera again. I think I know where the deer came in, but there are a couple of places they like to jump the fence, and I want to cover both possibilities, if I can, and see if there are any other areas they might be coming through.

We shall see what the weather does today. Today’s expected high is “only” 25C/77F, with scattered showers. Which means we will probably not be able to use a power drill, with its 300 ft or so of extension cords, to finish assembling the squash tunnel. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the summer squash in, though we might have to prioritize the Montana Morado corn. At least the place they will be planted is right next to what’s left of the pile of garden soil. We might end up having to use soil from the pile in the outer yard to finish transplanting. The good thing is, we actually have that second pile!

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: first loss

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While checking on the garden beds this morning, I found this.

One of the transplanted Mongolian Giant sunflowers was pulled up. With the leaves gone, I didn’t even see it at first. It was the gap in the spacing that had me looking for it.

Thankfully, it is the only one that was nibbled on.

I’m glad I moved the trail cam from the tulips to the garden. On checking the files this morning, I spotted a deer running by on the far side of the self-sown trees by the main garden beds. Something had startled it away, which is likely why there was only one plant eaten.

Right now, I’ve got the camera set up nearer the house, covering most of the main garden beds, with the far beds and blocks visible in the distance. We’ve got so many things around the main beds by the house, including the makeshift covers on the spinach, that I think they’re pretty safe now. I want to move it to cover the corn and sunflower blocks. I want to see where the deer are still coming in, to give me an idea of where we need to add deterrents. I think I’ll tie grocery bags to the stakes at the sunflowers to flap in the wind, too. It is very likely that the ones tied to the pea trellis are what startled the deer away, though there is no way to know for sure.

Today is not supposed to get as hot as yesterday – though previous forecasts had today being the hotter day, so who knows. We aren’t supposed to hit our expected high of the day until 7pm, though. Usually, the hottest part of the day is around 4 or 5pm. They’re also predicting thunderstorms tonight and tomorrow, and possible rain today. Looking at the weather radar, I’m expecting most of that to pass us by. I’m hoping to finally add the cross pieces onto the squash tunnel today, and maybe even find enough straight pieces to cut more for the bottoms of the frame.

We’ll see what the day brings!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: more firsts, and silly kitties!

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Before I headed out to do my morning rounds, we had already hit 25C/77F. By the time I was done, it was already 30C/86F! Thankfully, there was still a breeze and some shade, so it didn’t feel too bad.

I made a couple of discoveries in the garden this morning, but before I get to those, I’ll back track to yesterday evening.

I used the cut off strip of mosquito netting left over from covering our lettuces and beets, some dollar store hula hoops, and lengths of old hose to cover part of the third spinach bed. This is just until we can make a wire mesh cover for it. I also took the trail cam from the tulips and moved it to overlook most of the garden. The only critter I saw in the files this morning was Nutmeg. :-D

After setting the netting up, I moved on to the far beds and blocks to water them. The water in the rain barrel is usually cool, but it was quite warm by the end of yesterday’s heat! On the plus side, it meant being able to use the watering can instead of the hose, and not shocking everything with cold well water, for almost everything. As the water level dropped below half, I started to refill it while still using the watering can, so it would be just cooler water instead of having to switch to the cold hose to finish watering.

I had company.

Rolando Moon has a thing about drinking from puddles! Once the water was absorbed by the soil, she decided to roll on the damp soil, then just hung out. I guess it’s nice and cool. At least she tended to stay in the middle, which is more of a trench for water, as the beans are planted on the sides. No beans are coming up yet.

Nutmeg was also hanging around. I caught him lying across some pea plants, chewing on the trellis twine! The little bugger! :-D

When I checked everything this morning, things were still damp and didn’t need to be watered, but I also spotted a whole lot of these…

The radishes are sprouting! The one in the photo is of the daikon type radishes, but I was seeing sprouts for the watermelon radishes in all the rows they were planted in, too. I was aware that radishes sprout quickly, but I’ve never grown them before, so this was a very pleasant surprise. They most certainly were not there when I was watering last night. :-)

Then I found another lovely sight.

The first potato leaves have emerged through their mulch! There are the purple fingerling potatoes. Sifting around in the mulch in the grow bags, I found other shoots coming through the soil, but these are the first ones to break through and leaf out. :-) I really look forward to seeing how these do in their grow bags.

We have a whole lot of squash transplants ready to go out, but I’m starting to rethink what to do with the summer squash. The plan was to make more beds like with the beans and peas. However, we have that long arc where we’d planted the sunflowers last year. In removing some of the old grass clipping mulch to use under some new beds, I couldn’t help but notice how much better the soil is, underneath. It’s still rocky, but we basically have a long row of soft soil, bordered by concrete hard soil. I’m thinking we should take advantage of this. It will need far less amending than starting new beds. I’m also planning to try staking the summer squash this year, but with our without stakes, deer don’t like those prickly squash plants, so it could act as a sort of fence for the rest.

I sorted through our transplants while hardening them off, and we have a lot of nice, strong melons. Between those and the winter squash, and the two types of gourds that successfully germinated, we might not actually have room for it all on the squash tunnel. So I’m thinking we can plant as much as we can fit of each type at the squash tunnel, then whatever is left over can be planted in other areas. Without trellising, these should spread out quite a bit over the ground, and we’ll be able to give them lots of space, and we would just need to haul soil over to make hills, rather than beds. This would allow us to compare how well they do, between left to grow on the ground, or up a trellis.

What I might end up doing is getting the Montana Morado corn done, first. They are doing very well, but will start outgrowing their cups soon. Since the toilet paper tube pots didn’t work out, I’m really hoping they won’t suffer from transplant shock too badly. In zone 3 gardening groups. I’ve read from people who warn against transplanting corn completely, because they don’t handle it well, to people who say they do it all the time, every year, and have never had issues. I suspect type of corn can make a difference, and I seem to be the first person in all of these groups to try and grow purple corn in our zone!

I’m really excited to see how they do!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: transplanting tomatoes and onions

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After we got the sunflowers transplanted, the girls and I decided we would transplant the tomatoes today, too.

This is the area we prepared for the tomatoes, back in April, so that we can use the chain link fence to support them. You can read what we did to prepare it here. Though we have been wetting it down fairly regularly, there just hasn’t been enough moisture for the straw and cardboard to do much breaking down, and the soil layer was relatively thin.

Since the new garden soil is alkaline, and tomatoes like slightly acidic soil, we decided to make use of the last of our bale of peat. Before heading in for lunch and out of the heat, we took the time to mix the peat with garden soil and soak it down.

Basically, we made peat soup. :-D

The seedlings were brought over to wait in the shade, then we headed inside to let the soil and peat mixture absorb more water.

Do you see that cup with the itty bitty tomato plants in it? That is a cup with Mosaic Mix seeds in it. It took forever for one seed to germinate, so when the plants got moved to the sun room, we decided to keep it. Then, just about a week ago, the other seeds planted in the cup germinated! They’re really too tiny to transplant, but the girls wanted to, anyway. We’ll see how they do!

When we got back to it, the transplants were separated and laid out, after getting their bottom leaves and branches trimmed off. We did dig small holes for each one, but there wasn’t a lot of depth before we hit straw. Each transplant got some of the peat mixture built up around it, up to the lowest remaining leaves, so that the buried stems will grow roots and the plants will be stronger.

Then we added more garden soil in between each plant, to build up the soil depth in the bed, and to make sure the peat mixture won’t wash away when we water them.

The first things we started from seed were onions, but we lost all of our Red Baron bunching onions, due to cats. When we started using the Solo cups as pots, I decided to broadcast sow the last of the seeds we had in a couple of cups and see what happened. With one of them, nothing happened, but with another, they did actually sprout. They’ve been hardening off along with everything else, and onions are supposed to be good companion plants for tomatoes, repelling insects, so we decided to go ahead and transplant the onions, too.

Some of them are REALLY tiny, but the girls went ahead and planted them anyhow. They’ll either make it or not.

The onions got planted in where we added more soil, but you’ll notice a gap in the middle. The tomatoes in the foreground are the tiny Spoon tomatoes, while the ones at the far end are the Mosaic Mix tomatoes. In the middle are the super tiny, sprouted really late, Mosaic Mix tomato plants. They’re so small, no extra soil was added around them; they would have been buried completely! We’ll see if they survive or not.

As always, we thoroughly watered the soil before putting in the transplants, so when we did our evening watering, they only got a misting, to help settle the soil.

We did hit 29C/84F today. As I write this, it’s just past midnight, and we’re still at 20C/68F. Our expected overnight low is 17C/63F. Instead of having to watch out for a last frost hitting our transplants, we have to watch out for excessive heat! We’ll be doing a lot of careful watering over the next while.

One thing the girls and I did finally remember to do; we put our poor, bedraggled umbrella tree outside. It took three of us. One to carry the pot, one to open and close the doors, and one to keep the cats away! :-D

Tissue was watching me through the door!

Yes, the plant is on the stairs in front of a door. In this spot, it will get full sunlight in the morning, while it’s still relatively cool, but be shaded during the hottest parts of the day. We don’t use this door, so it can stay there. Right now, during the day, we open the inner door and set up a little step ladder, so that cats can sit on it and look out the window. The window is open just enough to allow a breeze through the house to help keep it cool. The outer door has a tendency to unlatch on its own, so to make sure the cats don’t accidentally end up outside, we have it secured with some cord. It has become a favorite place for the cats to see and watch all the birds outside! :-)

So the tomatoes are now transplanted. Between them and the sunflowers, I had a lot fewer plants to bring back into the sun room for the night! :-) The rest cannot be transplanted until we finish the squash tunnel for the climbers, and build beds for them, but they are all hardened off and ready for transplanting. So we need to get those done as quick as we can! Friday and Saturday as supposed to be scorchers, too. Ah, well. Better the heat for transplanting, than frost!

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Desperate Measures

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One of the down sides of having so many cats in the house is how much they “love” our houseplants! We’ve had to get increasingly creative to protect them. The smaller ones ended up getting hung up. Thankfully, my daughter’s orchid kokedama are very light, as they ended up being hung from a curtain rod we don’t use. I had several succulents, one of which was apparently delicious to cats. I’ve managed to save two, while a third ended up being totally destroyed.

The problem is with the larger plants. I have a big umbrella tree, we have a whole bunch of aloe vera (less than we started out with) and several jade trees. We’re down a few jade trees, too. :-( I also had 5 avocados growing in one large pot. They had been doing very well, too.

Then Cabbages happened.

She has a thing for digging in dirt. She’s not interested in the plants themselves. She just wants to dig. The other cats like to bite the aloe vera leaves, which at least won’t harm them, but they also like to break of jade tree leaves, and play with them like cat toys. Jade trees are not good for cats! None of the other cats have Cabbage’s obsession with dirt digging. Thank God for that, or I wouldn’t have any plants left!

We’ve tried many things to deter them. Our aloe vera now all have protective rings of plastic around their bases (except the biggest one, which is so big, with so many babies growing under it, it can protect itself!), cut from those cheese ball and pork rind containers from Costco we’d been keeping to use as garden cloche. They’ve been coming in handy for a lot of other things!

The umbrella tree got a ring of 1 inch wire mesh around its base. The kittens would still jump over it and sit in the middle of the umbrella tree but, as they’ve grown bigger, they seem to have stopped doing that. The smaller plants got the plastic containers put over them as cloche, but some of the cats figure out how to knock those off – and the pots under them. The larger jade trees got various things stuck into the soil to both support their stems, which were being pushed over by cats sitting in the middle of the pots, and to make things difficult for the cats to get in.

The pot the avocado were growing in is a large double-layer pot. The inner pot holds the soil while the outer pot has a reservoir for water, so the roots can be watered from below. In one corner is a triangular piece that holds a float in place, and covered the opening where water is poured into the base.

This pot is on a shelf by the dining room window, along with a number of other plants. Eventually, though, we were down to just one other plant on the shelf; another jade tree. To stop the digging, we tried things like putting duct tape, sticky side up, over the dirt. The jade tree got a plastic collar, which kept getting knocked out of place, so we tried wrapping it with plastic, and even sticking in dozens of bamboo skewers in all directions, to dissuade the digging. Nothing worked for long. We even ended up putting the pot on top of an upturned bucket to raise it higher above the window ledge that cats like to lie on, but Cabbages is very determined, and still managed to get in to dig!

The remaining two avocados got a shield of hardware cloth around the perimeter of the soil. That worked for a while, until Cabbages discovered she could just jump over the top. We ended up putting a box over the top, but it was too late for the avocado. We just needed to stop her from making a mess. When she started digging, she throws dirt everywhere! She knows not to try for it while we’re around, too, so we’d find the mess in the morning, of after we’d been outside for a few hours.

Well, she still managed to get the box off the top and get into the dirt again. She also got into the jade tree again. So today, my daughters got the pot outside. The remains of the avocado were removed, and the jade tree was transplanted into the bigger pot. The hardware cloth got wrapped around it again, and the extra piece I had left from the roll got folded over the top as a cover. Then it went back to the shelf at the dining room window.

This evening, I went into the dining room only to find David lounging on the table – they are not allowed on the dining table – so at first I missed it. My husband was coming in behind me and saw it right away. The hardware cloth that was on top was gone, the rest was askew, and there was dirt, everywhere.

I was not a happy camper!

This time, it looked like Cabbages got under the mesh. The cover for the water reservoir was knocked completely off, too. We found the wire mesh that had been on top, rolled up under the dining table, with Tissue curled up inside. !!

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The hardware cloth got placed around the jade tree again, but instead of putting it on the inside of the put and pushing it into the soil, it was jammed between the inner and outer pots. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long enough anymore, so the piece that had been over the top was squeezed in, too. Then, we got the remains of a roll of 1 inch wire mesh and used that to create a top.

The wire mesh on the sides has been pushed down quite far between the two layers of pots, so there’s no way a cat is getting under it or lifting it out. The 1 inch mesh on the top is wider than paws, so if a cat tries to jump on top, it will hold the weight, but little paws will tend to slip through, which will be a deterrent.

The down sides are, we can no longer use the opening in the corner to water into the bottom of the reservoir, and watering from the top is going to be a challenge! We also can’t reach the plant to tend it. The top is held in place with a couple of twist ties, but the wire ends along some edges were also bent inwards, to help hold it in place. It can be taken off, but it’ll be a pain in the butt.

It should, however, finally be safe from Cabbages and her digging!

This poor plant!

The Re-Farmer