The Race Is On

I have grown a very good crop of some juicy and quite tasty strawberries that some varmint has taken a liking to. Every morning it looks like something has tunneled through the bed then passed out in a strawberry stupor leaving a mashed spot in the patch. The strangest thing is there are never any strawberry remnants. Varmints always leave remnants, taking a bite or two out of as many fruits as they see and spitting out the rest until they finally move on. They must be very good berries if there aren't any remnants.

The other options could be kitties chasing mices and dive bombing them from above or my varmint could be a human at breakfast time and the mashed spot a foot print.



We'll just see who can pick the most strawberries before the harvest winds down.



I promised myself I would not let the sunflowers get out of hand in the roadside vegetable garden this year. They get way to big and cast too much shade. They are fully self sowing now. I don't plant them. I swear I have been pulling plenty of them and look how many are left. The dern things keep coming up.

Time is short and the rush to grow and reproduce is on.



In that vein all the starts are planted, all the seeds are seeded. Seeds get to be problematic when things warm up a bit because rolly pollies and grasshoppers just love fresh sprouts. I have to outseed them while there is still time. Last year I promised myself I would get some row covers for the critical germination period. Never got around to that.

I did however manage to buy some acorn squash and cantaloupe starts and found a few places to squeeze them in to the vegetable garden. Maybe if I didn't have quite so many tomatoes. And then there are the tomatoes germinating on their own in the garden, most likely the pear shaped 'Juliet' cherry tomato and I have to have at least one of those.

Oh woe is me. The roadside vegetable garden is too small. Maybe if I didn't have three rows of potatoes.



The summer wildflower season will be here shortly and the front roadside bed is getting ready with the first flush of bloom. Some self seeded Campanula 'Canterbury Bells' is joining in this year.

Perhaps the coming wildflower season will help distract me from trying to cram more plants in to the roadside vegetable garden.



A Pieris, white lilac and some purple iris fell out of the ground at work today. I need to find homes for them in the lush of the garden to be. There is more than enough to keep me occupied and out of the vegetable garden. I just don't think it will happen. The race is on.