The Rabbit's Garden: The vegetable garden May-July 2019

Time for an update on the actual garden! Right now our raspberries are just about finished, and now cucumbers and tomatoes are starting to ripen.

A few pictures of garden itself. Thanks to Mike and Bob for putting up this lovely fence around the garden in 2017. It has been rabbit and deer free ever since. Hooray!

7/9/19
The garden with the raspberry thicket on the far end.
I need to do some serious clearing back there.

7/9/19

The squash and cucumbers have grown so much over the past 2 weeks! So have the tomatoes.

7/22/19
Zucchini, yellow squash and cucumbers up front, with tomatoes in back of those.
Followed by potatoes and climbing beans in back.
The raspberry thicket on the left.

Garden 7/22/19
Rhubarb, asparagus and strawberries to the right

The rows of tomatoes
We ate about 5 tomatoes tonight!

7/22/19
Our first ripe cucumbers! Mike and I ate one tonight and it was delicious.

7/22/19
A good looking cucumber

Tiny yellow squash starting to form.

Tiny zucchini starting to form.

The tomatoes are on their way!

7/15/19

And earlier this month we had our raspberry harvest! We picked at least 4 quarts of raspberries this year, not counting the ones we ate while picking.

7/13/19

Raspberry picking from our wild thicket is a dangerous job, though. We both ended up with some pokes from thorns or scratches. One of my goals for next year is to tame these berries somehow. I think if I get started early enough I can train them to grow upright between rows held up with twine, rather than in the giant thicket they form now.

7/13/19
Mike helping me pick berries.

These are so good just plain, or with ice cream, or frozen with milk.

Here is the strawberry patch, which we started in 2017, I think. We had a few strawberries out of here this year, maybe 1 quart or so, but I was lazy with picking these. They are very sweet and good.

7/9/19
Strawberry patch

7/9/19
Only a few strawberries left at this point.
Peak of strawberry picking was early July this year.

And even earlier in the year, in late May, we had the rhubarb. And that is our small asparagus shoots off to the left.

5/27/19
Rhubarb and asparagus

My favorite way to eat rhubarb - in a crumble!

The garden in late spring, just before it is time to plant.

Garden 5/25/19
The onions are right up front, with the unruly raspberry thicket in the back.

Garden 5/25/19
Weeding the garden in preparation for planting.

All in all, so far this early summer has been great in the garden, with everything doing great so far! There is always a lot to do, which I love. I don't always get to everything (or anything) but I love dreaming about all I can do.

The to do list for the garden includes:
-Weed
-Transplant strawberry runners which have escaped the bed
-Transplant mint to outside the fence

-Harvest onions or replant along dog run fence.
-Dig up and transplant all the daylilies

-Tame the raspberries somehow

-Prune the lilac.

-Weed the far area and clear space around the blueberry

To recap, the biggest improvement we have made to the garden so far was to improve the fencing. When we moved in, there was a low fence with strings of fishing line above it, which worked ok at keeping deer out, but poorly at keeping rabbits out. The rabbits must have found a way in somehow under parts of the fence.
So, in 2017, Mike and Bob helped me re-fence it! We bought the cedar posts at Menards, and bought 6 foot high deer fencing online. Since we have put this up, we have been able to keep the deer and rabbits out of the garden, and we can garden in peace.

5/14/17
We dug a trench a few inches deep so that the fence could be below ground a few inches to prevent rabbits from digging under the fence. Here Mike and Bob are stretching the fencing before we attached it to the posts.

5/14/17

5/14/17
Here is the large roll of fencing that we attached to the fence posts. I like that the lilac was in bloom at that time!

5/14/17
Here is Mike digging the trench for the fencing. That was not an easy job. We are enclosing quite a bit of area that was not previously enclosed, including the lilac, the raspberry thicket, and a lot of lovely purple blooming creeping charlie.