Adventures in gardening ~ Part 2

It finally occurred to me that I haven't been blogging about gardening. It seems silly, since it is on the top of my hobby list. I put more energy into planting a garden this year than any year before. Perhaps the reason I don't talk about it is that most of my garden has been eaten, by rabbits and deer.

I don't have a fence around my garden so I have tried many natural deterrents. Automated sprinklers to scare them, some super stinky concoctions that are guaranteed to work and not be toxic. They didn't work.

So my only option was to build cages around everything I possibly could.

Here are my caged Zucchini and Pumpkin plants.

Without the cage, these plants would look like their uncaged neighbors.

Pitiful site isn't it. They could also end up looking like the uncaged lettuce.

They attacked the tomatoes too, so they also got caged in.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the beans caged well enough, something got in and at them to the point they wouldn't grow back. There are a few things they don't eat, like the corn.

And they don't touch the sunflowers. At least not this batch, they pulled the first ones out of the ground.

The flowers in my yard are not exempt from the midnight grazing either. My rose bushes sport long poky stems with no leaves let alone any flowers. There are however some lovely flowers in bloom that they don't find tasty. Like these lovely orange marigolds, even the bugs don't like to eat these.

Or this very invasive butterfly bush, nope no nibbles on it's leaves. No butterflies either.

Or this purple petunia.

Pretty purple fuzzy grass.

Pretty pink Penstamin that once bloomed in February, what a lovely surprise.

Bachelor buttons that come back every year wherever they feel like it.

The annual perennial purple daisy.

Pink Zinnias, one of six that didn't get eaten by bugs this spring.

Pretty purple cosmos, the package said it was multiple colors but only purple came up!

Pink ivy geraniums that almost died from over watering.

Purple verbena that replaced the other purple verbena I killed earlier this year.

And last but not least, red gladiolas. Some of the few that survived the move here six years ago.

I can show my Alstermaria, the rabbits clip that back to nothing. Or my Asian Lilly, the deer ate all of the buds off of that. I have twice as many eaten flowers as I do not eaten. I guess I need to go through the yard and plant only those the animals don't like to eat. Or get a really big outside dog or just maybe someone will build me a fence.