Gardening at the Busbys

Our garden this year has been a total mess. Most of this is my fault because I haven't been able to keep up with it for one reason or another. The weeds have absolutely taken over, as have the grasshoppers. Some of the plants didn't even bother to come up after I took all that time to plant them, the ingrates.

Our garden is bordered on one side by a big empty field. This field must be the breeding ground for all of the grasshoppers in the county. And they have found their way over the fence into our garden. Well, we released the secret weapon on them, the four ducks named Goose, Nigel, Oscar, and Elmer (*by the way, all these ducks are female, having been named before we could tell their sex) and the six chickens named Shanikwa the rooster (*see above note about names), the Gwens (hard to tell apart), Squirrel, Zsa Zsa, and Judy. The birds love grasshoppers and did their job very well. Then they ran out of grasshoppers so they started eating my pumpkins, green bean blossoms, tomatoes, and other suculant vegetables. They also started laying their eggs in the garden so every day was like an Easter Egg hunt. The dogs were the best at finding the eggs, but they immediately eat what they find or hide the eggs from eachother and me. So now I have to lock the birds out of the garden and the grasshoppers are starting to come back and eat my plants. Can you say viscious cycle?

In spite of all of this, my garden is actually producing some things very nicely: zucchini of course, peas, onions, yellow squash, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots and corn. And my grapes that I just planted are looking really nice and I have great hopes for them in the future years. Our apple trees are loaded, as are the pears and we have some peaches on our new little trees. I planted a few raspberries last year and they are really taking off. We have gotten a few berries from them also.

I bottled some green beans on Saturday, thanks to a friend who had pity on me and gave me some of the their extras. I love green beans that I can myself. They taste so much better than the store bought kind. Today I am going to make some zucchini bread from a gigantor that grew while I was hiking in the Uintahs. I'm also going to make some whole wheat bread, ground from my own years supply of wheat. And lest you think I'm too good, I borrowed my neighbor's electric wheat grinder so I didn't have to grind by hand, which I usually do. Then there is the laundry. And I hope I have time to carve a little. Connie says she doesn't blog because her life is too boring, but as you can see that doesn't seem to stop me.