The Garden is Netted!

After many hours over many days, I finally finished sewing, with fishing line, all three 28 x 28 foot netting pieces to each other and to two 14 by 45 foot netting pieces to cover our ridiculously huge garden. Then I stretched it over the garden and fastened it up temporarily. Today Johnny replaced wire on one side that was rotted and helped me stretch the netting over that side. Voila! A peacock-proof garden. I hope.

It is difficult to get a photograph of black netting with 3/4 inch holes stretched over an enormous garden. I took one photo from inside the garden, looking skyward. The photo from outside the garden shows the peacock sitting on the board at the top of the garden fence, hopefully not contemplating diving through the netting. Perhaps you can see the netting where it droops a bit behind the peacock.

It is so lovely to have my garden back. It has been covered, at ground level, with bits of netting and hardware cloth pieces and whatever I could find to keep the peacock from eating the seedlings. He wiped out an entire row of watermelons before I had them properly protected. But I could not weed that way and the seedlings were becoming buried under weeds. Today I hoed and hand weeded and found vegetable plants! Unfortunately, I don't know what they all are because the tags were knocked off by the peacock's tail in his wanderings around the garden.

The corn is recognizable, although it wasn't knee high by the 4th of July. (I don't think it was even up by the 4th of July.) Alas, I don't know if the pictured hill has pumpkins or winter squash or some sort of melon. I guess I'll find out eventually. I can tell three rows have beans, but I don't know which beans are edamame, which are bush beans, and which are dry beans. All three rows need to be filled in with more beans but I don't know which type bean seeds to put where.

Our outer garden is producing well, since the peacock has ignored it, although in this odd weather year we harvested our first crop of peas, first new potatoes and first ripe tomato all in the same week. Pictured are the prolific peas in a box and plentiful potatoes in a manure spreader.

Tomorrow I will replant beans and cucumbers (only a few came up... or survived) in the inner, safely netted garden.

Happiness is a garden without a peacock in it.