Last year, we planted a garden buffet for our groundhog. We didn’t intend to be a 4-star groundhog restaurant, but that’s what happens when you plant a garden beside a groundhog home. It’s really not the groundhog’s fault for wanting to dine in our garden. If a restaurant was put up next to our house that had all the tasty treats we like, I’m sure we’d dine out a lot more. And it would be weird if we walked into a restaurant and the owner said, “Oh, we don’t serve humans…don’t make us put up a fence!”
Ahh…a fence! We decided to make our garden restaurant a bit more exclusive. I put up a 4-foot metal fence around the garden and put some chicken wire near the base to prevent critters of any size from getting through. I considered building a motion detection system that would trigger something really bad for groundhogs, but I thought it would be a bit too extreme. Besides, I don’t think I would feel good if I actually killed our groundhog. Groundhogs have a right to live too, and I’ve grown accustomed to seeing him/her every day. We plan to plant some clover for him/her so our pet groundhog doesn’t feel so slighted. So far, the garden is doing great. It is, at this time, no longer a restaurant for critters of the north, unless those critters are bi-peds that migrated from Cambridge.
Here’s a pic of our garden restaurant last year. The groundhog lives under our blacksmith shed to the left.
Our new fortressed garden:
Fenced Garden
We also decided to tackle a previous gardener’s mess. Many moons ago, someone planted a flower garden in the middle of our front yard. I’m sure it must have been nice at one time, but after years of neglect, it was a huge mess. Grass had grown throughout the flower bed, and the flowering “stuff” had spread uncontrollably. I also couldn’t mow near the flowering mess because the garden was loosely bordered by rocks that grass had overgrown, and my tractor doesn’t like rocks. Grass is good. Rocks are bad.
So we went to work digging up a 10 X 12 foot mess. It was not easy. Most of it was manual until I decided to bring out my tractor to shift dirt around. It was a good idea until I decided to leave the lawn mower attachment on the tractor, which negated the good idea and turned it into a really bad idea.
The tractor got stuck and I spent an hour trying to dig it out to no avail. The dirt was too soft, and the lawn mower attachment was too low and propped up the tractor so that the wheels couldn’t get any traction. After getting eaten by too many mosquitoes, I decide to get some rope and pull my tractor off of the mound of soft dirt with my SUV. K asked why, if I knew that pulling the tractor out with the SUV was an option that would work, did I spend an hour trying to dig the tractor out….I’m still trying to come up with a response to that question…stay tuned!
Here’s the before pic of the garden mess. It doesn’t look so bad here, but it really was out of control.
Here is what we did after digging up our mess:
And finally, I thought I’d share the start of our walk-in closet. Our small bedroom has a smaller room off of it. This smaller room was in bad shape. The walls were built with very thin plaster covered over by nasty wallpaper. At first, I tried to peel the wallpaper off of the plaster, but after a year of working on it, I finally gave up. I decided to put up aromatic cedar paneling on the walls to cover up the messy plaster walls and wallpaper issue. In the end, I think it looks pretty good. I still have to build all the shelving, but I’ll leave that for another post…
Before picture of our closet:
After I finished the floors and put up the cedar paneling:
Yay! Looking great : )