Spring Container Garden Becomes Feline Favorite

Spring Container Garden Becomes Feline Favorite
This is a view of my waist-high container garden after I added all my 'birthing sheets' of chard, lettuce, carrots, beets, kohlrabi, spinach,  and red and yellow onion sets on March 18th. In the upper left is the tower for the sugar snap peas. It took all of 30 minutes to get done and then back inside for a cup of tea.

Looks pretty, doesn't it.

You can just barely see young peas coming up near their support. On the right, the first section of chard has a light covering of dirt, tamped down with the cardboard press. That little bit of compression kind of gets the whole idea of germination working in the seeds and also lets you know where you've just planted.

These are the 'birthing sheets' being arranged and lightly held down with soil to keep them in place until their final positions are established. I try to consider the sun's position and the height of each plant at this time.

Neighbor's Cat Decided to Rearrange My Design During Toilette

The less said about my neighbor's cat deciding that I had built this garden for his own privacy, the better.  Anxious to see how the planting made it through the night, I was up at the crack of dawn on the 19th and headed toward the garden. YIKES!!!! Kitty paws all over! And the 'birthing sheets' piled up and shredded! This was NOT good. Something had to be done to keep this guy out of my garden -- something with a caliber, perhaps? --  and, I didn't want to lose my friendship with my neighbor. I did some thinking...and some shopping...

By afternoon, ready and armed, I headed back to the garden with my solution. But, first, a fast peek at how the sugar snap peas had grown. It's always so much fun to see the growth, once the seeds have actually made it through the soil. 

There it is! Yup, ye olde chicken wire! What would a gardener do without it? Using support poles at each end of the garden and one at each center, it was easy to slide the wire down to meet the top of the blocks. A few nightly bumps against the wire and kitty is going to have to develop some new patterns, that's for sure!

Morning has broken on day two and heh-heh-heh! I'm still smarter than a cat. Not bad for an old lady. The wire held and, although there were some paw prints on the ground, not a single one was in the garden! Yay. With that success, it was time to add the broccoli transplants that you see down the center. Now, on to the budding fruit trees and preparing the beds for incoming blueberries, blackberries and raspberries. Don't you just love the spring...