May 15 - Garden Check

Stuff is coming up.

It took the squash and zucchini about 4 days to send up the first sprouts.  Green beans, cucumbers, and okra began to sprout today, day 7. 

There are deer tracks everywhere.  The deer are coming up from the little thicket behind the garden, and walking diagonally across the garden to the field beside Nanny's house.  I think it's a fairly well-established route.  I wish I could've seen them come across there the first night after we installed the hog-wire fence for the beans.  Judging by the mish-mash of tracks in one spot, I'd say the fence surprised 'em.   

....Which makes me recall....

A long time ago, we had a big old shaggy brown dog named Bear.  He looked like a cross between a Golden Retriever and a German Shepherd - long, thick, tan coat with a black muzzle - (how that happened I'll never know, for his mother was a Sharpei and his daddy was a brown and gray patchwork shepherd dog from up the road that we affectionately referred to as "Fugly").  Bear chased anything that moved, including meter readers (how they hated him) - I guess that was the shepherd in him - and he was fast as lightning.  Let him see a squirrel or rabbit, and ZOOM!  Zero to sixty in one second.

He routinely zoomed right through the flowers that I'd planted around the patio.  There was no way to teach him any different.  I'd parked the car on his head when he was a puppy, and he never was quite right.  So I figured the best thing would be to put up a fence around the patio.  We didn't have much money, so the best I could do was chicken wire and some landscape timbers, sawn in half and planted like posts.  I started the fence late on a Saturday afternoon.  We had somewhere to go that night, and so I didn't get much done before it was time to quit for the day.  I got the posts set in the ground on one side of the patio, and had just enough time to tack up some chicken wire between the posts when I had to stop. 

The next morning, I went out to the patio, and my posts were leaning, and the chicken wire was all pooched out in one spot.  As I stood there puzzling about what could have happened, Bear came trotting around the house and sauntered toward me.  The pooched-out spot in the chicken wire was exactly as high as his head.  Judging by the amount of damage, I'd say he'd been moving at a pretty good clip when he encountered the newly-installed chicken wire in the darkness.  Is it wrong of me to still be snickering about it?  ;)