Laowai

It’s not even June and my garden is already growing so nicely. Last year the garden lacked infrastructure – my tomato cages were flimsy and the peas would have grown higher if their trellis had been taller. So this year I have lots of structures to make use of vertical space. We have herbs, green beans and tomatoes growing at the close end.

We’ll be picking peas within a few days.

Two rows of spinach and one row of carrots.

The potatoes are growing so fast it’s almost alarming.

We had to have a new roof put on the flat part of the back of the house. We got a new copper cap that goes all around the edge of the roof. And a shiny new top to our downspout. Another thing I am surprisingly excited about – copper on my roof.

Grandma Dice gave us some strawberry plants when we visited Michigan in April. I planted them and rabbits or some other critters promptly dug them up and ate them. Sad. But, happily these strawberries that grow along the side of our house are doing really well this year. If I can just keep the critters away we’ll get some little strawberries soon.

My garden is making me so happy and I just love to putter around and weed or cultivate. My only disappointment this week was discovering that some of our shrubs in the front yard are getting decimated by caterpillars. I did a little research and I think the caterpillars are Viburnum Leaf Beetles. We’ll probably have to cut down the infected shrubs to stop the destruction. For some reason I felt devastated after I learned about the Viburnum Leaf Beetle – what a nasty bug.