We’ve all had that goal where we truly just want something to work out. For myself it would be everything to do with the garden. I love the garden. It truly is a magical place to just see so much flourish and take off. It’s the golden hour falling over the garden that has me smiling. It just is a calming place.
This year though we have had nothing but issues in the garden. We planted the majority of the garden in April and I can’t even lie, we had issues since day 1 in the garden. It started off with taking down our raised bed frames and tearing apart the garden beds to make them new. When we did that we found some rats nests (our biggest struggle last year) and were able to get rid of the rats. But we quickly rebuilt and planted the garden. Well that obviously then called for our free range chickens to come in and scratch the garden right after I planted everything! Ok no problem, once again. I can work with this. Oh but then there were the wild rabbits. They thankfully moved away but they would come to chill and have a nibble.
Now, those were all minimal issues. The next few…. Oh they truly wrecked! It started with our free range and the wild ducks getting into the space. They managed to tear up a few of the garden beds while looking for bugs to eat. I was able to resow anything that looked like they may have wrecked. But the next was the shocker. Our pigs got loose and they went right into the garden first then they moved onto the rest of the yard. There was a clear line of destruction. This year we offered a garden bed space to our friends to use and sadly that was one of their favorite spots to smoosh. Once done with that space they hit up every single flower section I planted from seed. Those did not resow at all. Thankfully our friend planted more than she needed (she sells farm shares) and the pigs didn’t cause her, so to speak, much loss.
The worst case yet was just two weeks ago. I am still so very annoyed and continuing to pray that The Lord performs a miracle on this garden. If you know our layout, our female goats fence lines one side of our garden space. For myself this is an extra added layer of protection that they have a second fence protecting them from escaping. Well there was one spot that looked lower than the rest and on that day our goat named Whiskey decided to push it down and climb over. She’s our tallest goat and she surely made it known that day that she wanted to have a snack. Whiskey ended up chewing up about 5 hot pepper plants, our blackberry plant, some herbs and a lot of the elderberry plant. The blackberry and elderberry plants stung the worst to see demolished because both had such beautiful growth this year and the elderberries haven’t been picked yet. They are still working on blossoming and coming into season but she took so much of the foliage and some of the berry sections too. The blackberry had grown so much on our trellis but she managed to give a really harsh trim. Hopefully we can still get some elderberries this year but we will surely be getting less than originally planned.
With all of these bumps in the road we have thankfully still been able to harvest so much from the garden and have been able to actually can items for the winter. I am so thankful that we can still provide food for the family and for others but the emotions have been absolutely everywhere this year. Here is to hoping that we can manage a fall garden with less issues. I think we have a lot less opportunities for the animals to get out now. Our free range animals continue to lessen as we manage to catch them and add them into our big fence but with half of our issues being escapees, we still have a chance of issues. Feel free to say a prayer as we try a new season of gardening!