My husband and I have always taken an interest in gardening. Not only did we find it fun, but also the possibility of growing our own food from scratch could be really rewarding. We lived in the city (Phoenix area) for about four years. In our apartment and our rental house, we tried to grow easy things, like lettuce, in pots. During our last year in our rental house, we were given a greenhouse kit where you essentially put together premade panels and metal pieces to build your own greenhouse. We were excited for the chance of possibly having some plants successfully grow in the green house since we never really had luck with the pots. At first, the green house was doing well. We were even able to grown a green bean vine big enough to start getting a few pods. Unfortunately, as soon as the temperature started to get hot in the spring, our plants burned.
When we bought our cute, little home in the mountains, we knew it would be a priority for us to have a real garden, like one in the ground with rows and big plants, the whole nine. When we moved in, it was almost impossible to imagine a space for our garden. The majority of the property had been neglected for years by previous owners, and as a result, was completely overgrown. Nevertheless, my husband was so determined that buying our first home would be the start of fulfilling our dreams. So he quickly went to work clearing out the overgrowth.
There was an insane amount of work to be done back there and I will talk about all of that in another post in the future. It took a lot of hard work to get a space for our garden. We have quite a few large granite rocks and boulders on our property, and of course there had to be one in the space we were planning for the garden. Incredibly, my husband was able to move that several hundred pound rock (and several others) by himself, more on that in the future post. Anyway, as I’m sure you can imagine, it took quite awhile for the property to come together. So in the mean time, I started our seeds inside, which helped because we had a pretty long winter here.
My little seedlings grew so well in the house and we were so excited and hopeful that that meant we would have a great garden for our first season having a real garden. I was so excited to check on them every day and see their progress.
When I saw how well the plants were growing in the house, I decided to try growing some plants indoors that would stay indoors and hopefully grow all year long. I planted some cilantro and I bought a tomato plant specifically for this experiment. I started them in my kitchen window with my other indoor plants. To my surprise, the tomato plant is actually growing a tomato currently!
As spring approached, my husband had not only found the time to build a wonderful chicken coop for our brand new flock, but was able to make us a perfect area for our first little garden.
As soon as the weather was warm enough, we had transplanted our little indoor seedlings to our new beautiful garden area. We also planted some new seeds too. Things were off to a good start and we couldn’t be happier. After a very short couple of weeks, we were even able to harvest our very first vegetables from the garden: some radishes. I had never even tried radishes before this point, but trying them for the first time and knowing we grew them ourselves, made them even better!
But with all new things, you make mistakes, and you learn and grow from that. Well, what mistake did we make? We naively assumed that the many animals we see in our new little town would not be able to climb over the natural granite boulder “wall” we have surrounding the back of our property. Well we were wrong. Just as things really started to take off in the garden, we started noticing some nibbles on our plants. We decided to get an animal “surveillance” camera to see who or what was helping themselves to our plants. One morning we came out and the garden had been eaten up to the point it was basically bare. We took a look at the camera footage and found that a group of hungry javelinas helped themselves to our garden like it was a salad bar.
After the javelinas destroyed the garden, we were upset over the loss of our plants, but it was still early in the season so we decided to salvage what we could, replant, and learn from our mistakes. We went out and got some garden fencing immediately and surrounded the garden. After the fencing was installed, things were going pretty well. Our new seeds began to sprout and once again, the garden was beginning to flourish. Before long, we had a nice size squash plant growing, several stalks of corn, a jalapeno plant, FIVE tomato plants grown from seed (which is a huge deal for us), a bunch of lettuce, green onions, and a couple other little things.
Things were going really well. We did face a couple of smaller pests like birds, bugs, and skunks. My husband was able to trap two skunks and release them away from our home. Since then, the garden seemed to be doing great and the new fence seemed to be keeping the javelinas out. The corn was as tall as me (5’1″), the squash plant had grown so many vines and flowers, our tomato plants were growing dozens of tomatoes, we’d done one harvest on the green onions, the jalapeno plant was going crazy with peppers, and I was even able to make a delicious salad with fresh lettuce from our garden and some boiled eggs from our chickens. Boy did it feel (and taste!) great to eat something that was mostly grown right here on our own property.
We were so proud of the garden we had grown. It was awesome to have such a beautiful garden on our first season and after the trouble we had had. It felt incredible to know we would get a good harvest at the end of the season. However, last week, we were struck with another unfortunate event.
I went out to let the chickens out one morning and saw the garden decimated. I couldn’t understand what happened. The only thing that would do such damage was the javelinas but the fence was intact as far as I could tell. So what happened? Well, I went inside and checked our garden surveillance to get to the bottom of it.
A fat, hungry javelina had found its way onto the property. At first, the fence did its job and kept the javelina out. Then the javelina found its way to the makeshift garden gate. When it couldn’t get in there, it backed up, charged the fence, and actually broke it (after I found this out, I was able to see where the hole was). It then wandered into the garden and began helping itself to our plants. After a short time, several others showed up and made their way to the broken area of fencing their friend had so kindly done for them. Eventually, there were 6 or 7 javelinas just helping themselves to anything and everything in the garden. I couldn’t believe it. In a matter of minutes, they had destroyed almost the entire garden we had been working so hard for.
Any littler plants we had growing were gone. The lettuce was gone. The onions were gone. The squash was so bare. The tomato plants had been knocked over. Only the corn and jalapeno plant seemed to be untouched. We salvaged as much as we could, tried to fix the tomato plants, and my husband reinforced the fencing. It’s pretty late in the season now and the summer heat is in full swing, so we have made the decision not to replant again this year. We are hoping we can still get some corn at the end of the season, and some tomatoes and peppers from the plants that remain. While the garden is mostly ruined, we are still happy that we were even able to grow things and have a real garden. Since it has been our first time with a real garden, we have learned some things. We can go into the next garden season with some new knowledge and a bigger desire to learn and grow. Stay tuned to see if we are able to harvest some corn, tomatoes, and/or jalapenos at the end of the summer!
CatTailsandCookies.com 