Autumn Japanese Maple

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Garden and Seedlings

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We have been getting the compost turned, giving the raised beds some extra composted manure and getting everything ready for the seedlings to go out. Hopefully this weekend we will have everything in the backyard garden and will only have the big garden left to work on. Our lettuces are ready, so our first salad from the garden is coming shortly...the kale and spinach have taken a beating though from the squirrels, for some reason they want to dig them up. I added a lovely aluminum pie plate on a stick to scare them a bit and it works until the plate gets free. I hate having what looks like junk hanging in my garden, but I also don't want the groundhog eating my lettuce and the squirrels digging up my other greens! The seedlings are holding on even though I have had some dampening off and the garlic spray seems to be helping some of them. I was glad that we put in grow lights for them because it has been so cloudy and rainy for the past couple weeks, although you can tell we had s
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Adding Garden Soil to the New Garden

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The composted manure garden soil was delivered in the rain, and then the rain continued for a couple of days. That produced a soggy wet soil pile in the middle of our driveway. Saturday morning, the rain had stopped, and we were ready to lay down some cardboard and maybe some paper to kill whatever grass we were not able to destroy hand tilling it. The whole plan was a failure. The hand tilling we had done last week was nowhere near the kind of shape we needed it to be. It's funny to feel defeated so early in the process of anything you want to do, but there we were soaking wet topsoil covering our driveway and hand tilled slightly turned up grass in the backyard. We realized the mix we had bought was going to hold too much moisture and it would likely not work well for a garden if it was sitting on top of composting cardboard, this would have been the easy and quick answer to our garden dreams but we knew it had flaws already. We had to get a second opinion even though we knew w
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Pest of the year so far goes to....

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