The Goose, The Gabe, and Jungle Gyms

It has been fun to have Gabe out to Andrea and Alan's to run around in a larger setting than our small back yard at home.

He gets to drive his brother and cousin around in the gator, play in the bucket of water, and just generally run around. The other night he was put in charge of a new task: goose wrangler. This is the resident goose.

This goose is one tough hombre. He is the last goose standing from his entire clan, and he is kind of a cranky old cuss who does as he pleases.

It is a shame he's beyond his prime to be sitting on the table at Christmas. Goose decided it was time to get his feet wet in the garden tromping all over the mounds of newly planted pumpkins and tramping through the newly planted corn.

So the other night Gabe was put to work wrangling the goose, helping to keep it out of the garden. Gabe thought it was hilarious to chase down the goose and soon found out how quick it could move.

The other job I put Gabe to work doing that night was container pick up as I planted the tomatoes and herbs.

I chronicled his fine work and he was soon asking for his picture to be taken, resulting in this cheese hound.

Alan started constructing our industrial strength custom tomato cages.

As Alan placed them around the tomatoes Gabe asked what they were as he was picking up discarded containers. I described them as best I could to a three going on four year old.
"Gabe," I said, "those are tomato jungle gyms."
He figured it out right quick as he asked, "are the tomatoes going to climb them?"

Newspaper Decline

Newspapers are not only doing poorly at the newsstands these days, but also in our garden. Andrea has been boning up on some serious garden reading as can be evidenced by the literature represented to the left. However, one book idea is being thrown out due to practicality. We placed newspapers as mulch over the sweet potatoes, and had planned to do so for the tomatoes.

Well, practicality won out and having more rocks than mulch resulted in going back to the drawing board and coming up with a new game plan. For the tomatoes we decided to go with landscape felt to control the inevitable weeds.

This worked much better for the scale of garden we are dealing with, even if it isn't granola. Andrea decided to replace the newspaper in the sweet potatoes with shredded paper, so do not lose heart we are still recycling.

We also covered the peppers with shredded paper while the beets and newly replaced kohlrabi received grass clippings.

Newspapers may work well for small urban planter beds like the square foot gardening some of my friends are implementing this year, but it does not work well on a large scale windswept rural garden. The landscape felt installed like a charm and should work well for the herbs and tomatoes.