Gardening In The Woodlands
Notice we use those plastic Milk jugs for watering our gardens. They last about 2-3 years then they get taken to a recycling place in our area. The fence had to be put up for the deer to stay out but we had tried several ways before putting the fencing up. We tried Irish Spring soap and many other things to no avail. The squirrels have gotten in the fence though and there is no stopping them. They eat anything. I mean ANYTHING! They love bread and peanut butter and I sometimes put that out on my back deck for them and it is funny to watch them take off with them. Not sure where they take it but they whisk it off to someplace. Yeah, I do feed them and almost every other critter that is called wild and they are respectful. Seriously! Opossums love banana bread too. None have attacked any of my cats or my dog when he was alive. Raccoons don't like cats and neither do deer. I have seen them stay away when I had indoor/outdoor cats. corn is the cheapest and they love that!. That is about all the deer eat. Tried apples and such but they don't seem to eat those. We had a couple of rabbits last year that had babies but I haven't seen them for about a year. We also had a chipmunk and it disappeared. Very funny, my husband who was a city dweller called it a rat! Of course, he called the squirrels rats too. They are also known as "Tree Rats". Hehehe.
We have mice, from who knows where they get through way under the fence into our raised gardens as well. Very tough having a garden in the woods. We live in a housing development and cannot have goats or chickens and can't cut trees down without permission, so that's hard as well.
This year we are trying something new. I got the idea from one of my favorite shows Homestead Rescue.
This IS the right Video and episode. Enjoy it! You can find others tooit on YouTube. We had to cut many trees down last year because of insect devastation. They ate all the insides of the trees. The only way we saw that was when the tree limbs started to die. Strange, as we tried very hard to use environmentally friendly insecticides on the trees to no avail. We also had lots of woodpeckers pecking the trees. They also pecked our decks to eat lots of the Carpenter Bee larvae. I watch one of the episodes of Homestead Rescue and they showed a garden they were adding to a person's yard that used dead trees. I thought that was a wonderful idea!
How that did it was perfect for my situation. All you need is a large dead tree and lay it on the ground. We have already cut up the trees but should work the same way. Throw on top compost material and grass clipping and then some dirt and put straw on the tip of that and water it really well. I think a layer of snow would have been the best, but we did not get much of that this year. In the spring, you can plant things on that big hill. The soil should be warm and the tree decomposing. We don't have access to straw right now but do have lots of pine needles for the top to keep the moisture in. That is great news! There is a layer of rock 6 inches under the top of our soil. That is why we have raised gardens.
I am going to use the fencing we had left after putting up the fence to make those tunnels. That way we can have small greenhouses for our plants. I got some PVC pipes already. Our sun is out during the spring. Then the sun peeks through all the tree leaves during the hot summer months. That is why we try to mostly garden in early spring through early summer and the early fall.
Any help would be appreciated!
