Spring has almost sprung here in the Bear House, and a lot has been happening! I recently returned from a spring break trip to the Netherlands and Belgium, and Tim is away on a boys’ trip to the Soda Springs cabin with his brother and father this weekend!
Ever since the beginning of the year, it has been raining a minimum of at least once a week (and if you live in Southern California, that is definitely rare). The garden has become a huge forest of weeds! Our planter box was actually under siege during one of these rainy weeks by some mysterious unknown creature that upended several of the plants. RIP baby arugula and baby cucumber plants. The dogs were getting cooped up due to all the rain (and my reluctance to continue to wipe eight dirty paws 5x a day), and I think some animal decided it would be fun to dig up some of our new plants. 🤔
To protect the rest, we put wire tomato cages around them leftover from last summer’s garden, which has so far protected the baby plants.
There was also a caterpillar infestation, so we decided to lure some birds into residence with a bird feeder. I purchased this bird feeder and a 10-lb bag of seed from Amazon with the hope that the birds would eat some seeds AND caterpillars. Although we have yet to see if the caterpillar population has decreased, the bird population has rapidly increased, as all of the local birds told their bird friends about our feeder. It was emptied completely in half of a day the last time we filled it up.
In the past month and a half, the real stars of the garden have been… our potato plants!! They have taken amazingly to root and are growing into giant sturdy plants. Because of their success (and more old pantry potatoes), I added two more seed potatoes to my garden. Only time will tell if they will be as successful as the first group!
Bird feeder in action!
Potato growth after 1.5 months! (trowel for scale)
Sneak peek of the Netherlands and Belgium travel guide!
