Saturday, August 16, 2008

Rabbits

My garden's going. I've planted:
  • 5 tomatoes (now fruit is maturing) -- here's my mom's beefstake tomatoes, still green.
  • 1 zucchini (still flowering and fruit maturing. Weird thing is sometimes the flowers fall off without growing a zucchini fruit, and sometimes it's growing a fruit and still flowering-- and if the flower falls off a growing fruit, the fruit stops growing. I've only got one good sized zucchini, and its flower wilted this last week. I asked a man at the local gardening store, and he said that's normal and not to worry, and if a leaf has mildew (white and powdery-- which some of my leaves did have), not to worry about it. It's good he told me about that because i was cutting those leaves off :p
  • 1 cucumber (little cukes are starting to sprout!)
  • Swiss chard (Fordhook-- I've only got maybe 6 plants I'm confident about. I got the sprouts confused with some kind of weed, and so was weeding good plants out :( I'll know next time...)
  • 2 peppers (1 is developing fruit, the other is flowering. The latter was delayed by slug trauma earlier in the season).
  • Kale (Dwarf Siberian-- a good grower, esp. once it has a couple leaves to run off of)
  • Radishes (red globe-- I've got to thin these out soon!)
  • Turnips (purple top white globe-- I have to thin these out too). You can see the radish and turnip sprouts at the top:
  • Lettuce-- two varieties, a romaine and a bibb. They're the lines of green at the bottom in the above photo.
  • Sugar snap peas (worried about this one-- not sure it'll germinate.. it's been over a week and I see nothing. We'll see...)
Recently we've been seeing rabbits in the yard. They have been known to eat the kale, so every time we see them we run them off. This last week, I ran off one rabbit and a couple minutes later my dad ran off a second rabbit-- there were 2! I thought there had only been 1. Then I went out to water the plants and to put out garlic and red chili peppers-- apparently rabbit deterrents-- and saw 2 baby bunnies under the deck!!

I had to conclude we had run off their parents. And the next day, the baby bunnies were still under the deck with no big rabbit in sight. And the next day-- I counted 5 baby bunnies. I feel bad!! We de-parented 5 baby bunnies. They're still living under the deck. My mom cut up and apple from the yard and they ate it. But when they're bigger, I know they'll be after my kale. I am a little torn about what to do.

These ones look scary because their eyes are glowing, but they're pretty cute normally... Hamsters with bigger ears :)