> > My scare birds don't look like people. They are shinny, rattley, shaky things hanging in the tree. I am still looking for the rubber snake, but the rest of my artillery is already in place.
>
> This sounds like more fun than what we did. And maybe easier. My dad would drape our cherry tree with plastic netting and that pretty much kept the blackbirds away. If we didn't net the tree, we had to be quicker than the birds or we'd be left with the pits.
>
> Hanging nets on a 25-30 foot tall cherry tree takes a lot of netting, clothes pins, a ladder or two and some long poles. It also gets in the way some when trying to pick the cherries but that is why we used clothes pins to connect the sections.
>
> This year is the first time I've had room to plant a large garden. I got a late start this year because it stayed colder for longer than usual and the rain was pretty constant until about two weeks ago. But I have some corn planted, peas, beans, squash, bell peppers, lots of different tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelon and canteloupe, as well as wild flowers. The soil that isn't in the garden boxes has a fair amount of clay that I didn't amend so we'll see how that does. And the beans, and maybe some of the corn, look like they are being attacked by something but I have yet to find a slug/snail/bug that could be causing it. Whatever it is, they are sneaky. Some of it was started when I planted and some are from seeds, hopefully to stagger the harvest so we aren't totally overloaded at one time.
>
> I don't know if it is the seed or the soil but the corn I planted has been erratic. One row only had two sprout and another had about 7 sprout. I finished planting all four rows and put some new seed in the feeble rows. We'll see.
>
> We leave for England on Sunday so hopefully it gets watered well while we are gone, we don't get a serious heat spell, and the enemy weeds and varmints keep their mouths off. After ten days away, I'll come home to find out how the war is going in our yard.
>
> Ferrick

I guess that's why nobody ever says it's easy. The bugs are bad enough, but we also have rabbits, ground hogs, moles and squirrels. One time a neighbor's goats got out and ate a large portion of what we had planted.

But you can't buy food like that in the store. We have had greens, onions, radishes, and lettuce, but that's all that is ready to eat. The cherries are about half ripe, and the birds are really taking notice.

I don't eat potatoes much anymore because of the diabetes, but my wife planted a short row and they are enormous. At least the part above ground is. Potato bugs are easy to control. You just knock them off the plant and they just lay there on the ground and die.

We planted almost a third of the garden in purple hull peas. They are the easiest thing in the world to grow.
Howard