Garden city-

Saturday was a special day. We planted our garden. Our back door leads to a cement patio, surrounded by a foot of dirt all the way around the patio. We have four chairs back there..but they're stacked because there isn't much room. However, once the plants start sprouting, I'm sure we'll just sit and watch them grow.

If you'll remember, we commandeered a bucket of sand from the beach a while back and dumped it in one of the boxes. Saturday, when we started spreading it with our trowel, we found a trove of cat feces. I could not have imagined a bigger stash fitting into such a small pile of sand.

We've never seen any cats around here, and our garden is surrounded by a tall fence, so we were surprised to find out cats even go back there. Blessings. Anyways, we got rid of all the sand. After we'd filled the boxes with dirt and planted them, Charles put a net over the garden and hopefully that will keep them out.

We mixed 5 types of compost, vermiculite, and peat moss. It's 1 part each, to make a good mix for plants to grow in. SLO apparently has really good soil anyway, but we didn't want to give the plants any reason to deny us results. Plus, the weather here is really fine.

We planted cantaloupe, tomatoes, green beans, peas, cucumbers, peppers, broccoli, spinach, onions, chives, basil, oregano, parsley, cilantro, and brussels sprouts. I know, it sounds like a lot of plants, but we're hoping to get quite a spread of plants to grow. If there's inadequate sunlight for our plants to thrive, we will find out soon enough.

We did a square-foot garden. I'll send some pictures later. Thanks America, for the book. We'll bring it back at Thanksgiving.

Out of the three available sections, we only planted two. The right and back sides are all ready to grow. The left side has no dirt yet- we ran out of vermiculite and wanted to stay in budget. Maybe next month/year we'll finish everything.

Meow

This morning, Charles looked in the garden and saw a big hole. Something was digging in there. It's on. I have heard cayenne will cause cats to scratch their eyes out. Believe me, it's tempting. Or we could put our own scent onto the fence- so our backyard could smell like an outhouse. Or we could boil pepper and pour it around. We're also thinking about broken glass bottles. I saw that all over the place in Guatemala and we're both quite taken with the idea. More news when it comes.


Boo on cats.