kindergardens - week 4 {rawr! ... and grrrr! ... and awww!}

{RAWR!}

We have a dinosaur garden!

We started with an old crate from a friendly barn, some house plants inherited from an aunt, some moss dug up from Grammy and Pop Pop's farm, some old potting soil, leftover play sand, pebbles from one of our dead pond plants, and rocks left over from our "kinderGARDEN rocks" project last year.  Oh...and a plastic garbage bag to keep it all in the crate where it belongs.

The dirt went in first, and the plants.

Then Kiddo used the pebbles and sand to make paths for the dinosaurs to walk on.

A few rocks...some water...

And we're ready for the dinosaurs!

Kiddo is quite proud of his little Jurassic (Cretaceous?  Mesozoic?) world. 


{GRRRRR!}

Despite Kiddo's fabulous dinosaur digs, it has been a frustrating week in the garden.

We were super-excited when our new apple trees actually started sprouting leaves and looking alive a few weeks ago.

 

They were looking really good and strong and healthy.  And then I went to check on the garden one morning this week and the trees had been mauled by deer.  Half of those tender, cute green shoots had been ripped off.  Oh, SAD day.  We've taken preventative measures, but don't know yet how effective they will be.  The deer also mowed off the tops of our tomato plants, so they now have a tent of netting over them, as well.  Our garden is like an army encampment - tents everywhere!

(and a barn cat, too, of course)

We also had our first death-by-insect this week.  We've lost a cauliflower plant.  To roly polies, of all things.  Roly polies!!! (or pill bugs, or sow bugs, or whatever you want to call them).  Those innocent little things you find under logs and rocks and stuff.  Ha!  Not so innocent anymore.  I guess with all the wet weather we have had, they multiplied until we had a small mob out there.  They demolished our poor cauliflower in a day and were threatening several others, as well as our peppers.  An emergency trip to Agway for some diatomaceous earth took care of that problem in a hurry.  

Kiddo has also lost quite a few seedlings from the Great Flowerbed Flood of last week, and we are probably going to lose some of our favorite shrubs because they sat in waterlogged soil for too long.  Sigh.  

Gardening is not for the faint of heart.

{AWWWW!}

I was so frustrated with rain and deer and bugs and barn cats last night, I didn't even want to write a kinderGARDEN post, so I decided to put it off until after Kiddo went to bed tonight.  But after dinner, he and I went out to play in the yard.  

We planted some more seedlings in his flower bed...

We checked on his garden house and found the morning glories starting to climb up...

And we discovered that the potatoes he planted with Daddy were already coming up.

As the sun was going down, he informed me that he had an idea for a "really fun project!"  He had remembered the "sniffing tour" we took of our garden last year, and wanted to make a bouquet of the plants that smelled good so that he could bring them inside and smell them.  So that's what he did.

And I realized that the bugs and the deer and the cats and everything else...were worth it.

(Linking up to KinderGARDENS over at The Inadvertent Farmer.)