This was the thread that helped me put a name to the style of garden that I love best. I have been working towards the cottage style for many years and never get tired of the evolution of it. Loved reading them all again today. Cheryl

I appreciate your post, because I've always had that 'dream' in my head, of living in the country, which I've never done and this is a reminder of the reality of how challenging it is. I don't know how you do it. I just wanted to share that we have a dog and it has not been a problem in the garden at all. This dog is not a digger at all, She enjoys the garden. I have a shrub border edged by grass on 2 sides of the back that she can wander through and look out the back post and rail fence at the next yard. And we have a 30ft mixed border with perennials that has a rock edge, that she was very easy to train to stay out of. She will chase squirrels when she sees them, and that has cut down on their mischief. So the right dog can be a workable solution and a joy as well. Maybe you have friends or family that might consider taking the dog when you go away? You might have to drive to them before your trip, but on the plus side, you might see them more often. :-) Maybe you have a friend with a dog that you could borrow for a weekend to test out how it would work out? We have never had outdoor cats, we have allergies in the family. But if I had rodent problems like you do, I would definitely get some cats right away. There are so many cats in shelters. But you might want to speak to someone about how you judge whether a cat is a good mouser. You said you have raised beds, I wonder if you added hardware cloth to the bottom of them? I would look into that. We just finished building new beds and added 1/4 inch hardware cloth to the bottom. I've been told that makes a big difference. I haven't had a lot of problems. I definitely have a mole in the yard, but not sure about the voles. So I did it as a precaution. It was expensive. I've also had it suggested to me to plant my bulbs in little baskets made of hardware cloth. On the Hosta forum, there was a suggestion to plant Hostas in wire wastebaskets that you can get at the dollar store. I've also seen people build chicken wire tops for their raised beds to keep animals out, although I haven't heard how successful that is. Good luck!

At our house, the harvest is hot and heavy right now. We have potatoes and onions curing everywhere, on every flat surface available. Today I'm going to start slicing and chopping onions to freeze for later use in cooking, and then the rest of the first batch of cured onions will go into tubular net bags for storage. The second onion batch needs to cure for at least another week and then they'll get the same treatment. I'm going to send 10 or 20 lbs. of onions and the same amount of potatoes to work with DS on the next day he works, which I think is Thursday, because I've promised his fire station chef a steady supply of fresh veggies. I am picking tomatoes about every other day, and we have more than we can handle at this point, which is a great problem to have. I don't think it will continue to be such a great tomato year for too many more weeks though, because our temperatures are well above the range at which flowers set fruit.) We need a cold spell here. By cold, I mean any weather with highs only in the low 90s and lows in the low 7os. We have enough tomato fruitset that I think we'll be harvesting all we can handle through mid-July but am not sure what we'll get after that. Yesterday we were down in the metroplex shopping for a few hours and we dropped off two Wal-Mart bags of tomatoes for DS's crew at the station which generated a lot of excitement among them, and saved me from having to do any canning yesterday. (I didn't have time.) On Sunday afternoon I put up 8 quart bags of green beans in the freezer, and I'm going outside in just a few minutes to pick beans again. I was hoping it would be nice and cool this morning, but our low temp for the night was 80, so we're starting out kind of warm already and the sun isn't even up yet. Yesterday morning we harvested the early sweet corn, which was the variety 'Early Sunglow'. We got about 75 good ears and a few bad ones that either had been 'sampled' by the raccoons, had poor fertilization because of the heat or something else that resulted in unusable ears. I gave the bad ears (less than a dozen total) to the chickens who were delighted with them, and put the rest in the refrigerator. We ate some fresh last night and will have more today, and I am going to blanch and freeze the rest this afternoon. Some years the raccoons get all the corn, and there's rarely a year in which we beat them to all of it, so I'm very happy with our harvest. I hope we're able to get as many ears from the mid-season corn and the late-season corn, but we'll be fighting both the coons and the corn earworms and European corn borers, so who knows what we'll get from them. Our garden is in the transition stage, where the last of the cool-season crops have just come out (I finally yanked the broccoli and cabbage because they just weren't doing anything at all) and have been replaced with hot-season crops so we'll have something to harvest in July and August. With highs in the upper 90s and lower 100s already and lows in the mid-70s throug low-80s, our weather here feels more like late July and August than June, so I am concerned about the effect of the heat on the garden---but there's nothing we can do about the heat except go with the flow. The bigger issue is the lack of rainfall. There's been no rain here for about 3 weeks our last rainfall was a half-inch on May 24t), and no good chance of rain anytime for us anytime in the foreseeable future. With 100-degree heat and no rainfall, everything here is rapidly drying out and turning brown, and we are starting to see grassfires. I'm already wrestling with the decision about whether to water or how much to water. We did run the soaker hoses to water the soil/foundation area yesterday, and I'm going to run a soaker hose in the garden today to water a couple of beds, but I am not doing a lot of watering. The problem with trying to keep a veggie garden green in this kind of heat is that the garden becomes an oasis that attracts tons of bugs when everything else is browning out, and we have a lot of wildlife (deer, raccoons, possums, skunks, rabbits, etc.) trying to get into the garden every day and every night. It is going to be a long summer. We have a surging spider mite and grasshopper population too, but also have lots of ladybugs so I'm not overly worried about the mites. The hoppers may be a problem, but only time will tell. Dawn

Larry, Ouch! Do you really want dead carcasses in the road by the house all the time? The other day we had a dead armadillo in the road and the vultures swarmed around it all morning. Then they came and started circling the garden where I was working. I was wondering if they were trying to tell me that my time was about up, but then I realized they likely were attracted to the bone meal and blood meal I had added to the garden a couple of hours earlier. I often do get circled by vultures after I've used those particular organic fertilizers. Carol, My summer peas hardly made anything because those plants seemed to be the preferred food of blister beetles and grasshoppers. The fall peas are doing a lot better. I am about starved-to-death for fresh cowpeas from our garden. I really don't mind shelling them. I can buy them fresh and already shelled at Central Market in Southlake, or I even could buy them fresh, shelled or unshelled, by the bushel, from the purplehull pinkeye pea farm in Thackerville. I just prefer to raise my own whenever I can. To me, they taste best when I pick them, shell them, and put them right into the pot on the stove and cook them. While they're cooking, I make homemade cornbread. I can make a meal out of purplehull peas and cornbread. Progress in my fall garden goes slowly. Parts of it are such an overgrown jungle, and I have to go slowly while clearing it because of the snakes. It never ceases to amaze me how many snakes like to come into the garden and climb the trellised plants. It is such a rude awakening to be looking at a plant and to see those beady snake eyes looking back at you. It is a wonder I haven't had a heart attack and died right there in the garden. I make a little progress every day, but it is such a big garden that I feel like I am not making progress quickly enough. It is still so danged hot that most of my cool-season plants seem stalled and not growing much. I know they'll grow more as time goes on, but these windy, warm days with temps in the 90s aren't the weather that the cool-season plants prefer. The Seminole winter squash has watermelon vines, Grandpa Ott's morning glory vines, cardinal climber and some bindweed mixed in with it. I've been trying to cut out and pull out the watermelon vines (no melons or flowers on them at this point) and the bindweed vines without destroying the Seminole winter squash, morning glory and cardinal climber vines, all whilewatching for snakes. I could save time by leaving all those bindweed vines in there, but I'm trying to get them out before they set seed. I am hoping to get out in the garden early, early tomorrow at first light and do some clean-up of the vining areas while it is so cool that the snakes shouldn't be up and moving yet. Larry, That's the reason I haven't bought a pea sheller--I don't want a bunch of mashed-up summer peas. I went through a period of really wanting one during a good summer when we had oodles and oodles of peas, but talked myself out of it after talking to someone who had one and said it mashed up the green peas a lot. It is a lot of work to shell them by hand, but if you cook them fresh, nothing's better. Some years I get a lot of them put up in the freezer but I doubt this will be one of those years since the nights are already cooling down quite a bit. I'll be happy with a few meals of fresh ones though. I do always do put up one frozen packet of southern peas for New Year's Day. It is like summer in the garden when they're cooking on the stove. When I was a kid, shelling peas was just something you did in the evenings--that and snapping green beans. We'd just sit out there on the porch with a big pile of purplehull peas or green beans and work out way through them and, before you knew it, they were done. Dawn