One hard thing about spending lengths of time away from home on long hikes is that I don't get to garden. For decades now I've loved to make environments that grow plants, flowers as well as good things to eat. For two of the past three years I've spent six months away from home, making it impossible to do summer plantings. This year I've decided to go for it but first I had to build garden beds that will protect plants from the mauruding gophers we have up here on the property. My previous gopher wired beds only lasted a couple of years so this time I built some with hardware cloth that should give me five or so years of gopher proof bliss. I added climbing trellises to both planters so I'll be able to grow gourds and peas, sweet peas in fact.
The biggest box above is 4 x 8 and contains one big cherry tomato plant, dalias, basil, radishes, beets, sweet peas and sunflowers. Some of which did well and others did not.
The small box here has done very well with loose leaf lettuce, radishes, beets and a bumper crop of gourds... birdhouse gourds. I love those and I should have tons by late fall.
So you can see my spots for protected planting are small but I hope productive this year. I'll be gone some early this summer (vacation to Mexico) and will attempt to finish hiking the state of Washington in August. I hope there is some food left for me when I get home in September.
