It’s finally starting to feel like spring. It probably won’t last long, as summer officially starts just 2 days from now, but I’ll take what I can get. The good news is that the garden is finally starting to come on strong. We keep getting big storms with lots of wind, and that’s never fun for the garden, but it usually bounces right back. We did have a few pepper plants get snapped in the last storm, but the rest are really starting to produce. It’s fun to watch.

We had about a week of good, warm weather, but now we’re back in the cold. It rained almost every day this week, and the high temperature never got above 60. That’s extremely uncharacteristic of this time of year. Normally we would see mostly sunny days with highs in the 80s and 90s. Yet, despite those conditions, the garden continues to move forward.

This week we put up nets for the beans to climb. They’re not big enough to grab on yet, but it won’t take long (if it ever warms up). Some of the storms brought wild winds that knocked down many of the tomatillos and tomato plants. There are more peppers and more kinds of peppers growing now. The potatoes are starting to bloom. And the kohlrabi are starting to look like alien space ships, which is what they are supposed to do.

We do have a couple plants that seem to be dying for no apparent reason. They were healthy and strong last week, but this week they’re almost dead. It’s sort of strange, and fairly concerning. I don’t want it to happen to any of the other plants.

It’s no secret that I hate cats in my yard. Every year they find a way into my yard to cause problems. My next door neighbor just got a new kitten, and asked me to kindly return the kitten to him if I ever saw it in my yard. I told him that I usually try to shoot any cat in my yard with my airsoft gun. At first he thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. I doubt I would shoot at his kitten, or chase it until it hid in my window well like I do the other cats, but I hope I don’t have to find out.

We have at least one bird nest in our yard each year. Protecting the nests from the cats is never easy, but this year it was nigh impossible. A robin built a nest less than a foot from the top of the neighbor’s fence, right where the cat usually comes into my yard. I scared the cat off many times, but eventually the cat got to the nest, smashing the eggs.

I need to get a garden camera hooked up so I can show my neighbors, in excruciating detail, just what a well-behaved citizen their pets have become. Plus it would be cool to be able to hit this page and see the current conditions. Maybe I’ll tackle that project when we do the new deck next month.

One of the side-effects of keeping your plants inside while it snows outside, is they believe it’s time to blossom. Apparently those blossoms attracted pollinators during the few days they were allowed to stay outside, because we have peppers and tomatoes growing in the garden already!