Janine Donoho

In the beginning…

Even as our beautiful living space known as Planet Earth heats beyond her best health, when spring comes to these highlands, my yearning turns to my annual Mediterranean garden. When we moved here over a decade ago, we immediately laid out our garden rooms with the most sacrosanct going to my vegetable and fruit space. That’s the only one I’m unwilling to share with the local wildlife. Deer, bear, moose, marmots, squirrels, and chipmunks don’t share when it comes to succulent cucumbers, basils, tomatoes, melons, and eggplants.

Planting the mounds

Last year’s attempt to grow melons outside my fenced area ended with humorously frustrating views of a doe and her two fawns standing on the boxes as they tugged leaves and melons through the bird netting. Since I grow perennial flower and shrub offerings specifically for native fauna in other garden rooms, it’ll be aromatic herbs and greens in those vulnerable boxes this season. Hoops versus netting may allow me some share of the harvest, too. Lessons learned.

Native browsers

Seed catalogs brighten winter and this year’s fresh delights? Sweet Baby Doll, New Queen, and Sugar Cube melons; Stars and Stripes eggplant; Dinosaur zucchini; Banana Legs tomatoes; Bulldog okra; Dragon Tongue beans; and Corno di Toro Rosso peppers. These novelties join the reliable varieties leading to baskets of harvest. Surrounding those will be the usual suspects of carrot rainbows, piquant radishes, robust spinach, kale bliss, luscious chard, and lettuces with plenty of marigold and nasturtium to act as natural deterrents to predatory insects.

I wish you a productive gardening season, my friends, and hope you’ll share your successes, too.

What do you love to grow in your gardens? Please share those experiments that led to ah-ha moments.

These beauties love my vegetable patch too much.

Previous season with garden helper.

The why of it.

Melons and salad