On a whim, we planted a jalapeño plant in one of our raised beds this year. It's turned out to be our favorite of all the vegetables and herbs. After our trip to Grand Cayman, I've been making a lot of jerk and those jalapeños come in mighty handy. They'll get planted every year from now on.
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It's amazing what a raised bed will do. Especially if you fill one with a 50/50 mixture of soil and horse manure. Our tomato plants are taller than me, and in our climate, that's really unusual.
Tim, it was a terrible year for our tomatoes. I did a very poor job prepping the soil and they ended up growing large, but barely fruiting. Since we live in the Southwest, we can afford to try again and we planted a second crop about 3 weeks ago. This time, I took much greater care to nourish the soil.
I built a raised bed many, many years ago. The only plants the groundhogs let me keep were the tomatoes.
Since then, it has overgrown with volunteer peach trees (*) and redbud trees.
(*) from which I have got a few peaches over the years in those few years when a frost didn't kill the budding fruit.
Luckily, we don't have groundhogs around here. Deer are our big problem, and they prefer to kill fruit trees rather than eat the garden. Raised beds are practically miraculous in our climate, probably because they help the soil warm up faster.
I live in the middle of a city of 50k, and among the wild animals I have seen on my property are:
* deer (including fawns a couple of different years)
* raccoons (they are *still* getting into the attic)
* groundhogs
* skunks (their scent sometimes wakes me; I once caught one when I was trying to catch raccoons)
* wild turkeys
* mobs of crows
* hawks (the crows always chase them away)
* possums
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