Well, we finally borrowed our friend’s tiller and prepared the garden for planting again this year. I think it is safe to say that we got almost NOTHING from our garden last summer. Lots of rain plus hardly any sunshine made for a not-so-good gardening year. Plus, the critters kept getting in and eating things as soon as they would spring up. I built a tower trellis for green beans and a different one for peas, and as soon as the seeds sprouted into leaves, the were gobbled down to nibs overnight!

On Monday morning after a run, gym workout, chicken-feeding-watering-egg-gathering, breakfast with the kids, and math lessons, (It was a productive morning, and I was definitely on a mission to get a lot accomplished this week!) I asked Kayla if she wanted to help me get the plants in the ground that we had purchased over the weekend. She absolutely loves being outside in the garden, and decided to bring along a little friend. Meet Mr. Izzy. He started out as Isabella, but then became father to two litters of baby bunnies while “rooming” with Kayla’s other bunny Chelsea. (We were ASSURED they were both females when we bought them for Kayla’s birthday last summer.) Now living in separate hutches, Mr. Izzy gets more playing time out of the hutch because he is not as wild and crazy as Chelsea is. (More crazy with each pregnancy, I think. It happens to the best of us.)

Since we had already put the garden fence up, Mr. Izzy was free to hop around freely while we did our planting. He immediately found the only shade in the garden which was under a raspberry bush. I’m not sure I would even call it a bush yet, as this looks to be the first year it will produce. My friend Christina gave me a couple from her garden a while back, and we’ve been anxiously waiting for them and trying to protect them from teenage boys with weed-eaters! (And husbands with riding lawn mowers.)

He left the raspberry shade to hop around and enjoy his freedom several times and even stopped by to say hello to Kayla while she was planting some squash!

It was so cute to watch him stop by for a little visit, and then hop off again for either some playtime or more rest in the shade.

They do seem to prefer winter to summer as their coats are beautifully thick, but he was definitely enjoying the wide open space of the garden on this day.

And we got all plants in but the green beans and peas…. pumpkins, squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, jalepenos, basil, carrots, daisies, zinnias, and another type of flower that I can’t recall the name of. We also got some free veggie starts at our farm co-op – lettuce and stevia.

The leaves of the squash and pumpkins have already been eaten which led me to search for a remedy to the critter problem. The fence now has strips of dish rags soaked in vinegar dangling at intervals all around, and Buddy, our Golden Retriever, is about to get a haircut and have his hair sprinkled around the base of the fence – two home-remedies I discovered. We’ll see….

Of course, it was all worth it to see these adorable garden helpers at work with smiles on their faces!

Note to self: Take camera back in house after capturing cute images of little girls and bunnies in the garden. Otherwise, you may end up “watering” the camera after you have done all the planting. Thankfully, it survived. This time.