After the deer’s wanton destruction of my 2008 garden and peach crop, see my post on [Depredations] of June 18, 2008, my solution was an eight, foot, fence around my current, and planned future expansion, garden area.

The completed fence and my “second edition”, 2009 garden.

The fence was completed in February, just after I had planted my onions. In first were two and a half rows, each row being seventy-five feet long, are Texas 10/15Y’s, Vidalias, Bermudas and shallots. The other half row is my wild garlic “patch”. Next to the onions were three rows of spinach that would be harvested by May 15.

In planting my garden each year, I have faithfully followed four things; the Farmers Almanac planting dates, the arrival of hummingbirds, the arrival of barn swallows and most important, the blooming or “coming out” of the large mesquite trees. The mesquites are most accurate of the four! By March 26, all of the preceding had taken place, my peach trees were blooming too, but peaches are the worst of the worst predictors, but I was busy planting this year’s edition of my garden.

My eyes being bigger than my garden and I had purchased twelve tomato and jalapeno pepper plants, so I planted them in two rows, six plants of each, sprinkling dill, basil, marigolds and black eyes among the plants. Luckily, I saved the other twelve plants and kept them alive indoors. Then I planted a long row of black eye peas and sat back with a big grin on my face. This year I would have a good, early garden!

The morning of April 7, it was awfully cold, twenty-eight degrees, with a heavy frost, almost ice on the ground and even though I had covered everything the night before, all my plants that were up, tomatoes, peppers and peas were frozen, history, even my peach blooms! My spinach survived and by April 15, I had paid my taxes, cheered along with all of the tax protesters and replanted my garden.

This was the first time that I have ever heard of mesquite trees being wrong!