Detering the hares

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RMan and I met our first ever blogger friends on Friday.  Rae & Dino from  African Bliss were on their way to Cape Town, and dropped in for too brief a visit.  How do you cram getting to know someone into an hour... :(  They are wonderful, open, friendly people - and we both wish that they lived closer.  Finding, and finally meeting, people that you have so much in common with is uplifting - and not to be squandered.  Thanks guys - for taking the time to break your trip, schlepping along our sand road, and for dropping in :)  Now, when are you next coming our way...? lol

This passed summer was a complete washout as far as growing sweetcorn was concerned.  Three full packets of seeds only produced eight sweetcorn pants - why, because the hares kept nibbling the tender young shoots.  Those few plants which did survive  battled.  (I lived in constant hope of more showing themselves above ground, especially as I planted the 2nd, and then 3rd packet, but alas the hares with their nocturnal visits prevent that from happening)

So, I tried manually cross fertilizing the flower heads - obviously I didn't do a good enough job.

Evidence of inadequate cross fertilization

Similarly, my pea harvest last winter was a disaster.

The centre of the sweetcorn husk showed distinct
seed head origins

And my cabbages...

Cabbages chewed to death by hares

But - I am of the opinion that waste not is want not, so even those mangy veggies were used.  After all a stir fry is the perfect recipe to "hide" misshapen items and baby sweetcorn tastes and looks the same as what my garden produced :)

Stir fry consisting of home grown sweetcorn,
Baby Emerald squash, carrots, cabbage,
the last of my fresh yellow heirloom tomatoes
 and onions.

I may be slow on the uptake, but once I get the full picture I will go all out to prevent the same situation from occurring again - ever...!

My old shadecloth veggie patch to the right of
the pic and the new one in the background

We have all those alien black wattle trees in the area around us.

Black Wattle droppers as walls - you can see in the
foreground how many pathetic sweetcorn plants
the hares left me

And once again they came in handy.

This veggie patch is slightly bigger than the
original shadecloth one - that will allow me an
extra veggie bed

Gum poles for corner and centre supports, with Black Wattle droppers fixed along the sides to form walls.

The new hare proof veggie bed, with my original
shadecloth one in the background.  We have used
the bark which falls off the wattle / bluegum firewood
we order for the Rosie as mulch in the veggie patch bed
pathways - hopefully that will mitigate the winter rain
sticky clay effect when I need to harvest some veggies

I'm please to tell you that it's working - the new veggie patch "walls" are too high for the hares to jump over and my cabbages and peas are coming on fabulously this winter :)

Next spring we will be adding a shadecloth roof which will allow me to grow veggies there during the heat of summer.  I'm not going to bother with shadecloth walls - the wattle "dropper walls" will suffice as windbreaks / dappled sunlight.  And anyway, the field mice eat a hole in the shadecloth so that they can access the goodies inside.  So adding it to the walls is pointless.