Picture 2 for Sad Story

1/4-inch precipitation this morning. The weather man said it would come in the morning, I guess he meant 2am.

Here's the follow-up picture to sad story. This is the Marathon Broccoli after the birds had their way with it. I have decided to try adding a bird feeder in Watsonville. I have lots of birds in my garden and they never bother the crops. But my husband also keeps a variety of feeders going with lots of different food choices. The birds are very active here in the winter. I quickly polled some of the other Master Gardeners, and it seems that the ones that don't have a feeder, also have problems with birds nibbling leaves. I found it easy to glean the information as we have a couple of PVC frames that have bird netting over them to protect the crops, and it draws people to them like a magnet. They all think it's a great idea as they are easy to move on and off the bed. Also, we have a couple of bars across the frame as we saw the birds gang up on the netting, weighing it down until it touched the plants; darn clever fellows.

And here's a shot of the bed that is looking the nicest right now. The plants on the left are 'Red Jewel' cabbages and the right are 'Oliver' Brussels Sprouts. They were transplanted on Nov. 12 of last year. And if they grow as planned, they should be ready to harvest in February. But I have to leave some leeway for slow growing during cold weather. The plant on the right is a fading 'Signet Starfire' Marigold from Renee's Garden Seed. I really enjoyed them last year, they made some lovely soft mounds of heavily flowering plants. The one in the picture was a volunteer in the bed that I left in when I transplanted the cabbages and sprouts.