This cute little guy can’t take all the blame!

You would think that with four hightunnels we would have plenty of room to grow enough fresh veggies for you. But no, we had to expand to some outside beds. We chose crops that are the least vulnerable to insect pests, one of which is carrots. We put up a temporary fence to keep out our pets and planted away. Then we watered. And finally, we saw a few tiny carrot sprouts peeping through the soil. We kept watering to keep the soil moist hoping to see more carrot plants grow.

But they didn’t. And we couldn’t figure out why.

Then one warm evening as I was wandering around the garden, I startled Peter Rabbit in the midst of his supper. He came hopping out of the carrot bed, jumped through the squares in the fence, and ran away! Molly and Clark Kent, our two Great Pyrenees guardian dogs thought he was too cute to pose any threat and let him get away. I can’t blame them though. We enjoy all kinds of wildlife on our farm.

Mystery solved. One whole carrot bed had been munched to extinction.

So we doubled the amount and tried again. We planted two outside beds with 6 rows in each 80-foot long bed. That’s 960 feet of carrots! Having learned our lesson from Peter, we did things a little differently this time. After planting and watering well, we covered the beds with a silage tarp keeping in the moisture to conserve water and to protect the little seedlings as they germinated from cute, furry, brown things with white cottontails.

On the morning of the seventh day after planting, we looked under the tarp and saw lots of tiny plants. They were plentiful and thick. We fully removed the tarps and basked in our success.

At the end of the hot day, we checked to see if the carrot beds needed watering. It was too late! The tiny fragile plants had all shriveled and died in the heat of the day. Another fail!

Now you know why our carrot supply has been limited. We hope to have more available soon, but it will be a lean winter as far as carrots go.

And don’t even get me started on why we have no broccoli this year…