For the last two nights, we have picked up our watering cans and watered the garden beds, fruiting trees, containers, vines and bushes as well as the volunteers that showed up this year. Each night, I have watered the pumpkins (previously in the corn and squash bed as volunteers and moved to different locations) and a pretty large toad has been cooling himself under one of the pumpkin plants.
I can’t help it – I squeal like a little kid with delight whenever I see the toads in the yard. What we are doing is making a difference! The toad doesn’t actually like being watered, so he hops along under the Juniper bush in front of the house until I am done. What I think is actually happening, is that the toad is feeding on bugs in the bed we just recently planted with corn, beans and squash (and apparently about 6 other volunteer sweet pumpkins that I can’t move now) There are also several places in the garden that I put water dishes and fill them when we water each night, and that fill with each rain.
It’s very important to me to attract amphibians to the garden, to eat slugs and other pests that may hurt the plants we are growing. We haven’t seen a snake yet – but there are lots of toads – or at least I think there are based on the number of holes around the herb spiral and other plants.
Everything is an experiment. With each day that passes, I learn more and more about how to set things up to attract certain predators or pollinators, and watch and wait to see if it works…and so far – it is!
The potatoes are at least a foot above the raised bed and we keep adding soil, to grow more potatoes. Of course, we were watering the new grape vines along the fence and noticed that there are potatoes growing there…which means the potatoes we left (because they were too small) last year have seeded a new bed? So potatoes are perennial?
What I do know is that we really need to forget anything we have read or watched and observe how plants act in our particular garden. With the ridiculous winter we have had – I would not have thought that potatoes, tomatoes, and amaranth would have seeded themselves and grown this spring.
It’s all quite amazing and magical! And this little guy is apparently very happy !
