DIY: Saving the tomatoes in the garden!!

Do you have tomatoes in your garden?

Have you lost any of your tomatoes to birds picking them to death?

So how do you save your tomatoes? 

Well, that's where this post comes in.

I heard that if you take red plastic easter eggs and put them in your garden, that will detour the birds from pecking at your tomatoes. It tricks the birds into thinking that they are tomatoes and so the birds will peck at the eggs. Once the birds realize that they aren't pecking at a tomato, the birds leave alone the real tomatoes. 

Since we have a garden this year, I thought, I have to try this and see if it works. I decided to try it with wood balls instead of easter eggs. So one day after work I went to the hardware store to get some wood balls that were a little bigger than an inch a cross. I also bought some red spray paint to color them like tomatoes.

So I sprayed them red with several coats to make sure there wasn't any wood showing. I used Krylon Gloss Cherry Red spray paint. I let them dry for about 5 or 10 minutes, to make sure it was really dry, before spraying the bottom of the balls.

And really that's it. After I finished painting them and I felt like I had coated them well, I placed them in the garden. I painted six of them and then just randomly laid them in the garden bed near the tomatoes.

Here are the tomatoes growing in our garden. These are the Big Boy tomatoes.

These are our grape tomatoes.

This is our cantaloupe that is growing.

These are my herbs. I have basil, parsley, rosemary, and cilantro.

My basil. I absolutely love basil. It smells so wonderful and it's great when you use fresh basil in your dishes too.

We have worms.... in the garden.

The other day I went out to our garden to pick some fresh tomatoes. We had three plants growing, but one died. I don't know why, but one plant just didn't make it. The other two are grape tomatoes and better bush.

I'm so excited about our garden. I love everyday going out and picking the fresh veggies that are growing and watching what we produce. I can see now why farmers farm. It's an amazing process. The Lord created an amazing process with the fruit, soil, sunlight, and love.

Even though we are only growing on a small scale, it's still so exciting to wait for the plants to produce delicious and healthy foods.

One day the Hubby and I were driving around Texas and on our way home, we took some back roads. As we were traveling through the small towns there were fields and fields of corn. For some reason it was interesting to see it so close to home. I always thought our produce came from other places  (like other states or even countries), but yet there was corn just a couple of hundred of miles from my home.

But back to our garden. After I had picked some cherry tomatoes, I brought them into the house and set them on the counter. I walked off to go take care of something and when I came back I looked at them sitting there and noticed there was a small little worm crawling on the outside of one that was "bad".

I had left the tomato on the counter over night and when I got home from work the next day, the little guy was out again crawling around but this time he was black. It was kind of cool looking to see how he changed colors in a day.

These are from our garden that I picked over several days. The green one fell off as I was getting a nice red juicy one.

Eating the garden

Last night was the first night I actually ate something out of my garden. I was super excited too. For dinner the hubby and I made homemade fajitas. They were good except I think the meat needed to be marinated a little longer. It was still tuff. I needed cilantro for the marinade so I went to the garden and cut some. Man, was it strong too. Right when I talked in the door Hubby could smell it. Then I washed it and put it in the bag with the meat and it tasted wonder. This got me thinking about how the food in the store and how it doesn't taste nearly this fresh or delicious.

The garden

Here is the second part of the garden. As I said before, we put newspaper down and then put the garden soil on top. Here is the hubby putting the paper down.

Here is the second finished bed. It's starting to shape up real nice. 

The growing garden

So the other day, the hubby drags me to Lowes to get Garden Soil. So off we went and bought like 12 bags of that stuff. When we got home he put down newspaper in the beds and then put the soil on top. Next (Friday) we will get some bags of chicken manure to add, when it comes in at the nursery. Below is two shots of what the garden is starting to look like.

Well, the hubby is banging on the window to get me out there to help with the next bed. So off I go.

Growing a garden

Well we decided to grow a garden. We ordered some seeds online, from Burpee, and they came in a couple of weeks ago. We also bought from Lowes, those garden trays that come with the dirt in it, and then you just add the seeds and water. I asked the Hubby and he said we've been doing it for 2 or 3 weeks.

Here are some pictures of what it's starting to look like. Ok, this is the only good picture I took. Do you see the very tall plant in the front that looks like it's almost touching the candle? That was our first green bean to grow. They are coming a long very well.

Here is what we built in our backyard (which isn't very big either). It's our  own little garden. The long skinny one is going to host our beans. The other two big ones are going to have tomatoes, peppers, swiss chard, and okra with some different kinds of herbs and carrots. I'm excited about getting our own little garden going. It reminds me of when my dad used to plant one in our backyard and we would go out there and get some fresh stuff. I can't wait for my Big Guy peppers to sprout. Then I can make some homemade stuffed jalapeno's. We still need to get some fertilizer and soil but other than that, we are almost good to go. :) The net is going to get fixed (some how), to keep the birds out of. I'm not sure how my hubby is going to orchestrate it.

Here are some of the seeds we bought. This is what we are planting in the spring. We have some others that are going to get planted in the fall.