A New Blog

Every time I finished a pregnancy, I wanted to change my hair style and buy some different clothes.  I wanted to have an outward change to reflect all of the changes going on internally.  Have you ever had that happen?  Even now that we are done with tummy babies, I go through times of change and growth when I need what we call in our house a "do-over."  For those who don't know, the past four years of my life have been what I would call turbulent.  Emotionally hard, relationally lonely, and spiritually confusing.  Things were so bad that I found myself unable to blog about anything good, kind, noble, or uplifting.  The only words that came out were hard, complaining, and depressing.  "If you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all."  I didn't have anything good to say, so I didn't say anything.  This blog was, for the most part, very silent.

After a long fight, I am out of the darkness.  Not out of the fighting, but out of the darkness.  Because of the changes in my heart and in my life, I felt it best to have a blog "do-over."  So if you are interested in the happenings of the Rhodes family, link on over to How My Garden Grows.  I'd love to share my life with you!!  (And if you are one of my blogging friends, please take this blog off of your friend links and replace it with the link above!  Thank you!!)

The Birds

We expanded our garden this year. It's ridiculous how much bigger it is. The reasons behind the expansion will make for an entire post that I'll have to type out at a different time. Right now I must tell you about the birds....

Our lettuce was beautiful. The spinach growing by leaps and bounds. The peas were climbing each other and almost a foot tall. The swiss chard was glowing in yellows and reds. And then it happened--large chunks of leaves being eaten! Not MY plants! I planted those veggies for ME to eat! We couldn't figure out what was going on. I googled. I researched in all of my vegetable gardening books. You know what I found out? Nothing. Not a single site saying anything about pests for the aforementioned plants. In fact, everything I read basically said "If you can't grow these, you should stop gardening!" Didn't help the dying plants. Didn't help my curiosity.

It didn't look like bug bites--there were no holes at all. I thought that it had to be birds. My neighbor (a gardener of 25+ years) said that she has never heard of birds eating lettuce. Jeremy thought I was crazy. Tonight I got my answer. Jeremy went outside to make a fence around the raspberry bushes (again, another posting!) and found EIGHT chickadees eating my pea plants! It feels good to be right! Now I just have to figure out how to get the chickadees to eat the bugs that are in the garden rather than eating the garden!!