Under Attack + Fruits of Our Labor

I told you we were worried about deer eating our garden. We had been lucky. No signs of deer. They ate our neighbor's blackberries, but didn't touch our garden. 

Then, one day while I was at work, our neighbor posted this picture to Facebook:

That picture was taken out of their window. Yep, that's our garden. Crap-ola.

We surveyed the damage. So far, she's only dined on cucumber leaves. She left the cukes intact, but ate off most of the leaves and blossoms that would've grown new veggies:

At least she didn't touch the tomatoes. She did however get the sunflowers that were growing back near the woods. I mean COME ON! My sunflowers?! NOT necessary.

We went to Lowe's. We bought this:

Yep, deer stopper. You just spray it on your plants and it stops the deer. It smells like old people perfume. I am skeptical. BUT, it's 100% satisfaction guaranteed!! So it HAS to work, right?? We shall see.

Anyway, after I got over that devastation, I realized we had a lot of picking to do. Our cukes  and tomatoes are growing almost faster than we can eat them. Here's what we harvested just on Saturday:

I've found that the most fun part of having a garden is coming up with new ways and recipes to use all of your freshly grown goods. So on Saturday, I decided to make a delicious fresh pasta salad with cukes and cherry tomatoes. I couldn't decide between a mayo-based pasta salad and an oil-and-vinegar based one, so I made one of both:

They were super-delish!

Ok, that's all for now. I'll be back tomorrow with a few yummy food pics & recipes, plus a (sort of) Tightwad Tuesday post.