Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Little Hands Belong to the Devil Himself

 As my summer winds down and school looms on the horizon, my garden is in full swing and is also thinking about winding down.  The tomatoes took a hit with the 3 days of wild rain last week and they are ripening but they look like crap.  The beans are just about done and round 2 is just getting ready.  The peppers are pretending they will flower again but their first crop was pretty lackluster, so I don't know.  The peppers are good but very small.  Anything that flowers is blooming its pants off.  I arrived in my garden this morning to find this:

I know, more sunflowers and morning glories.  But they are so PRETTY!
And this:
This is very exciting because these are broccoli plants that I grew from seed. The slugs had a gourmet feast in the spring and I thought they had eaten them down to nothing. They have come back with a vengeance and I am thrilled.

Because then I came across this:

Something with HANDS had to be at work here.  You have no idea how much this infuriates me.  This is when I swear in the garden.  Hand wielding little shits ruining a whole summer's worth of work.  I am determined to grow corn without chemicals and I do quite nicely.  No bugs, nothing.  I picked one ear the other day and it looked so great that I couldn't wait to get a few more.  But something beat me to it.  I have 3 foot high fencing all around, so it was either squirrels or raccoons. We don't have deer in the yard and the corn is too far in for them to get it, even if we did.  Plus, they couldn't peel back the husks so nicely without HANDS.    
 
I go with raccoons because whatever it was actually pulled off some of the ears and then shucked them.  I don't think the squirrels are strong enough or determined enough.  And the raccoons would have to climb over the chicken wire because I think it's just high enough that they can't hop over.  Unless they climb a tree and jump down.  I'd like to set up a camera.  I am really mad.  I think the ears that are shucked right on the stalks are what infuriate me the most.  And if you look, they really aren't ready to be harvested, so they didn't even get a good meal out of it.  And the worst is that now they know.  The emails are being sent underground and the king destroyer (rubbing his little, shitty hands together) is marking the map so they know exactly where to go next year for more great stuff.  
 
Mornings like this make me HATE NATURE.  And that's pretty foul language from someone as green as I am known to be.

2 comments:

  1. The sunflowers are gorgeous! My daughter tried to grow sunflowers this year, but it didn't work out how we had hoped:( My husband thought the birds ate all the seeds!

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  2. Yep, the sunflowers are pretty spectacular. I had one that was about 10 feet tall but the hard winds and rain last week made it break at about 4 feet up. It's still alive and about to bloom but not as cool. And I've found that until the seedlings are up about 2 inches, you have to keep a screen over them or the birds dive right in. One year, I had some seeds in cups with a screen over them, but some cups were shorter than others. Something crawled in and turned over all of the short cups and shelled each seed and ate the inside of each one. Now I put seeds in things that are all the same height and anchor down the screens with bricks. Two can play at this game, nature!!

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