Our Fat Rabbit fortifications have been breached by a baby rabbit! Baby Rabbit is quite small and I have only seen ki a few times. Pretty sure Baby Rabbit is not living in the garden. I have not noticed anything being nibbled—the peas remain intact as does the lettuce and other little sprouts. There is so much arugula and other things growing and Rabbit is so small, ki has not graduated to being blatantly destructive—yet.

We stopped the rabbit fortifications with a bit of chain link fence left open because there were no big gaps in it. But there are plenty of gaps for a tiny rabbit, who has been exploiting them. We do not currently have any more hardware cloth to continue the fortifications, and no time to make the trip to get some this weekend. So here is hoping that Baby Rabbit doesn’t munch anything vital until we can get more barrier fencing. Or perhaps Baby Rabbit will be too big to get in through the chain link soon? Just as long as Baby Rabbit doesn’t get in and then can’t get out again. Oy, that would be a nightmare!

The chickens, well Ethel and then Lucy, because she followed Ethel, figured out how to get into the garden too. Sia, as you may recall, was flying over the gate and we put netting up so she couldn’t fly in. All has been going well. But in fortifying the garden against Fat Rabbit, James had moved some fencing on a cinderblock wall that kept the chickens out of the garden. He didn’t realize he had done this. I didn’t realize he had done this. Ethel, smart girl, figured it out.

To get into the garden she had to walk along the cinderblock wall until the fencing ran out and then simply stroll right in. Smart Ethel kept doing this over and over. Not smart humans kept catching her and putting her back into the chicken garden, completely baffled over how she was getting in. And then Lucy followed her.

James thought they had been getting in through a gap in the fencing along the coop and kept looking at that and found no way they could get in. Then he turned around and it dawned on him what Ethel and Lucy had done.

He put up a temporary barrier right quick, because not only could the chickens get into the garden walking along the wall, they could also decide to jump off the wall and out into the alley to go visiting the neighbors. We were relieved that they were so focused on getting into the garden that they hadn’t thought of escaping entirely!

About a month ago we got new neighbors. They are a nice young couple with two dogs and the dogs like to bark at us, but that’s probably because they don’t really recognize us yet. They also have tattoos and a very quiet electric mower. We’ve given them some welcome eggs, and we are always very pleasant as are they.

We found out this week that one of them works for a big lawn care corporation, the kind that uses chemicals and all that stuff. So I’m a little worried they are going to be spraying chemicals and stuff, especially since the “we buy houses” place that bought and sold the house after the previous neighbor died last summer didn’t take care of the lawn and it is in pretty sad condition. But with the two dogs, maybe they won’t spray stuff? Maybe they will just put down sod, or seed the big bare patches come fall and that will be that? I’m trying really hard to not worry about it.

We had some rain and some warmth this past week and the garden has really taken off. Today James removed lots of lovely finished compost from the bins and mounded up around the potatoes again. Now we will let them be for the rest of the season and hope there are lots of yummy taters growing underground.

I gave the elderberry a hard prune in spring before ki leafed out and thought with much satisfaction that this year ki would not be a wild garden-eating monster. Apparently elderberries like being pruned because, guess what? I have a wild garden-eating monster. The elderberry is in the chicken garden and the chickens love ki. When I get home from work on weekday afternoons and let them out of the run, they head right under the elderberry. With so much fertilizer, maybe that’s what causes ki to turn into a garden-eating monster? Soon there will be flowers and I am already looking forward to the jam.

I have tiny carrot sprouts starting to come up. The beans and squash and cantaloupe are all up now too. Yay!

I was weeding around the tomatoes today and one of them has a little tomato. None of the tomato seeds I direct sowed came up, or so I thought. One of them did, just not in the place I originally planted the seed. Instead, I have a 5-inch tall tomato growing about 6 inches away from the original location (squirrels!), which is why I didn’t think any of the seeds sprouted. Don’t ask me to explain why, with only a short distance relocation, I didn’t notice an obviously robust tomato plant until today. But robust it is, and while not as large as the transplanted tomatoes, the direct seeded one looks a lot healthier and might actually catch up to the others as Paul Wheaton suggested in his Building a Better World in Your Backyard book. So thus far the indoor started transplants v. direct sown experiment is looking really interesting!

In addition to arugula growing all over the place in the garden, I’ve got milkweed sprouting up everywhere too. I can’t let the dozens and dozens of sprouts stay so I pull them out. Don’t worry, I still have a lot of milkweed. And one of them near where I was weeding today had a fat monarch caterpillar! I said an admiring hello, and wished ki all the best. I am not one of those people who go searching all my milkweed for eggs and caterpillars and bring them indoors to raise. If they are not able to make it in the sanctuary of my garden, then me taking care of them indoors might not actually be helping them for all kinds of reasons. Besides, I like knowing they are out there carrying on with their lives, doing their caterpillar and butterfly thing without me interfering. It’s rather pretentious to put myself in the role of rescuing human when they have everything they need in the garden.

I am happy, happy right now. The only thing that could make me happier would be the ability to spend all day, every day working in the garden and with the gifts she gives me.

Now Officially Car-Free

Finally, all the car selling stuff is done and the car is gone. We are now officially a car-free household! We have been operating as such for the last two weeks as the whole transaction of selling was taking place, but it’s nice for it to all be over. We feel lighter and richer, both monetarily and life-wise. I don’t know what the price of gas is. And there is a big, multi-thousand dollar piece of machinery we not longer need to take care of. It’s rather liberating.

Interestingly, I have been tossed back into a similar situation as when I went vegan. Back then, people would get really defensive, as though I were judging them, and come up with all sorts of excuses for why they could never give up meat and dairy. And then they would be “concerned” about my health. In the last few weeks I’ve had a couple people, on discovering I no longer own a car, immediately try to find a reason why I should have one as well as tell me all the reasons they absolutely needed their car. And then they follow it up with “concern” about how I am going to manage certain things. It’s both funny and maddening.

Thus far we’ve been grocery shopping by bike four times, most recently today. And I feel like we’re getting into a kind of routine on how to do it. Earlier in the week James needed to go to his audiologist and pick up more hearing aid batteries. The office is in a burb and he got there and back by bike just fine. Not having a car makes us think about where we are going and why. It’s surprising how few places we actually need to go. And yes, some trips are a little slower than they would be by car, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Reading

• Steering Away from a Car-Centric Society
• Reflections on Time, and How We Care for One Another
• What People Don’t Get About This Inflation Spike Part One and Part Two
• Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It by Gabor Maté. James has ADHD, though he has never been officially diagnosed for a variety of reasons. I recently came across an interview with the author and was so fascinated by what he said, I had to borrow his book from the library. I am just shy of halfway through and it is really good! I highly recommend it if you have ADD or are married to someone who does

Listening

• Between the Covers podcast: Crafting with Ursula: Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Long, but so incredibly good!

Watching

• Fire Island. A gay RomCom based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This is so much fun y’all! Happy Pride Month!