It turns out we should not have been almost completely sure that Little Bun had been chased from the garden. Our certainty made us blind. Beans kept being eaten. Squash flowers kept disappearing. We made up excuses. We just hadn’t noticed before. Squirrels. Always blame the squirrels.

Then Tuesday night we were watering the garden and James watered the patch that has amaranth, zinnias, and an enormous feral arugula and out ran Little Bun! F-bombs fell like rain. We opened the gate to the front yard and took up our rabbit herding sticks and the chase began. Round and round the garden we went. We could not convince Little Bun to take the narrow path along the side of the house out the front gate.

We decided to try and herd Little Bun into the chicken garden where there are plenty of exits out through the chain link fence. We could not convince the chickens, who were milling around the gate between the two gardens, to go into their run. But James did manage to get them away from the gate and interested in stuff down in their garden so we could open the gate and not have to worry about getting chickens and Little Bun out of the main garden.

With the chicken garden gate open, we took up the chase again. Round and round we went with frustratingly close moments when Little Bun would veer away from the opening and back into the veg garden.

We were all getting worn out. It was humid and over 90F and James and I were sweating like crazy and Little Bun was panting and slowing down. 

But finally, finally! James set the chicken garden gate open into the vegetable garden at just the right angle to create a barrier and he stood in the perfectly right spot, so that when I herded Little Bun in his direction, Little Bun couldn’t veer around him into the veg garden and the gate forced Little Bun to take a hard turn into the chicken garden.

The chickens were milling around blissfully unaware, scratching and doing their chicken thing when Little Bun rocketed down the stairs into their garden and tore through their midst. Feathery and furry chaos ensued.

In a flurry of flapping wings, the startled chickens squawked and scattered. Except Mrs. Dashwood, who squawked and flew. As Little Bun zipped through the bottom of the chain link fence and into the alley, Mrs. Dashwood took to the air towards the top of the fence. Little Bun made a clean escape, but Mrs. Dashwood didn’t have quite enough lift to get over the fence and inelegantly crashed into it and back into the chicken garden where she shuffled her feathers into order and spent the next ten minutes complaining about the indignity of it all. 

Meanwhile, James and I were whooping and hollering and giving each other high fives for finally actually for real this time, getting Little Bun out of the garden. 

We went into the house and were treating ourselves to iced water, when I realized we didn’t close the gate to the front yard. James let out a few expletives and ran outside to close the gate. Then we spent a few paranoid minutes worrying that Little Bun somehow, in their own escape panic, had the wherewithal to run around our nextdoor neighbor’s garage, into their backyard, around their house and into their front yard, into our front yard, and back into the garden through the open front gate. This fantastic maneuver on Little Bun’s part would have had to happen in less than ten minutes. 

Little Bun is fast, but the likelihood of them knowing the front gate was open, especially when we couldn’t get them to get anywhere near running out of it, and, after living so comfortably for weeks in our garden, to know how to get around the neighbor’s house into the front yard and through the gate back into our garden, we really did feel confident that Little Bun had been successfully evicted. 

And now here we are, several days later, and no sign of Little Bun in the garden. No new nibbles, no beans or squash flowers disappearing. We are breathing a huge sigh of relief.

The heatwave came and went. Our hottest day was Thursday when we at one point had a dew point of 77F/25C and a temperature of 93F/34C. The temperature topped out at 96F/35.5C and the dew point dropped a few a degrees. Still the heat index when I biked home from work was 105F/40.5. But the high humidity meant that when the sun went down we got thunderstorms. Between thunderstorms Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we had 2.67 inches/6.78 cm of glorious rain. We are still in deficit for the month of July by one inch (2.54 cm), and even more for the entire season, but it was a blessing.

The garden did really well in the heat. The ghostly drapes helped give plants a little shade and kept their leaves from scorching. So I feel really good about that.

This weekend I pulled the rest of the garlic. I’m really happy with how well it did this year. The little yellow zucchini I had growing ended up laying on the wet ground and rotted. But there are other tiny zucchinis so I feel good that they will eventually make it to be big ones. The bush cherries are starting to turn red. I picked a couple ripe-ish ones but most of them aren’t quite there yet. I have two sweet meat winter squashes and two pie pumpkins growing on the fence in the front yard in the little experimental raised bed we made out there. The backyard winter squash is not doing so great and so far has no squash, probably because of Little Bun. Maybe there will still be enough time before first frost for some to develop. I got some bird netting this week and have put it over the quickly ripening chokeberries. The chokeberries should be mostly picked before the elderberries start to get ripe, so the netting will eventually end up on the elderberry to keep sparrow raiders away.

It’s not been a great garden year and I am already thinking about what to do differently next year. It’s all about learning how to adapt to a changing climate. Though if I hear one more talking head on the radio asking about whether or how much climate change was at fault for all the heatwaves and freak storms, I might just blow a gasket. Yes, scientists need to study all the data, but what difference does it make to the general public how much climate change had to do with any of it? Is this a new kind of disaster porn? Climate porn? Or is knowing how much to blame climate change on something supposed to make us feel better? Call us to action? What? What is the point?

And now that we have scientists and so-called experts, arguing over the newly released report about the potentially impending collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (Amoc), I’m just waiting for some dimwit to say that it’s good because it will keep the northern hemisphere cooler. You may recall the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow in which the northern hemisphere flash freezes from a combination of the disruption of Amoc and three gigantic superstorms. While it made for a great popcorn movie in which our heroes survived by barricading themselves in some posh private library and burning books in the giant fireplace, in reality our books will be safe. For now at least.

When the Amoc collapses, whether it is in 2025 or 2050 or 2100, it will definitely have global consequences even if there is no flash freezing. The Amoc has collapsed before, and from what science can tell us, that means parts of Europe will be 5 – 10 degrees Celsius cooler. Heat in the tropics will increase and tropical rain belts will shift causing droughts in some places and major flooding in others. The North Atlantic is likely to see significantly higher sea levels. Marine ecosystems will change, fisheries collapse. The trade winds will also shift. The drought in the American west will get even worse. Monsoons and hurricanes will intensify, and we will never be able to talk about “normal” weather again. Not that we can truly talk about normal weather now, but it’s still close enough to normal for many of us that we can.

Like I said, I haven’t heard anyone say yet the collapse of the Amoc will be good because it will keep temperatures down in the northern hemisphere. I’m expecting it. My ears and eyes are open for it. Will it be Trump? De Santis? Someone on Fox? If you hear someone say it before I do, please let me know!

In the meantime, I’m going to keep working on how to be a more resilient gardener with a more resilient garden.

Reading

• Article: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the TBR pile by Molly Templeton. Oh my bookish friends, this will make you feel better about your TBR piles and lists.
• Article: The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits. Surrounding ourselves with unread books enriches our lives!

Listening

• Maskerade by Terry Practchett. James continues to read aloud as we make our way through all of the Discworld witch books.

Watching

• Movie: Asteroid City. This was wonderfully weird and funny and I loved the while visual look of it.
• Trailer for Umberto Eco—A Library of the World. I really want to see the movie! The man owns over 50,000 books. He is the master of the TBR and tsundoku!

Quote

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

Umberto Eco

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

It’s James’s birthday this weekend so the wizardry is my witchery. He requested a peanut butter and raspberry jelly cake. The recipe is a loaf cake from Vegan Richa, one of our favorite vegan cooks. James requested frosting, so I whipped peanut butter, a little soy milk, some medjool dates, and coconut into a a tasty frosting. And he made banana coconut ice cream to go along with it all. Delish!