After the demise of Wanker the Squirrel—for which I am still sad but also must admit an occasional rush of schadenfreude—the garden shenanigans have been quiet. Even Spidersquirrel has been inactive, well except for briefly climbing the screen of a window at the side of the house next to which James had left a ladder. I have been lulled into a false sense of security for all the garden plants.

Last Sunday evening I was out picking beans and found one that had the bottom neatly snipped off. That’s weird, I thought, that’s not a squirrel thing, but what else could it be? And I went on my merry way.

A couple days later I was out in the late afternoon picking greens for a dinner salad and startled a critter I did not see. The critter ran into the nettle thicket. I peered in, but the nettles really are a thicket this year and I could see nothing. I knew it wasn’t a bird and I was 99% sure it wasn’t a squirrel because a squirrel would not have run to hide in the nettles but would have run across the garden or over the fence. Connecting the unseen critter to the snipped off green bean, I had suspicions that I very much wanted to be wrong.

On Wednesday my suspicions were confirmed. Once again I was out picking green beans and as I walked back up to the house I saw them: Rabbit! 

Our perimeter fencing has been so good for the last year and few months that I had failed to keep vigilant in spite of seeing lots of adult and young rabbits up and down the block on my morning bike ride to work. I thought, smugly, the garden is safe. Of course now that there is a rabbit intruder, a youngish one, not a tiny baby but not a full adult, I have noticed a couple places through which the clever bun could have snuck in. 

I deployed a squirrel cage over some fresh carrot sprouts and over some small beets, but these don’t appear to be prime rabbit food at the moment. This morning I discovered Rabbit has been eating the resilient brown soup beans. Also, sometimes, squash blossoms. 

Here is the problem. We can shore up the perimeter fencing, trapping Rabbit in salad paradise, and then attempt to chase Rabbit out like Uriel ejecting Adam and Eve with his fiery sword. But the garden is such a jungle, I’m not sure how we will be able to manage it. 

We were going to give it a try today, but after doing a couple of immediately important garden tasks, we were chased in by a thunderstorm that lasted for hours. The rain has stopped for now, but it is very wet outside and neither James nor I are keen on getting soaked and mosquito bitten chasing Rabbit through the shrubbery. Maybe later?

Rabbit is not the only critter surprise this week.

Thursday I was sitting at the dinner table and looked out through the sliding glass door onto the deck to see a chipmunk pop up at the top of the stairs, look around, think about drinking for the water dish, decide not to, and just as suddenly, disappear. I saw Chippy Chipmunk do the same thing Saturday morning while James and I were eating breakfast. And suddenly the holes I’d been finding around the garden since last fall made sense. I had attributed them to mice of which we have an abundance because of the chickens who scatter grain all over the place. Now I know they are chipmunk holes.

Chippy is dangerously adorable. Also, there is no way to expel them from the garden. But Chippy has been so unobtrusive that I didn’t even know they were there! Well, probably because I was blaming squirrels and mice for everything, but that’s beside the point. Knowing Chippy is living in the garden I now know who was eating the gooseberries and leaving bits of fruit skin on the ground but no fruit. Birds would not do that and a squirrel would be a lot messier and leave more than cleaned off berry skin, so I was thoroughly baffled. Chippy is the likely culprit.

While Chippy is living fairly unobtrusively in the garden at this point, I am hoping they do not find love and start a family. That would be a problem. 

In other critter news, the hyssop and coneflowers are blooming and the bees are happy, but disturbingly few. The monarchs have likewise been few this year. And the swallowtail caterpillar I had on the fennel didn’t survive, likely eaten by a bird or perhaps even Chippy or quite possibly drowned in one of the frequent downpours this summer. Good news for the fennel, which has gotten big and feathery and is soon to flower, bad news for the butterfly. 

One critter who is abundant in the garden this year is ladybugs. These aren’t the invading Asian lady beetles, these are legit ladybugs and they love Professor Plum. I’ve seen them and their decidedly frightening looking larva all over the tree’s leaves since spring. I suspect early on they were feeding on a small infestation of some sort of caterpillar that spun a web and wrapped itself up in the leaves of the tree. I don’t know what they are eating now, perhaps aphids since I have seen not a single aphid covered leaf in the garden all season. 

As for garden plants, wow! One of the immediately necessary tasks this morning was adding support to the skunk bean pole. This is the third year I’ve grown skunk beans.  The first two years were summer drought years and the beans struggled to climb above five feet. Nor were they especially productive, providing just enough beans to save for seed the following year with a few leftover to combine with other beans in a soup. Imagine my surprise this year when, with all the rain, they have grown so tall as to almost reach the lowest wires coming across the garden from the utility pole in the alley to the house. They are covered in beans and so heavy that their pole had begun to list precipitously and was in danger of toppling over. 

This morning we pounded a metal stake into the ground and secured the bean pole to the metal stake. The beans are so ridiculously tall I can almost imagine myself as Jack and start climbing up and up and up. Perhaps I can rescue a Golden Goose and retire from the day job so I can spend more than an hour in the garden at any one time. And perhaps the Golden Goose would put Sia in her place and give poor Ethel relief from being bullied.

It’s not just the beans that are ridiculously tall either. One of the Hungarian Heart tomatoes is chest high and covered in green fruit and flowers. The tomato cage supporting the plant is not big enough, and the plant is starting to sprawl. I have never had a tomato do this before and it is a little frightening as well as exciting. 

A few feet down the row are the cherry tomatoes and one of them, while not quite as wild as the enormous Hungarian, is doing their best to not be called puny.

Still further down the row is Alley Tomato, the volunteer I found while weeding the flower bed in the alley outside the back fence. I transplanted them into the garden and they are doing great. They are about knee high and have little tomatoes and flowers. I put a stake in the ground next to them but have not had to tie the plant up, they are a sturdy fellow! I have no idea what sort of fruit they will turn out to be—slicing, cherry/grape, paste? I am looking forward to finding out.

Eduardo’s jalapeños are covered in peppers and producing new flowers every few days. There are some big enough to pick, but we are waiting for them to ripen to red so they will be a little hotter. Then we plan on fermenting them into hot sauce. Some of the other peppers we planted are finally beginning to flower. I have no idea what they are because, in spite of being careful to mark them all when starting them indoors, the markers didn’t make it into the ground with them outdoors. Well, all except for one, and  the name has been washed off in all the rain. So they could be sweet banana peppers or long cayenne or paprika. At least once they begin to fruit it will be easy to figure out what they are. Until then, it’s anyone’s guess!

A few sunflowers survived the squirrels and are getting tall but no flowers yet. Today the first zinnia of the season began to flower though! It is one I saved seed from last year. Last year I believe we did State Fair mix and only pink ones flowered. So of course, this is a pink one. We planted Peppermint Stick mix this year and I am looking forward to them adding some pizazz. 

Reading

• Book: All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett. This was recommended to me by a friend and oh what a lovely book it is. Bennett tells the story of her grief at her sister’s death while she is pregnant with her son after many previous miscarriages. And then she writes of her son who is diagnosed with Type I Diabetes when he is only five. And then there is the death of her own mother. Throughout she tells of creating an apothecary garden with her son of “weeds,” or rather plants that these days we call weeds. Each chapter is headed by a plant and its medicinal and folkloric uses, and more often than not, it has some relation to the chapter that follows. I have dogeared so many of the plants, planning on looking them up to see if I can grow them in my own garden. 
• Essay: Both Sides by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a respected historian and public intellectual and here he dissects what the media is doing when they present “both sides” in the name of “fairness” and how it skews our understanding of both the media and what they are “reporting” on.

Quote

“‘The worst thing to do with life is waste it wishing it was something else. It’s the sum of its parts: some bad, some good. You need to live it,’ she says, taking my hand. I don’t know what to say, and so I stay quiet.”

~Victoria Bennett, advice from her dying mother, in All My Wild Mothers

Listening

• Podcast: A Meal of Thorns: The Scar with Dan Hartland. A brand new speculative fiction podcast from Ancillary Review of Books. This is the first episode. In it, host Jake Casella Brookins talks with Dan Hartland, Reviews Editor at Strange Horizons, about China Miéville’s 2002 novel The Scar. I have not yet read The Scar but the discussion made me want to read it! They also talked about what they are currently reading and the podcast website very kindly lists every single book mentioned in the episode. This is going to potentially be very very bad for my TBR.

Watching

• Movie: Wildcat (2023). This is a biopic of Flannery O’Connor. It doesn’t cover her entire life but just up to when she finally starts to become a published and respected writer. It is directed by Ethan Hawke and his daughter, Maya Hawke, plays O’Connor. Well done all around.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

There were lentil “eggs” with nettle greens from the garden, there was a dinner salad with plenty of garden pickings, and this weekend there were decadent chocolate chocolate chip muffins with chocolate mint from the garden added in that gave them a tiny minty hint. Today James also made pesto from yellow wood sorrel (eat your weeds!) that is now in the freezer to enjoy at a later time.