The Joy of Gardening

Joys of Gardening

So I walk out to the back-yard garden, four double-dug beds, sheathed in six-foot-high, anti-deer, plastic mesh that actually should reach to eight feet but like my current belly, the stuff flops over on itself, though it’s still okay, (the fence, not my belly), because it doesn’t work by being un-jumpable or stronger than 125-pound deer, but through its lack of odor and visibility, since deer detest all barriers they can’t smell or see, and this odorless and eye-squinting barrier has saved my garden for the last fifteen years, because these neighborhood bungee rats have no fear of humans, and cruise our yard like some lap swimmer at the neighborhood pool, and even bring their cute as a button, white-spotted fawns, who gambol and destroy our unfenced flowers, and shrubbery, and I’m thinking back to that spring night fifteen years and two weeks ago, when in a single nocturnal foray these varmints took out an entire seventeen by five-foot bed of mixed lettuces: Little Gem, Red Oak Leaf, Batavia, Spotted Trout, Red Sails, Black Seeded Simpson, and Bibb — a bed as intricate and colorful as any piece of millefiori glass from Murano, and my ten-week old leafy collage ripped up and clipped to the roots sometime between midnight and six AM, which led to my learning how to construct a fence.

Today is July 27th, so lettuce passed its finals and put away its books two months ago, and today the garden sports typical summer veggies, cherry tomatoes, red, green, and sweet banana peppers, Ichiban (i.e., best) eggplant, Rattlesnake pole beans…