Garden Report

My garden is doing well.  I fenced off the peppers from the rabbits with chicken wire.  At first glance that sentence sounds like a recipe; peppers, rabbit and chicken.  It’s not.  Put it in the category of struggling to coexist and live in peace. 

   

We live by a ravine where rabbits flourish.  In the winter we have rabbit tracks in the snow all over the backyard and every spring baby cottontails show up.  My wife thinks they’re delightful. She coos when she sees them.

“Aww, look at him, little bunny.  I love those bunnies.”

I used to love them more, when they didn’t eat my pepper plants.  Things took a big turn last summer.  My peppers, for years grown freely in the open on a little garden strip I developed on the south side of the garage, appeared munched on.  Some were eaten clean off, others had their stems spared.  Occasionally a newly formed pepper could be found lying in the dirt, the leaves of the plant it clung to having vanished, nothing but a set of stems and a dying pepper.  When I approached the garden rabbits would scurry through the horseradish on their way to the lilacs and beyond.  I first bought chicken wire and put little round cages around the pepper plants, cylinders of chicken wire held down by a tent stake.  They knocked the cages over.  Nothing was safe.  They ignore the tomatoes and cucumbers, the garlic, the horseradish of course, and the asparagus.  But the peppers, oh my God, it was a massacre.

 

The peppers have become as endangered as the herbs.  Years ago I switched to growing our herbs in pots by my wife’s flowers on the patio steps.  Planting flat leafed Italian parsley, basil, and chives in the open ground was equal to feeding the rabbits.  They wouldn’t last a day.  But the peppers are fairly recent casualties.  Maybe there are more rabbits than before.  Heck maybe the DNA of rabbits from Mexico has made it’s way into our local rabbits, changed their palates, and made them more sophisticated thus increasing their taste for hot peppers.  The world changes you know.  Whatever has happened, my pepper plants are no longer safe.

It came to me that one solution would be renting a coyote or a large hawk.  I Googled service providers who might be able to place a wild animal in my vicinity but came up with nothing.  I saw it as a way to take me out of the equation and let nature, with a little help, take its course.  I don’t see well enough to buy a .22 and shoot the rabbits, imperiling the neighbors, as if I wanted to own a gun and kill things anyway.  I could easily blame predators when a rented coyote wolfed down the rabbits but it would be a lot harder to pass off a motionless bunny dead from a gunshot wound as the victim of someone else. 

“Oh look honey.  Jeez, somebody came into our yard and shot that rabbit.”

Actually, I was done shooting things a long time ago.  As a kid my family, me included, both shot and ate wild rabbits on the farm during the season.  After hunting we skinned and cleaned the rabbits on a wooden fence by the barn, two eight penny nails sticking out of the top board especially for the purpose of impaling the little guys by their hind legs so they hung upside down while we worked on them with a knife. With the right cuts a rabbit skin comes off like a glove.  And it has been decades, maybe four, since I’ve eaten wild rabbit, although it is delicious.  My Mom cooked them slowly in a cast iron pan with onions.  But times and my outlook have changed.  Shooting and killing rabbits, along with butchering and eating them, are behind me I think.

 

I was avoiding the obvious, an all out fence, because fences are a pain.  I have a narrow little garden that you can reach the middle of from either side.  No need to go tromping through the rows.  It was handy.  When you put up a fence you need to either step over it or install a gate.  And regardless the option you choose a fence puts you inside an enclosed space crowded with the plants while weeding, tending, and harvesting.  I may be clumsier than normal now and I have big feet.  Invariably when I get in there and kneel down to pull weeds I manage to mangle something or other by stepping on it.  Work on the tomatoes, smash the garlic.  Weed the peppers at their peril.  I have 29 pepper plants in a small space.  You have to be nimble and controlled, qualities my rather large body no longer possesses, if it ever did.  I’m a free range kind of guy.  I don’t like to be fenced in, or out.

I grow a variety of hot  peppers:  Habanero, Serrano, Jalapeno, Caribbean hots, Cayenne, and Pequins.  I also grow some mild ones for balance; Poblanos and Anaheims.  I’ve grown them for years.  I make and can my own Jamaican jerk with the Habaneros, and concoct a chili paste with the rest of the peppers.  I grow lemon grass most years and add it to the mix, along with other stuff, giving the chili paste an Asian bent.  Since I’m Irish and the paste is my own recipe I call it Irish Asian.  It has real kick.  My kids like it a lot but it is too hot for many.  The Serrano peppers in particular are great for making green sauce.  Combine salt, Serrano peppers, oven roasted tomatillos, onion, and lime juice and you’ve got a fresh green salsa can’t be beat.  If you get creative you can add peppers to nearly everything, omelets, salads, you name it. 

So I put up the damn fence against my will because of a slowly developed respect for animal life that has extended even to insects.  When we get spiders and wasps in the house I do my best to catch them in a jar and release them outside.  I’ll admit I have been smooshing ants in the house of late.  Ants suffer from a lack of wings.  If they could evolve to fly they might escape death at the hands of humans but all they can do is crawl feverishly fast, making a break for it across the open formica.   They rarely make it to safety.

My son Dean helped me with the fence.  He didn’t see it as a big deal.  We bought chicken wire at Farm and Fleet and steel fence posts.  It went up quickly.  I staked the bottom down with tent pegs in places where the ground might allow bunnies to scoot under the fence.  It took a lot less time and work than I imagined.  Young people are good helpers in that regard because they are oblivious to pre planning considerations and worry.  They just do it.  You can over think those kinds of projects when you have a too much time on your hands.

I also planted marigolds, which people say repel rabbits.  I planted them in spite of being very skeptical about their effectiveness.  I can’t say I know rabbit behavior well but I find it hard to believe a hungry hare would pass up a tender pepper plant because of a short yellow flower.  I wouldn’t, that’s for sure.

 

So far the pen of imprisoned peppers is doing quite well thank you.  They look constrained though.  I hope it doesn’t affect their psyche, if they have one.  Would you feel hot and spicy looking at the world through chicken wire all day?  As if they could look.  As if they could move in the first place.  I don’t know.  It just seems wrong.

The tomatoes are having a good year, so far that is, judging by the vines that produce the actual tomatoes.  Last year was a wash out.  Too much rain and cool weather early.  I admit that I became discouraged last year and let my garden go.  It seemed hopeless.  The puny outlook for the tomatoes coupled with the much reduced pepper crop did me in.  I neglected everything. Weeds took over.  I let the scapes grow way too big on my garlic plants and left the bulbs in the ground far longer than needed.  I didn’t dig my horseradish.  A trip to Montreal in the summer didn’t help but it was all my fault.  I was a bad gardener.

Every spring I start with high hopes.   A friend brings up his roto tiller sometime prior to Mother’s Day, I add compost, and we churn up the dirt.  We do that twice a year.  In the fall we till when everything is out and then I sow rye grass, which is good for the soil and is great cover, keeping out early spring weeds.  When I cut the rye in the spring, saving the stalks for mulch, I think of how nice it would be to have a little field of it just once, letting the stems yellow and the heads of grain develop.  I don’t know what I would do with a bushel of rye.  I would love to make whiskey out of it would be entirely too much work and time.  So a crop of rye remains a shimmery kind of goal that probably isn’t going to happen.  I try to keep that list as short as I can.  It’s the reverse bucket list, the things you know you probably won’t do.  Who wants to think about that?

This year I’ve resolved to be a better gardener and so far I am.  In addition to the fence I rotated the placement of things, putting the peppers where the tomatoes were and vice versa.  I put up the tomato trellises, rebar grids given to me by my friend Wedge the iron worker, padding the sharp steel ends end with blue foam noodles.   Who I’m protecting is unclear.  Very few kids frequent my garden.  Maybe I’m protecting myself from stumbling into them.  Heck, maybe I’m protecting the rabbits.  That would be ironic.

I tie the tomato vines carefully to the rebar as they grow to give the plant height and keep the fruit off the ground.  So far this year I’ve been especially good, swinging by the garden every morning and doing a few things on my way to the shack rather than trudging, head down with my thermos in hand, straight to my work without giving a thought to the plants not twenty feet off my path.  I have been careful to pinch off the sucker sprouts that grow in the crotch of the vines coming off the main stem.  I also pinch off the early blossoms to get stronger plants before the real action begins later.   I have 15 tomato plants whose output is destined to be both eaten and canned.  I plant one grape tomato for salads and snacks, a number of different kinds of slicers for BLT’s and more, and Romas for canning.  I make a sweet tomato relish with cloves and vinegar from my Mom’s recipe.  She called it chilla sauce.   It makes roast beef taste even better than it is.  If I close my eyes while I eat it I find myself in the past, eating at the kitchen table on the farm.

I cut the scapes off the garlic plants earlier than ever this year, while they were still small and tender.  Just this morning I had a scape and Jalapeno frittata, topped off with a zig zag stripe of Sriracha sauce (I’m flat out of Irish Asian) and a glass of cold milk.  I am guiding the cucumber vines into the garden and off the lawn.  I pull a few weeds every morning.

Dean asked me to plant some eggplant this year so I have four nice plants coming along in a corner.  I think he’s planning to make baba ganoush.  I put the two Brussels sprout plants our friend Sharon gave us next to them.  You can let Brussels sprouts stay in the garden past frost.  We usually have them for Thanksgiving.

It’s a hopeful thing, planting a garden, but you have to sustain that hope throughout the year.  A garden asks for little really; some protection from weeds and herbivores, and water if the rains don’t suffice.  But the plants do the real work on their own.  It’s something of a miracle.  They take nutrients from the dirt, suck up sunlight and water, and in the end give us so much.  All that is required is time, a little attention, and hope.  You can’t lose hope.