Photo credit: chipmunks
I’m done. I’m through. I’m calling it quits. There come moments in life when you need to throw up your hands, admit defeat and hope that your life will eventually change for the better. This is such a moment for me and my vegetable garden. The season started auspiciously as it always does. I mean what’s more optimistic and life-affirming than planting tomatoes or peppers or basil in spring and looking forward to their bounty in July, August and even into September?
As a matter of fact, I foolishly considered organizing my summer travel plans around my ripening tomatoes. Oh, what a fool am I!
Let’s take a step back. Or two. Or 10. In June 2016, Roy Berendsohn, an editor at Popular Mechanics, helped me construct planting beds. He read my Urban Gardner column in the Wall Street Journal and offered to lend his mechanical talents if I secured the wood and the soil. In more recent years, my son-in-law Malcolm, who also possesses those visual/mathematical skills of which I’m sorely lacking, erected a fence around the beds.
In a perfect world, we should have been all set. But after several years the wood started to rot, soil spilling out the sides, and the fence did little to deter critters. That wasn’t Malcolm’s fault. His enclosure, supported by posts that he sawed himself from fallen trees — we have lots of those, too — burrowed a half-foot or more into the ground.
Remember that Paul Revere reference? One if by land, two if by sea — God help us all if they come by three. The last part was probably penned well after the Revolutionary silversmith’s time. But it applies to my garden. We seemed to have thwarted the burrowing critter problem. But who knew they were capable of scaling the fenceposts and gaining access that way — I’m looking at you, chipmunks.
And then there are birds. I’m not sure birds are to blame for the carnage wrought on the plants this summer. But they can fly, and why should they be any more virtuous or abstemious than anybody else? I suppose one solution might be to stretch netting across the entire breath of the garden but there happen to be other things I want to do with my life.
What it boils down to is a cost-benefit analysis. That might be more complicated than it sounds. On the one hand you have the expense of the plants, fertilizer and your all-important and occasionally debilitating toil, including that ignominious task known as weeding. On the other, there’s that sense of satisfaction that comes from beholding and consuming a ripe tomato that you and you alone grew in cahoots with nature.
What broke me this year wasn’t all of the above but the fact that things looked so promising for so long. This appeared to be one of those summers for the books, like a 1945 Bordeaux. The ratio of sun to rain to heat seemed ideal. Everything felt ahead of schedule. Within days of purchasing my plants in late May, tomatoes appeared. Not buds or blossoms but actual tomatoes.
I could visualize myself sitting on our deck indulging in a Caprese salad, the mozzarella di bufala from Italy, the tomatoes and basil from my buzzing, glowing beautiful garden. But first to arrive, harbingers of summer, would be sweet, succulent cherry tomatoes; when sprinkled with sea salt, they’re the all-in-one, effortless, ideal hors d’oeuvre.
Alcohol, even in moderation, is now judged to be bad for you. That doesn’t come as a major surprise. The way it burns going down is your body saying “Don’t be stupid.” But I liked to think that the poison was neutralized by the overwhelming therapeutic benefits of a 100 percent organic cherry tomato.
What truly broke my heart — I don’t know why I’m speaking in the past tense since that organ is still in surgery — were my heirlooms. These melon-sized babies were shaping up to be 4-H, county fair blue ribbon, prize-winning specimens. My humble star-crossed garden had never produced such wealth and beauty. But just as their green skins started to blush orange and red, some creep took a bite out of them. It would be one thing if they ate the entire orb. But they took a mere nibble as if to say, “Nah, we don’t even like tomatoes. We’re just doing this to spite you.”
There were so many tomatoes on some plants, or fewer but monster individuals on others, that the conical wire cages that I surrounded them with when they were mere seedlings collapsed under their weight. Yet still they grew and spread, so great was their desire to please me. Until those damn chipmunks ruined my life. How do I know it was a chipmunk? Because one of them scurried into a hole in one of the planting beds when he saw me coming. I tried, obviously unsuccessfully, to drown him with a garden hose — but that’s a whole other story.
I’m not getting any younger. I don’t need the stress. I can get perfectly good tomatoes at our local farmer’s market. Yet there’s something about planting them, watering them, nurturing them and willing them to survive that makes one feel slightly more alive. Part of the natural cycle of things. Coming to visit them only to see their beauty desecrated by fang marks feels like death by a thousand cuts.
My wife suggested I cut my losses and save my mental health. Why not just grow a plant or two in a pot on our second floor deck? That’s a thought. But I’ve seen chipmunks up there, too. Cute as they are, I don’t think they get enough credit for spreading misery.
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Thank you. Nice to know somebody shares my pain.
Best ever!
Oh how I’ve been there and done that!!!
“As a matter of fact, I foolishly considered organizing my summer travel plans around my ripening tomatoes. Oh, what a fool am I!”
Those two sentences distill it down! You could make a T-Shirt with that on the front and back, you’d make thousands and you could go buy all the tomatoes your heart desires!
“Let’s take a step back. Or two. Or 10. In June 2016, Roy Berendsohn, an editor at Popular Mechanics, helped me construct planting beds.”
Oh man! I made an aesthetically pleasing raised bed using treated wood (I know, I know) at least 3.5 feet high (to save my back) in my far backyard after I had a small, inelegant, raised bed on the side of my house that grew so many peppers and tomatoes that most went to waste, despite a plague of chipmunks on the side of the house.
Initially, the architectural equivalent of the Eiffel Tower, all the plants thriving, early on, was marveled at by all who visited…but a plague of deer, chipmunks, rabbits, and rot of all types, turned the beautiful into the grotesque, just like all the Egyptian princess who turn to dust and have populated “Mummy” movies from Boris Karloff, onwards…
“My wife suggested I cut my losses and save my mental health. Why not just grow a plant or two in a pot on our second floor deck? That’s a thought. But I’ve seen chipmunks up there, too.”
EXACTLY!!! Been there, done that! Putting it on your deck is like opening a Golden Corral, with a view, for chipmunks and squirrels.