At the beginning of May I began to take the baby steps necessary to double the size of I.’s pickle factory. I am proud to announce that today, I completed the final baby step. It was a pleasure to pack my tools, to clean the work area, and to vacate the site. Lovely has already seeded 80% of the new area, even though I continued to put the finishing touches on the fence. The next step is to put the garden under surveillance for Wabbit intrusions. My design for the Wabbit barrier is several steps above the original design. I learned a lot from trying to beat the fluffy-tailed vermin at their game. Time will tell if I succeeded.
In the meantime, Lovely and I look forward to a mid to late summer harvest of some delicious, organically grown vegetables free of pesticides and nasty chemicals. It will be interesting to see how faithful Lovely is to her determination to stay “green” and organic. I fully expect her to complain to me when some nasty bug descends into the yard to have a feast. Over the years, I have learned that for every vegetable there is a bug. Some are scary like the tomato caterpillar. This rather large creature can strip a mature tomato plant of its foliage in a couple of days. When discovered he will scare the bejesus out of me before I pick him off the plant and squash him. It is also a sad moment because the caterpillar morphs into a chrysallis that eventually becomes a beautiful butterfly. By killing him, I have affected the universe in some small way.
I remember as a kid watching my mother’s father, my grandfather, walk the rows of potato plants to pick off the potato bugs. He plinked them into a coffee can filled with kerosene. I often found his cans stashed around the house and in the yard near his favorite yard chair, all of them with with a solid layer of dead potato bugs floating in kerosene. Although Mom’s potato plants remained organic, the bugs met their end drowned in the same stuff that propels jet airplanes through the sky.
Filed under: Biography, Garden, Gardening | Tagged: Bugs, Organic, Rabbits |
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