Kicking It around the garden again

About 10 weeks have passed since my home garden was planted. Happily, this year’s bounty fulfills the promise every gardener dreams about. You may recall, this year we chose to forego tussling with hungry gophers, deciding to use tubs and a horse trough for the tomatoes and avoid ground-level planter boxes. It was one of our better decisions.

Not really a gardener, I’m what could be called a planter, the garden management is primarily left to my husband. VJ has the green thumb. As in times past, I can rely on his nurturing skills to follow through on the day-to-day watering, pruning, and fertilizing.

He constructed an overhead arbor, with multiple trellis lines dropping above each Early Girl tomato vine supported with clips. His ingenious design is also used by commercial growers. His answer to everything is YouTube.

We are now enjoying this year’s harvest. We are eating freshly picked tomatoes. We have harvested basil, that grows faster than I can make pesto, and we like snipping sprigs off the giant bouquet of parsley.

The watercress is flourishing and the third English cucumber vine has produced multiple 10-inch Cucumis sativus’.

Why, you wonder, would one make a distinction amongst three cucumber vines? Simple. Where once there were three, we now have one producing and the other two recovering.

Whatever made me think a rabbit would ignore young, tender spinach leaves and tender radish sprouts would not be too peppery for their dainty taste buds? Clearly my mistake. Here is what happened.

A few weeks after planting the garden tubs everything was flourishing. Tomatoes were vining in the horse trough, the spinach and watercress regenerating, and both of the cucumber vines in the ground level tubs were spilling over the rims on to the ground.

The garden was alive. Orioles were dive-bombing the hummingbird feeders, the ground lizards were getting bigger, and migrating bird

4 were pausing at the water bath in the backyard. We kept seeing paw prints left by wild animals drinking from the ground water basin, butterflies dotting the air, and the Jacaranda trees were in full-purple bloom. The yard was blessed by fairies.

It was an ahhhh moment when I saw a tiny creature of nature, a brand-new baby bunny in the side yard.

I actually smiled.

Who could imagine that one teeny-weeny-cute-baby bunny could manage so much destruction overnight?

I mean there I was smiling from the kitchen sink watching this adorable little guy flick his ears and nibble on tender cucumber shoots.

Feeling somewhat like a modern-day Beatrice Potter, I imagined this little love in a blue jacket coming to tea for cucumber sandwiches.

That scenario ended by morning. That precious little rodent (not really a rodent but a lagomorph-it just had a better flow) had chomped off every leaf on two cucumber plants! Okay. Okay. I shrugged it off. After all it was only about $10 in plants. It wasn’t the end of the world.

But the next morning, he had hopped up on the decorative lava rocks beside the tub and popped into it. In no time at all, he completely demolished all of the spinach and ate the cucumber vines down to the roots.

He just wasn’t that cute anymore.

Lucky for me, VJ is smarter than a rabbit. He immediately purchased chicken wire and wrapped it around all of the ground tubs.

So, you can now congratulate us for being smarter than a baby bunny.

Elizabeth can be reached at [email protected].