Kale, it's what's for groundhog's dinner

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

This isn't the post I wanted to write today. I wanted to boast that my garden was flooded with verdant waves of kale, lettuce, kohlrabi -- all the things that revive in the garden when summer wanes into fall and then gasps at the first frosty breaths of winter. I wanted to report that the harlequin bugs finally headed out to wherever harlequin bugs go for the winter and left behind a pair of perfectly formed, ivory globes -- my first try at homegrown cauliflower. The harlequin bugs are gone, finally, yes, but I have not a single cauliflower to speak of. And that parsley that grew so slowly - from seed - over the summer? When Michael went to the garden to cut a few leaves, he found in parsley's place only a few sad-looking blank stems. Curses.

Houston, we have a problem here. A big, fat, furry, four-legged problem -- the groundhog. As if squirrels weren't enough (and they, too, are baaa-aaack), we now have a voracious groundhog that's taken up residence under the deck. It's been coming out to eat just about everything in the veggie plot (AND the neighbor's), never mind my attempts to protect a few choice items with a bit of netting. I swear, we've got the best-fed groundhog this side of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Could have been a cauliflower

I contacted our city's animal control department and hope they'll send someone to take Chubby off to greener pastures, or wherever groundhogs like to be when suburbanites like us aren't feeding them with our green thumbs.

On the bright side, the garlics I planted about a month ago are reaching their newborn stems to the sky, oblivious to all manner of encroaching herbivorous creatures and the first icy coughs of an awakening Old Man Winter.