"What's he do? Nibble your bum?"

When you were wee, did you ever run into Peter Rabbit and all his cute fluffy pals? He was the main character in Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit and His Cute Fluffy Pals" series of kids' books. Actually, I'm pretty positive that the series went by another name but I'm feeling a little too lazy to Google it right now so I'm re-christening the series for my own bloggy purpose...poetic/creative license and all that.

Anyhow, Peter Rabbit et al spent a bunch of time making the token human character, Mr. MacGregor's, life miserable by raping and pillaging his vegetable garden.

A Grammatical Query: which word shows possession in that case "character's" or "Mr. MacGregor's"?? 

These past few weeks, I have felt a rather strong affinity with the much-abused Mr. MacGregor.

Get outta my garden you wascally wabbit

My new house happens to have a very small raised bed that my sister-in-law(the previous homeowner) used as a vegetable garden. I’ve never ever had a veggie garden of my own before so I was very excited to try my hand at bringing forth food from the earth...just like my Mom.

Every summer, for as long as I can remember, my Mom has had an enormous garden. When my siblings and I were young, we were conscripted into her slave labour garden workforce to "pick stones" and pull weeds and lots of other little menial garden-y tasks. We were her grubby little garden minions.

The pay was pretty excellent though...all the veggies we could sneak without her catching us...kinda like Peter and his friends. If you've never had the chance to gorge on freshly-pulled carrots (...you wipe the dirt off in dew-soaked grass, if available, and if not you can run them under the hose...delicious!!) you are missing out on one of the best things in the whole entire Universe. Also super tasty are peas in their pod and yellow and green beans and tomatoes. She also grew radishes and cucumbers and onions and green peppers but they are on:

"A Comprehensive List of Vegetables That I Think Are Gross and Therefore Will Not Eat Them"
by: squirrel_e_girl

• Radishes ... I don't even want to think about how gross they are let alone muster up the words to describe how gross they are. They are the worst vegetable. Period. YUCK. F&@K.
• Cucumbers... Wouldn't eat them EVER... under any circumstances until just recently. I will now almost sometimes think about eating them if they are in a Greek Salad...or if I've been tricked into eating them when they've been hidden in a Mariposa Market sandwich.
• Onions...Cooked=Not totally disgusting...Not Cooked=Totally Disgusting
• Green Peppers...If I had a nickel for every little chopped up piece of green pepper I've painstakingly picked off pizza or out of a salad, I’d be a gazillionaire. A very time intensive task. Actually, same goes for onions so that'd make me gazillionaire X 2...a bigazillionaire, perhaps.
• Brussel Sprouts...Little gross green balls of disgustingness. No amount of butter can make these little bastards palatable.

Hmmmmmmmm.....I may have lost the plot a little.

So...Back to my story...

To Recap:
-New House
-Little raised vegetable garden bed
-Very excited to plant veggies for the first time and feed my children food that I have cultivated with my own bare hands...primal stuff.

OK...

So, this spring I dove right in and cleaned out my new veggie patch...pulling out a million little baby chives and a million little pine cone type things that had blown in and one nasty bitey nettle bush that I'm not sure how or why it got in there in the first place...I'm thinking My S-i-L must've booby-trapped it...she's mean like that ;) ...But seriously...have you ever had a run-in with a nettle bush?? Envision several thousand angry red bitey ants attacking your hand...then pouring gas on it and then lighting it on fire....That's how it feels to tangle with a nettle bush. It f$&king KILLS.

My Guy brought in about a million pounds of triple mix to make new flower beds with and he also used some to top up my veggie garden. And with my topped up, mixed up, beautifully raked bed ready for planting, I headed off to buy me some veggies.

As I mentioned earlier, it's very small so I had to choose my choices carefully....and since choosing choices is an arduous task for me to begin with, choosing choices carefully was AGONIZING!!

BUT!!!

I did it!!!

I bought 2 little tomato plants and 4 little broccoli plants and 2 little red pepper plants and 2 little strawberry plants (they were very different plants which I found interesting so I bought em both as an experiment...I am a thrill-seeker). I also bought a packet of sunflower seeds and a packet of carrots seeds ....

And here is where shit gets crazy...

I also bought 1 little cucumber plant....AND... a packet of radish seeds....THAT!!!! is how much I love My Guy.

Cucumbers and f&@king Radishes.

I bought 2 little wire cages for my little tomato plants and 1 little wire cage for my little cucumber plant...my Mom suggested that since my space is limited, growing my cucumbers up instead of out would be a good idea...who knew???

Now, before I planted my wee plants or sowed my wee seeds, I had to sift through the beautifully prepared soil and remove all the DISGUSTING CAT POOP that my Asshole Cat had deposited there. He must've thought he had died and gone to Asshole Cat Heaven...because, while it might be a teeny veggie patch to me, it is an ENORMOUS open air kitty litter...a Kitty Poop Patch, if you will...to him.

Asshole.

I really wish I had taken a picture of my beautiful little veggie garden...it was so neat and tidy and beautiful and so full of promise and hopes and dreams.

Little did I know that it was also full of frustration, disappointment and heartbreak.

And this is where I get back to telling you why I'm feeling a strong affinity towards Mr. MacGregor...the woodland creature hating man.

You wanna know why???

I'll tell you why!!!

WOODLAND CREATURES ARE TRYING TO WRECK MY GARDEN, GODDAMMIT!!!

The first assault on my beautiful and beloved garden (other than my cats insisting on pooping amongst the radish seeds...I guess they hate radishes, too. Wise felines.) was launched by what we first thought to be a groundhog.

We noticed that our newly planted Hosta bed had been invaded by a groundhog who had returned to reclaim the entrance to his subterranean lair. There had been what we thought was a dormant groundhog hole at the side of our house. It just happened to be located right where I wanted to plant a bunch of hostas.

Silly groundhog.

The Hosta bed was created.

The groundhog dug it up.

Silly squirrel_e_girl.

Groundhogs have landed on my ever-growing List Of Assholes.

Hosta Bed/Groundhog Hole...the sand isn't supposed to be there

The dug up Hosta bed was just the beginning of the horror...for we walked over to admire my fine looking vegetable garden in an effort to soothe the pain of the destroyed hostas, only to discover ...

THIS!!!!!!

Decimated Baby Broccolis

And THIS!!!

Decapitated Baby Sunflower

And THIS!!!

Leafless Baby Radishes

I was very sad.

Very.

Very.

Sad.

But...as obviously logical as it seemed to blame the veggie patch destruction on the woodchuck, a couple of things didn't add up.

A) There were no rodenty-type footie prints in the soil surrounding the vegetable carnage whereas there were rodent-y type footie prints in the desecrated Hosta bed.
2) There were other victims in my other flower gardens. The buds of a bunch of tall plants had been eaten away and unless the groundhog was wearing his stilettos, he could not have reached the tips of the tall plants.

It wasn't until we ran into our down-the-road neighbour who told us about a doe and her fawn who had been hanging out in his backyard eating their stuff that it finally made sense.

THEY were the ones who ate my broccolis and sunflowers and radish leaves....which, of course, means...

Does and Fawns (especially Fawns) are assholes.

Yep.

THEN...

With that mystery all cleared up, I was free to shift my focus to my anticipatory excitement since BOTH of my strawberry plants were sporting wee little baby strawberries !!! YAY!!! I settled in to wait until they ripened.

Left-Good Strawberry Plant...Right-Less Good Strawberry Plant

YUM YUM

The first plant to offer up tasty berries was mildly disappointing ...the berries were small and elongated and seedy and weren’t especially sweet. They were more akin to the little wild strawberries you find out in fields...still yummy but not AS yummy as I had hoped them to be.

The berries that appeared on the other plant held more promise. They were more like your typical run of the mill strawberries...nice and round and plump.

One morning, I checked in on their progress, as I do every morning, and I noticed that FINALLY, one was just about perfect. I was going to pick it and eat it as a pre-work snack but I had just brushed my teeth and didn't want the residual toothpaste taste to detract from the strawberry’s strawberriness....so I didn't.

A post-work/pre-lunch snack it would be.

I looked forward to that strawberry ALL morning and when I got home, I hopped out of the car and skipped over to my waiting strawberry snack, only to find ...

THIS!!!

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

No groundhog or deer could do precision work like this!! Not even a wee baby asshole fawn has tiny enough teeth to commit such a dastardly yet dainty crime.

DOH!!!

We figured the strawberry nibbling thief had to be a small rodent and fingers were immediately pointed at ....say it ain't so...at one of our friendly neighbourhood squirrels.

Squirrels are assholes.

It was the same thing, day after day...kinda like the movie “Groundhog Day”...but with squirrels.

I’d check my strawberry plant for ripe-for-the-picking berries and think to My Self, “Self, how ’bout we give this one till tomorrow and then it'll be perfect and then we will eat it.”

Eager for a sweet strawberry snack, I'd check my strawberry plant the next day...

And...

BAM!!!!

The berry would be half-nibbled.

Again.

Damn YOU, Squirrel!!

Then the plot thickened...I was harvesting some of the lesser strawberries...the Berry Thief was very discerning and rarely helped itself to those ones ...and from somewhere in amongst the veggies, I heard the very angry chattering of a very angry .....CHIPMUNK!!!! And I'm pretty sure I heard him say, "Get the hell away from my strawberries, lady!! Or else I'll cut you!!"

Could it be that the asshole swiping my prized strawberries was a cute little chippy???? Was it the same chippy who has been hiding out from our my asshole assassin cat in our garage eating all the uneaten birdseed that was useless to me since I took the feeders down to save the birdies from my asshole murderous cat??

This chipmunk was living large.

Chipmunks are assholes.

Damn you, Adorable Cute Little Chippy!!

Then...

The plot thickened....

Again.

My Guy was leaving for work early one morning and was startled by a blur of greyish brown followed closely by a blur of menacing black as the blurs sped out of my strawberry plants.

Asshole Cat was hunting down, at an extremely high rate of speed, a fluffy little bunny :(

Could it be that the asshole swiping my prized strawberries was a fluffy little bunny??

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Not a fluffy little bunny!!!

Say it ain't so!!!(again)

So...

To Recap:

“A Comprehensive List of Possible/Probable Vegetable Garden Rapers and Pillagers”
by: Mr. MacGregor

• Groundhog
• Mummy Deer
• Baby Deer
• Squirrel
• Chipmunk
• Peter Rabbit

Unfortunately/Fortunately, a few days later, the “A Comprehensive List of Possible/Probable Dastardly Yet Delicate Strawberry Nibblers” got really really short... really really fast.

I did my usual Pre-Work Strawberry Status Check and was surprised to find a couple of nice plump fully intact strawberries still attached to the plant.

Weird.

Delightfully tasty.

But weird.

And mysterious.

The mystery didn't stay very mysterious for very long because as I pulled out of my driveway and onto the road, I noticed a little pile of fluffy bunny smooshed in the middle of the road.

Poor Peter Rabbit.

I don't have to share my strawberries anymore.



“A Comprehensive List of Dastardly Yet Delicate Strawberry Nibblers”
by: squirrel_e_girl

• Peter Rabbit ...RIP

The End.


As long as we're on the subject of bunnies...

HA!! That rabbit's dynamite!!



p.s. Unfortunately, The Veggie Patch Heartbreak doesn't end there with the dead bunny...my little tomato plants and little cucumber plants quickly outgrew their little wire support cages and are so crazy big that the tomato plants are collapsing into themselves and the tomato-laden branches are bending and breaking and the cucumber plant has toppled over its cage and is smothering my pepper plants :(

Who knew that veggies could grow too big to be manageable?

Maybe I should’ve splurged and bought the heavy duty wire support cages.

Oh well, there’s always next year.

Lessons learned.

I guess my mad gardening skills are just too spectacular to be confined and limited to such a small space.

Yeah...that's it.