Monsters of the Garden

Certain plants meander along fitfully until midsummer . . . and then take over the entire garden once they hit their stride. I am speaking, naturally, of squash, melons, and cucumbers, but especially of the squash.

When I planted buttercup squash again this year, I had little hope for the long-term survival of the big, flat seeds that I pressed into the open earth. Last year’s plants, which I had started indoors in peat pots, were vigorous, thick-leaved, and about a foot and a half long when I planted them out in the garden, but they soon shriveled and yellowed in the inhospitable mulch. I kept them alive for a few weeks with successive applications of artificial fertilizers, but then the squash bugs laid eggs on them, and the young nymphs sucked all the juices out. It was the first time I’d ever dealt with those insects. In Colorado, where I grew up, I had never seen any such problem, though my family grew far too much zucchini every year.

This year, I never got around to planting zucchini. I didn’t want to plant two kinds of squash close together, because (according to the venerable Edward C. Smith) large groupings of the same kinds of plants make a sort of one-stop shop for marauding insects. I meant to prepare another flowerbed for zucchini, but I’ll admit, the motivation wasn’t very strong (not that there’s anything wrong with zucchini).

Perhaps sensing an opportunity to impress in the absence of its super-productive cousin, the buttercup squash has outgrown every other plant in the garden. Its vines have climbed sideways on my supposedly rabbit-proof garden fence, and as of this morning, the longest vine spans the length of the fence on one side. That means it’s at least ten feet long—and since it’s climbed up diagonally, it might even be longer. The two squash plants on the far side of the fence have been excellent producers, as well. There are at least four developing squash fruits, and the largest one has grown to the size of a softball.

I’ve had very little trouble with insects, except for the squash vine borer that killed one of the plants on the side of the garden nearer to the house. I’ve killed three or four adult squash bugs, but so far, I’ve seen no signs of their leathery, red-brown eggs, which they like to lay in several angled rows on the undersides of young leaves. The yellow-and-black cucumber beetles, which came by the hundreds last year, have been nearly absent—I’ve seen one striped beetle and one spotted beetle. The nasturtiums I planted next to the squash and cucumbers might be at least partly responsible for these insects’ absence, as their repellent effect is advertised nearly everywhere I’ve looked for information, but I think the general health and better nutrition of the plants also has helped. The gardening manuals say that weaker plants tend to attract heavier infestations of pests.

The watermelon and muskmelon plants have made similar advances across the flowerbeds, but the progress of the muskmelons has been checked by my archenemies, the infernal, unstoppable rabbits. The plants are too big to be seriously damaged by the nighttime nibblers, but nearly all of the ends have been clipped off with the greatest efficiency. An untutored eye, roving over those plants, might assume that the gardener herself had decided to prune those vines to keep them under control. This gardener, however, operating under the assumption that larger plants will support healthier and more numerous melons, would far prefer to have the vines wander at will.

So far, dressing the vine tips with cayenne pepper-laced vegetable oil has provided temporary relief for the plants, but the oil seems to cause the leaves to scorch in the sun, and the cayenne washes away each time the plants are watered or rained on. Gazing at last night’s damage (after a heavy rain), I felt rather hopeless. I’ll continue apply the mixture just to the ends of the plants, and I’ll stick some of the other growing tips inside the chicken-wire cages that I used to cover the young peppers and eggplants.

It pleases me to see my monsters grow over wide swaths of soil and fence, to try to train the unruly cucumbers up their trellis, and to watch the bees compete for places inside their bright yellow flowers. A few of the cucumbers are almost ready to pick. They appeared beneath the vines almost by magic and seemed to grow overnight from the size of a piece of chalk to nearly a foot long and an inch and a half in diameter. On the muskmelon plants, I have observed three swelling, furry, oblong objects, the largest of them about the size of my fist. None of the watermelon plants have produced viable fruits of any size as yet, though I see a few marble-sized objects that look promising.

Important though these fruits will be at harvest time, the expanding leaves—the many fingered, rough-looking leaves on the watermelon; the broad, slightly rippled leaves of the cantaloupe; great, smooth squash leaves approaching dinner-plate size; and the roughly triangular, dark-green, furry cucumber leaves—are what bring me joy right now. These ramblers and climbers take a lot of space and a lot of effort to grow, but every garden should have at least one monster to support the gardener’s ego and to impart to the entire project the luxuriant, almost decadent, appearance of success.

Desperate Measures

Well, I was wrong, and I might as well admit it at the start. Rabbits will take a nibble of just about anything, it seems, and they will certainly eat most of a tender young eggplant or pepper plant, given the opportunity. They don’t care for melons, cucumbers, and squash, but one muskmelon plant had a single broad leaf half bitten away the night after I transplanted it into the flowerbed.

At first, as I have chronicled, the peas and beans were decimated by these creatures. That’s when I put up the fence. It worked—for one or two nights. I don’t know how they found their way back in, for I did my best to see that there were no gaps at the bottom, but they did, and the new beans lost their heads on a nightly basis. Outside the main garden, I had planted the eggplants and peppers, and two mornings later found one of the larger eggplants reduced to a single sprouting leaf, while several of the peppers were leafless on one side.

I contained the problem by placing plastic plant pots over the larger plants and plastic Dixie cups (of which, luckily, I possessed a nearly endless supply) over the smaller ones each night. Putting those cups on the plants each night was hard work, but it did the job. Rabbits are good at getting past barriers, but it seems that they’re just not smart enough to figure out what’s underneath an upside-down cup.

Soon, however, the carnage moved back into an unexpected quarter of the main garden. Peter Rabbit fancied a forbidden bite of lettuce. The invaders in my garden ignored the puny lettuce and spinach seedlings, but the Swiss chard, a tough, leafy member of the beet family, was disappearing, one handsome, three-inch seedling at a time. I spent a few nights covering each plant in that long row of chard with its own cup. But I was about to go on vacation for a week, and although I had arranged for a neighbor to water the plants, I knew no one who would willingly cover dozens of plants with cups each night and remove the cups in the morning. I felt rather foolish about the entire venture myself.

Stronger measures were necessary, I decided. Back to the hardware store I drove, grumbling all the way. I brought home a roll of chicken wire three feet wide and fifty feet long, the only size the store still had in supply. Although I should have been preparing for the next morning’s eleven-hour drive to my conference in Tennessee, I instead stayed up past midnight hacking at the chicken wire, holding each section of roll open with a chair on one side and a piano bench on the other while I clipped the wires. When I finished cutting through a section of wire, it would snap back into a curved position, scraping my arms and legs.

From the smaller wire sections, I fashioned cylindrical cages for the peppers and eggplants. For the row of Swiss chard and onions, I cut a nine and a half–foot length of wire. This larger section rolled and buckled until I manhandled (or womanhandled) it into submission. I straightened four wire clothes hangers and threaded them through the wire at regular intervals, then, with much difficulty and swearing, I curved the entire piece longwise into a row cover.

Early the next morning, I covered my seedlings and maneuvered the row cover into place (muttering many hard oaths the entire while). The row cover didn’t fit the ground exactly, so on its exposed side (away from the fence) I shoveled a few inches of dirt from between the garden rows.

None of this made my subsequent driving trip any easier, but at least I had peace of mind. I had awakened that morning dreaming that I was handing an eggplant to a fellow named Itai (an Israeli name, I think, but the word coincidentally means “ouch” in Japanese) whom I had met at journalism school and who had lived down the hall from me. The dream was disturbing, because I had no reason to believe my worthy former colleague would care for the plant. My rather quixotic last stand against rabbits at least convinced me that I had done all I could for the garden. Though success was not guaranteed, the garden would have to hold its own against Nature’s fury for the next five days.

Kill the Wabbit

“They don’t come out at night, do they?” said the Man with the Perfect Lawn to me, as we watched a half-grown Eastern cottontail rabbit lope around the corner of a picket fence in someone else’s yard. But alas, yes, they do. Judging by the damage I have found, they come out in droves after dark and don’t stop eating until dawn. Lawn Guy doesn’t have anything to worry about; his soil is fertile and his plants are large enough to withstand a sustained attack. Moreover, many of his plants are nightshades, whose poisonous leaves rabbits won’t touch.

Now I understand why Elmer Fudd hated Bugs Bunny so passionately. Bugs is the personification—or cartoonification, perhaps—of all that one imagines bunnies to be, after one discovers that they are chomping through one’s vegetable patch. His slyness and insouciance are calculated to irritate. Even his name connotes a certain pestiferous quality in the character, for it reminds the gardener of the insect pests that infest the growing plants.

My newly planted fence kept out the intruders for but one night. On the next night, the rabbit found its way in, beheading a couple of newly emerged bean plants and one of the two remaining pea plants. There was no sign of disturbance beneath the fence, but I doubted a small cottontail could make a 30-inch hop (including the 20 inches of fence that protruded above the garden and the 10-inch wooden sides of the raised bed). I surmised that the animal had gotten in underneath the fence, most likely at the corners, where there was a little space at the bottom.

Rocks, I thought, were my answer. In this land of gluey clay soil, there is no shortage of rocks. The shovel hits a large rock with every thrust. I took some of the rocks from the cairn I had made beneath the wooden deck, and I filled in all the gaps I could find at the corners of my garden. “Try and dig through that!” I thought. Such ideas tempt the jealous gods. I had no faith that my efforts would work. But when I next looked at the peas, the nasturtiums, and the emerging bean plants, there were no further signs of damage. Some of the peas were making a weak attempt at rallying, growing small leaves at the base of the stem.

Elsewhere in the backyard, my plants were not so lucky. A balloon flower plant I had stuck in the ground a few days ago is much smaller than it was, though it has not yet been completely razed. The rabbit cut down a foot-high aster plant to a height of 3 inches. A lupine plant that has been trying gamely since last year to raise itself a few inches above the ground has lost its pretty, palm-frond-shaped leaves time and time again. I have begun to cover some of these unfortunates with upturned plant pots at night.

Luckily, the rabbits haven’t shown any interest in the watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, and cucumber that have only recently grown their first true leaves. The rabbits either don’t like how they taste or find the leaves of these cucurbit plants too tough. So far, so good . . . I may not have any peas, but I will have melons, and I’ll be damned if I let a few chomped-down plants discourage me from planting more pole beans. Anything that comes from this garden will have the added flavor of victory, sharp and sweet.

Rabbit-Proof Fence

Two months ago, a litter of cute, fist-sized bunnies was born in a furry nest beneath my neighbors’ kitchen door. While others fawned over the little creatures, I stood away, muttering grim prophecies that have, at last, come to pass. The rabbit is out of the bag, and he is a hungry devil, who brings all his friends, brothers, sisters, and associates to the banquet.

The main attraction of this lapine smorgasbord, for the last two nights, has been my formerly six-inch-high pea plants, tender-leaved, succulent seedlings that were far too young to be allowed out at night alone. Most of those plants are now one or two inches high, and those that have more than one leaf left can count themselves fortunate indeed. A pole bean seedling, meanwhile, fared far worse in the latest rampage, having been foully and mercilessly slaughtered, cut down to the ground just as it was feeling its way toward a strong support.

One neighbor (who is a non-gardener) suggested planting marigolds to deter the creatures. I pooh-poohed the idea. Even if I believed that marigolds are a strong rabbit repellent, I would still have no confidence that flowers alone, howsoever stinky, would deter a rabbit that knew quite well what it was going after. I offended my neighbor by mumbling something about rabbit stew. Later on, I bought a length of two-foot-high nylon-covered wire fencing and unrolled it around the garden. Perhaps the little marauders will find a way under my fence, but the barrier will at least tax their ingenuity and strength for a time, and siphon off some of the energy they have already usurped from my high-maintenance garden plants.

At night, I am re-reading Watership Down for perhaps the eighteenth time. Though I still love that tale of rabbits on the run from residential development and still sympathize with Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and the rest of their crew, I am not deluded thereby into believing that bunnies are our friends. Like all the other creatures on the earth, rabbits are herbivorous competitors that must be discouraged from consuming the dainties we desire. My mother, who memorized Peter Rabbit when my brother and I were young, says I have turned into Mr. McGregor. So I have, and it is only natural that I should. The unwritten code of the ancient and hard-working cadre of gardeners requires me to accept that I must do a certain amount of fighting for my future meals, and that the fiercest of those struggles will likely be against my fellow creatures.