Double Trouble

This last weekend marked the completion Fall 2006 garden tilling. It was one of those typical November days where the temperature barely makes it to 70 degrees and a mild breeze was blowing. A perfect day for gardening! The soil was a bit damp from heavy rains about a week or so before which made the tilled soil a bit clumpy, but not to the point of being too hard to work. Nonetheless, it was a now or possibly never situation as more rains were forecasted for the upcoming week. The routine was to first take down the electric fence to allow access by the garden tiller. Then after digging up the last of the summer peanut crop, removing invading roots from a nearby tree, digging up miscellaneous weeds, nut grass and a bit of bermuda grass, tilling, spreading a bit of fertilizer, hand working the tilled soil into rows with shovels and rakes, and finally re-installation of the electric fence, the job was done. These activities took a few hours of clock time to complete. Seems like each year the process takes a bit longer than the year before. I seem to be finding each year more truth to the popular Toby Keith song "I ain't as good as I once was"..

But now it's all done. The garden tiller has been saved with the fuel additive to keep gum from forming in the carburetor. During the upcoming weeks the remaining fall vegetable seeds and plants will be set out thereby taking advantage of all available garden space. The main item left for planting will be the onion sets which will be planted in December. The Texas Supersweet 1015 onions planted last year were wonderful.

About that electric fence.. one of the best garden investments I've ever made. It is the only item that I've found to be effective in stopping the garden raids by raccoons, rabbits, squirrels and opossums. Before installing the electric fence I was encountering numerous critter problems each year. These would include raccoons eating dozens of sweet corn ears per night, rabbits eating small vegetable plants down to a nub, opossums eating strawberries, raccoons eating the cantaloupe, squirrels eating the tomatoes, and most recently armadillos digging up plants while looking for grubs in the garden soil. With the electric fence in operation my animal pest problems are fewer and far between. Squirrels sometimes slip under the fence, and every now and then the fence becomes ineffective (shorted out) when weeds touch the wire.

Although the garden problems are mostly solved, I still have to deal with the pest problems outside of the garden, most of which are from raccoons. These animals have become far more numerous over the last year or so. Perhaps this is due to the developing landscape in our area. Since there is less area to forage for food, the animals need to depend on mankind to help provide them with something to eat. In late September after seeing several raccoons on the carport in the evening, I decided that I needed to break out the trap and relocate these pests. The raccoons eat the leftover cat food so it's easy to tell when they visit in the evening. There is absolutely nothing left in the bowl.

So starting in late September I began to catch and relocate these nuisance animals. At the end of October after about 4 weeks time I had trapped and relocated 4 raccoons. One would think problem solved, right? Wrong. I again noticed the cat food bowl was showing "clean as a whistle" each morning. So last Sunday night I set the trap once again. After waking early Monday morning I could hear from inside of the house the tell-tail cage-rattling sounds of another trapped raccoon. As usual I put the trap out in the middle of the patio and duck taped the safety latch for transporting to the relocation site. About an hour later I made my routine check of the garden before heading out to work. As I walked towards the trap to put it in the back of my truck I couldn't believe my eyes, for there was not one but TWO raccoons in the trap. Who'd of thought it. Never before had I caught two of anything in the trap at the same time. So my current count is 6 raccoons since September.. and wondering how many more to go... It turns out there is at least one more out there as the cat food bowl was once again clean as could be this morning.

The rains came yesterday as forecasted and so the garden is now happy, but hopefully not too happy. It has been said that too much of a good thing is bad for you. Well, this is certainly true for rain on my garden. The rainfall the week before was about 3 to 4 inches. This amount literally drowned the broccoli and cauliflower. I replaced most of the sick plants (note one remaining droopy plant in the foreground of the adjacent picture). But time will tell if the replacements will have time to produce this winter. Gardening, like many other things in life is not an exact science. But then again that's usually what makes gardening (and life too for that matter) so "interesting" at times... So we'll see.