Is there any more suburban pastime than planting a vegetable garden? Even when we lived in Philadelphia, we had a great experience growing some cucumbers and tomatoes in our tiny back yard, so when we moved out to the suburbs, it just seemed natural to grow vegetables.
With some goading from Mary (it's hard to get me to do any manual labor), we started preparing the garden early in May. Observing the drainage of the yard and the condition of the grass in various places, I picked a sunny spot where the grass was dark green and water didn't accumulate and Mary and I spent several weekends turning the soil and pulling out the rocks.
Mother's Day (around mid-May), the traditional planting day for vegetables, came and went and it rained for several weekends in a row. Our neighbors, having the foresight to plant before the rains started, already had lush tomato plants in the ground by late May, but we were still preparing our soil.
Finally, on June 3rd we had a free two hours before a surprise party so we went in search of vegetable plants. We couldn't travel far due to time constraints, so we had to settle for what they had in the local Agway store, and the selection wasn't very good. We ended up with some lettuce seeds, beefsteak tomatoes, cucumbers and cauliflower, which I hastily planted while Mary got ready for the party. I also quickly assembled a three-foot fence to keep out the local rabbit population, and I was stapling the fence in place as I realized that we were late. The garden was born.
The plants were in the ground, but despite daily watering, they refused to grow at all. For several weeks they only got a little taller, and there was no sign of flowers. Consulting the invaluable Rodale Garden Problem Solver book, I reasoned that the soil didn't contain enough nitrogen. We fertilized the soil with nitrogen-rich fish tank waste and compost, but it was no use--the plants simply refused to grow. It was then that I realized that the spot I had picked for the garden was only exposed to sunlight for about 5 hours in the late afternoon, and nothing was going to change that.
Then I mulched the soil with grass clippings, and almost immediately they started thriving. The tomato plants grew new, robust branches and leaves, and quickly multiplied in size. The cauliflower plants had enormous leaves, but still no sign of a bud that would turn into a head. The cucumber plants were threatening to take over the garden, and were quickly starting to crowd out the small patch of tiny mixed lettuce. Everything was looking great.
Strange reports were coming from our neighbor about his vegetables being eaten by a groundhog. This big fat brown rodent was climbing his three-foot fence and devouring all the broccoli, bean, tomato, and cucumber plants with or without fruit. I hadn't seen a groundhog anywhere near my garden, so I wasn't worried about animals. Then the deer came.
They came at night or early morning, pulling down the small fence on one side and walking around the garden eating the tops of the tomato plants and cucumber vines. In one night, the wondrous growth of the garden was gone. Only the bottom third and neatly snipped trunks remained of the once proud tomato plants. I was heartbroken.
Consulting the Garden Problem Solver, I read about how to keep deer away, and it didn't sound promising. The best way to keep them out is with an eight-foot fence. Since that wasn't going to happen, I read about scent deterrents, but the book cautioned that some people swear by them while others claim they don't work. I figured it was worth a try.
At Agway again, I perused the animal deterrent section. Using the helpful Predator/Prey Index on the back of the package, I selected a small bottle of coyote urine. Even now I am amazed that I actually paid the equivalent of $200 a gallon for animal pee. I got home and set out the three small rain-proof scent bottles with a goodly portion of the foul-smelling brown liquid. I found that I couldn't even keep the closed bottle of urine in the garage because it would fill the room with an overpowering stench--I had to keep it outside in the garden.
The urine appeared to work, and the deer stayed away. The tomato plants and cucumber vines recovered well, and soon we were eating the early cucumbers and lettuce, but there were no flowers on the tomato plants. I didn't need the Problem Solver to figure out that they were now suffering from too much nitrogen, growing excessive leaves and branches instead of producing fruit. Some pruning quickly produced small flowers on the tomato plants, but the cauliflower was another problem. There was still nothing even remotely resembling a head, and my worst fears for them were coming true--they had been unable to produce heads all along, but we didn't know enough to realize it when we bought them. I removed the plants to make more room for the burgeoning cucumber vines, which were reaching out in all directions.
Slowly, the tomato plant began producing flowers and tiny tomatoes, which soon started getting large. We had wanted to get plum tomatoes because they are better for pasta sauce, but beefsteaks were all that were available in Agway, so that's what we were growing. Unfortunately, beefsteak tomatoes take a long time to mature because they grow so large, and weeks were passing without a hint of a ripe tomato.
Then, one day one of them started turning red--it was a magical moment because there were scores of small green tomatoes growing everywhere and here finally was the first sign of success. I picked it when it was red, and was pleased to notice that a few of the larger ones around it were already showing signs of ripening. It was a wonderful, sweet tomato. Things were looking good.
The bandits struck in broad daylight, climbing the small fence and eating all of the ripening tomatoes. Some of them were half-eaten where they hung, some were dragged out and devoured, but the pieces of tomato were everywhere in the garden. Groundhogs! There were two of them, and each had been working a neighbor's garden. Now that there was nothing left to eat in the neighbor's patches, they were both hitting our tomatoes, eating anything that was even close to maturing. They were also stripping the lettuce plants, but fortunately they didn't want the cucumbers for some reason.
Once again, I consulted the Predator/Prey Index and bought some fox urine, and set out another set of scent containers. Unfortunately, these seemed to have no effect on the groundhogs, which ate any tomato that grew larger than a golf ball. Each day they would return several times to feast. We considered trapping, but according to the humane society, it means certain death for a groundhog if you move it to a park or the woods, and they recommend killing groundhogs rather than trapping and moving them. Putting hot pepper oil on the vegetables doesn't bother them, and the suggestion of using mothballs made me somewhat nervous when I read on the package that they are known to cause cancer.
Fortunately we didn't have to buy tomatoes because now that the groundhog was leaving our neighbor's garden alone, his plants were producing bushels of cherry tomatoes. They grew too quickly and too high for the groundhog to reach, so we think we might try to grow them next year.
Finally, the cucumber vines stopped producing vegetables. I took down the fence and left the plants to the animals once and for all. After all the work we did, I would estimate that we had about 20 cucumbers and a few heads of lettuce, but I can take pride in knowing that the tomatoes we grew were responsible for fattening up the local groundhog population so they could survive the long winter. Who knows, maybe next year there will be a whole family of them, but I'll be ready--next year we're going to have an eight-foot electrified fence and a motion-triggered alarm system. Then we'll see who'll eat all those tomatoes.
I wasn't entirely kidding about the eight foot fence. The next year, I wasn't going to play around. I decided to bury a fence a foot in the ground, and top it with 6 feet of chicken wire. This worked reasonably well to keep the groundhogs and deer out, though it was a lot of effort to construct...
The only animals that could manage to get over the fence were the squirrels, who enjoyed eating my tomatoes while sitting on the fence. Crafty devils. They would later try to move into our house...
