garden woes

September is my favorite month. School starts, the weather tempers, the leaves turn, and the garden gives us its very best. This year our garden makes me think that Mother Nature is a jokester, for instead of my seeds growing where I carefully placed them in the spring, it looks as though I sowed them by flinging them in the air on a windy day! I have carrots in the asparagus, a tomato plant in the middle of the carrots, and a lovely acorn squash at home among the beets. I’d say only 10% of the corn came up and it certainly wasn’t knee-high by the 4th of July (Nebraska’s standard for a successful corn crop). Although this year’s garden is peculiar, it doesn’t really bother me, for I am still happy with whatever the garden is producing and I am happy that my plants are filling the measure of their creation, wherever they grow.
But there is another strange thing going on. The tomato plants are producing nicely, or so it would appear. But just as the tomatoes get ripe enough to “pick tomorrow”, they disappear before “tomorrow” comes. The neighbors report sightings of a pair of very large raccoons in the neighborhood. They come out at night and invade our yards and, I suspect, gardens. Early in the summer I would wake about 3:00 every morning when our dog dashed outside to scare something away. Hmmm. It isn’t happening anymore. I suspect that our dog, who is always on top of any invading mice, birds and squirrels, is too intimidated by those raccoons the same size as she is. And so she cowers inside, letting them have their way with our produce. Mother Nature may be a jokester, but I have a trick or two up my sleeve, too. From now on I’m not waiting until “tomorrow” to pick the tomatoes, I am picking “today”!