Nest Building … Again

There are curtains going up around our patio today. The sense of comfort and coziness is palpable. I am going to enjoy it while I can.

I have frequently been guilty of my eyes bigger than my belly. No more so than when trying to set up house.

After some pretty unsatisfactory relationships, I chose singledom for decades (would I say anything different even if I hadn’t made that conscious choice?). That decades-long period of my life was socially thin but healing. And safe. It allowed me to clear a lot of cobwebs from my eyes.

But I have to admit I was a lot less productive than I might have been had I been coupled up. No way of knowing, really. During my hermitage, I found it mighty easy to devise elaborate plans and projects in my head. Actualizing not so much. I have that gift. Living in my head, I mean.

So when I imagined the verdant garden I would build in my minds’ eye, it was invariably better than actually creating it. Setting out to create a garden brought me nose-to-nose with hard reality. Especially of the four legged variety.

I once saw (to me) a hilarious cartoon. An onlooker watching his gardening neighbor working in the soil, waxed on about the paradisiacal scene unfolding in front of him. The gardener looked up and sharply retorted: “This isn’t paradise. This is war!”

After years of impotent vegetable production and many failed gardening attempts, I well understand that gardener’s frustration. Though I lived in the city, it might as well have been living in the deep, backwoods country.

There were skunks that lived under the deck. The groundhogs set up shop beneath the storage barn. The rabbits lived on another property nearby but visited regularly. The raccoons came and went and were very attentive to the slightest food scrap left out for them to enjoy. And the squirrels.

I am not sure I could utter that word out loud without having it sound like a curse word. Diabolical, clever, determined beyond all reason are those little bushy tailed demons. And hungry. They are blessed with great appetites. As I learned and it turned out, nothing I set out in my garden was safe.

A beautiful green pepper was growing in my raised container garden (that I sing the praises of a single pepper underscores how poor my green thumb actually was). I was so proud. One day I came out on my back deck.

The pepper was sitting on the rail of the deck. I panicked but quickly settled when I saw it was still verdant green and perfect. On the side facing me. The backside of my single perfect green pepper was carved out like someone had conveyed an abstract menacing message in hieroglyphics. I got the message.

On another occasion, thrift seeker that I am, I once bought a half dozen end-of-season corn plants. A good three to four inches high. I couldn’t wait to get them into the ground.

The local rabbits couldn’t wait to get them into their gullets. The morning after I planted them, I found only several sad remaining nibs poking out of the ground.

Instead of saving lotsa bucks with my thrifty purchase, I lost ten bucks worth of plants. Or, as the rabbits would have described them, absolutely delicious tender little bunny hors d’oeuvres. Bunny hors d’oeuvres sounded pretty appealing around that time.

In other aspects of gardening education, I learned how to drown slugs in beer placed in jar caps. The little lushes.

I put chili flakes and cayenne pepper in the feeders to ward off the little curse words because I was told squirrels will not eat hot spicy things. Well, that was a lie. I’m convinced the squirrels deeply appreciated how the spice kicked the birdseed up a notch. Don’t get me started on blood meal (which was bloody expensive) and whatever pestilence that was supposed to ward off.

And I knew it was the squirrels because no bird goes through as much birdseed as that feeder dispensed in just a few short days.

So I am enjoying my current delusion of comfort and coziness with the installation of new curtains. In here, protected from the elements and Mother Nature.

I can fool myself that there is not a whole wicked world out there full of raccoons, and skunks and bunnies and squirrels that will soon descend on my virginal and vulnerable patio vegetables and make short work of them.

For Northerners reading this, I will agree my complaints and caution may seem unseasonal. But mark my word. You have a whole winter ahead of you to gird your loins and bone up on how to protect your plants and keep the peskier elements of nature far away from you.

Trust me, if you wander down that garden path, you are going to need all of the ammunition you can get.