Cat’s Away, Rodents Play, June 2021
On returning in late June from the Great Smoky Mountains, I found the flower bed by my front door inhabited by gaunt, leafless stems that I had planted in full bloom just before leaving. Varmints had stripped the leaves off every zinnia and eaten most of the blossoms, too. We suspected chipmunks and rabbits and put out anti-rabbit spray, then fox urine pellets, then mothballs. Nothing helped, not even two different sizes of live traps baited with delectable carrots for rabbits and peanut butter for chipmunks. Days later, traps rebaited several times, still no takers.
In a daft hour of foolishness, however, I planted another platoon of zinnias and accelerated the chemical warfare. I knew that soiled kitty litter fended off chipmunks and rabbits, but my cat-owner friend was on vacation. The next morning, I looked out and saw a chipmunk, sitting on his haunches, reach up to delicately pluck a petal off a zinnia and eat it. Gary poured windshield washer fluid down a couple of chipmunk holes. That worked last year, but seemed to have no impact this time. Busy rascals promptly stripped all the zinnias.
By now, mid-July had arrived, months after the bounty of flowers at the garden shops must have been sold. On the advice of a friend, I went to the garden center at a big box hardware store and toured the sale racks. I came home with six large pots of begonias, petunias, and impatiens, including three hanging baskets, for a grand total of $18.50. We snipped off the hangars and placed each of the plants inside a bigger clay pot from our stash of pots in the garage. The flowers are now higher than your average chipmunk but anchored in pots heavy enough not to blow over. Most of the flowers have a habit of trailing and will grow down to cover the clay pots, which will inevitably bring them back into chipmunk range. I’m trying to think of it as pruning.
I have moved the pots around umpteen times and am now ok with the balance of shapes, colors, and sizes. That would not have been so easy with plants tucked into the soil. If the perennials around the pots begin to encroach, I can just move the pots. That assumes that the pots still have flowers and foliage in them. The dirt dug up in front of a pot, spilling onto the sidewalk in the photo at right, tells me that a varmint has been working on that plant.
A chomped coleus leaf just came to my attention. My next step is to sprinkle the tastiest flowers with cayenne pepper. Some days, I wish I had a voracious outdoor cat.
Oh, I feel your frustration! I planted gardens in Colorado and Texas that scrambled to survive for various reasons and gave up in Texas after meeting a pigmy rattler in my hanging petunias and a coral snake in my ivy ground cover. While at Vandenberg AFB housing, I had a spectacular garden established by previous residents. That was near the low mountains of Burpee seed fields that burst open in a rainbow of color every summer. Later in La Jolla EVERYTHING grew and was flower heaven. Again in Memphis my landlord had two gardeners working several days a week for a stunning setting. Now in Maryland, the last time I reached down to pull a weed, I toppled over and broke a flower pot with my head. Currently I pay for any special effects in the garden or just imagine what I would like.