American Gardenators…

June 2, 2008

So the other evening my husband and I, along with our friend Jenny (who also gardens), were entertaining ourselves by parodying American Gladiators gardener style...I dubbed it "American Gardenators". We like to call these little plays of ours "vignettes". Yes, we need lives.

Anyway, just imagine two aggressive looking ladies..."Love-lies-bleeding Leslie" and "Johnny Jump-up Jenny"...in their pumped up gardening garb, favorite hand tools at their hip, going head to head in garden combat. Events such as "turn that compost' or "show those weeds who's boss"...it made me giggle incessantly. I'm easily entertained. Obviously.

What even started this downward spiral into sillyness you ask? Oh, let me show you a few photos of the latest carnage in my garden. You already know of my murderous thoughts towards the peach stealing squirrels...now "they" are

picking off my corn...one precious stalk at a time. I had some good sweet corn coming on too. Lot's of ears developing nicely. "They" are decapitating my precious corn stalks, and then digging into the ears. They don't even have the courtesy to eat the whole thing. They eat half of the ear and leave the rest just to taunt me. Just to get a rise out of me. I don't know if it's the squirrels...or perhaps racoons. Racoons would make more sense.

Not only are the rodents devouring my garden goodies, but now that the heat of summer is set upon us, lots of other nasty garden pests are making their debut as well. Potato beetles, stink bugs (still...), second round of slugs, caterpillars. I'm in my second round of Bt sprays and am now resorting to spinosad to try and take out the beetles and stinkbugs. I do have some awesome assasin bugs around the garden right now and masses of lizards. Not to mention a few butterfly larvae etc. Now if I could figure out how to get the lizards to take out the racoons, we'd be in business. Let the garden battles begin!