The Garden of Earthish Delights

It's spring in LA so Kate and I have started a garden. We have this really sweet porch that wraps around our apartment so we got some containers, soil, plants and started growing food. Lettuces, zucchini, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, pumpkins, and more. I built this chicken coop sort of cage around the area of the garden to keep vermin out. I also set up a barrel to collect the gray water from our washing machine after we filter it through another barrel and I’ll go through that process when the drought hits this summer.

So our garden was off to a good start. Lots of things stretching out and growing in their pots and then one day I noticed something disturbing. It looked like something ate a few of our lettuces.



Kind of strange and I knew something got into the cage. Two nights later more lettuces were eaten and some cucumber leaves. Two nights later. All the cucumber leaves and some zucchini leaves. So we had a rat. It could squeeze right through the chicken wire holes so we were defenseless. We had the exterminator come and he confirmed this by noticing some droppings and left a few rat traps. Two nights later all the zucchini was eaten, all the pepper plants, and some of the pumpkin leaves. Now I was getting pissed. We’d put red pepper around the plants and that obviously did nothing except give the rat some flavor to go with our food. A war was on: man vs rat.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over 10 years and I hardly kill anything that I’m conscious of and I routinely try to save the lives of bees, spiders, and worms. But, this was totally different. This fucking rat was eating all our food. Food we’d bought and spent time procuring and if that rat thought he could walk all over us and eat our food because, we were passive vegetarians he was dead wrong.

I had to defend our garden and I felt this passion and stress to do so. I felt a hunter instinct well up inside me and I procured more weapons: rat traps, poison pellets, and sealing off entry into the garden. This didn’t work for the first few nights I assume because, by this point only the trees were left and I would cover the pumpkin every night and bring the other plants inside. All the empty pots became death traps for the rat. Poison pellets piled in the middle, traps along the edges, and every morning Kate would wake up and look out the window to see if we caught anything.

Then one morning I hear her scream a little and I just laid back and smiled. We’d done it. We’d killed the fucking rat. I saw that he’d eaten a last meal of peanut butter and buried him in the trash can outside. This did lead me to an interesting understanding of how I had to kill so that I could eat and I may have to do it again. This may sound ironic to most people and maybe I'm not entitled to call myself a vegetarian anymore but, I don't care. I observed a long time ago that the cycle of life involves life, growth, death, and decay and I understand my role in that process and I have a choice not to include meat in my diet so I don't. Hopefully I won't have to kill any more intruders and I'm making sure the cage is rat-proof so I don't have to.

So far all the plants are doing fine and making a comeback. We’ve got some squash sprouted and we’ll get some more plants this weekend to make up for our loses. I’ll report back later when the garden is back in action. . .In the pics below you can see some of the carnage. Things got worse after these pics were taken.