I have built a large vegetable garden.
I do not have weevils (poetic license) but I do have other pestilence: worms, virus, birds and above all, rats.
I hate rats. I love my garden.
I love to bring in fresh tomatoes, squash, peppers and other bounty. It brings me great joy and racks up points with the wife, with whom I have a perpetual point deficit.
Having a vegetable garden is not “getting back to nature.” It is the opposite. That is what makes it joyous. Nature wants equilibrium. Where there is scarcity, nature adds supply. An empty cave is occupied by bats, my shoe is occupied by a black widow spider. Where there is surplus, nature wants it eaten. A garden is a concentration of nutrition in defiance of natural dispersity. Caging my tomatoes, propping the peppers, fertilizing, watering, and protecting is most certainly NOT getting back to nature.
I have created a salad bar for all those clever, sneaky, or brave enough to enter. And it is “all you can eat.”
Two years my boys and I have worked. We have raised beds, conditioned soil, and fenced. I have even built shade against the scorching sun. But still, rats have found their way. After such toil, I am in no mood for mercy.
Their rapaciousness is remarkable. In a night, they can destroy every ripe pepper and tomato among 40 or so plants. They only eat about a third of a pepper before moving on. They do the same to tomatoes. After a few nights, there is nothing left but rotting remnants and my anger.
My Christianity is strained. I am not supposed to HATE anything. All God’s creatures have their place, do they not?
Yes, they do. Yursinia pestis and norovirus also have their place. But I don’t really need to share my place with theirs voluntarily.
I am uneasy with the Manichean philosophy of The Force or the Greek gods, but I agree that hate leads to the Dark Side.
Sith I am becoming. Darcus Victorus est.
I want an Anakin light saber massacre. I want Achillean revenge.
I want their little corpses strewn across the Troad, rotting in the sun, disfavored by the Gods and trampled by the Achaeans. May Apollo curse their progeny with snakes and owls.
I want their skulls on stakes and arranged in heathen alters lit by smoking fires of their own fat. When PBR Street-gang floats by Chef will say, “Fuggin’ A, man, they had it coming.”
I want to hear Ahab’s horrible leg pacing night and day, ever watchful on my behalf, ready to free Queequeg and his deadly harpoon.
My weapon of choice is the standard wooden Victor snap-trap. They are lethal. But only as lethal as a rat is naive.
Rats are clever. They avoid new things in the garden and any strange bait. Black plastic traps once worked but now they are routinely sprung with no corpse their jaws. I can only imagine a be-muscled brown rat doing three sets of bench press with one.
The Victor trap is different. They are hair-trigger unsafe and over-engineered. Nothing smaller than a human hand will survive its blow, probably nothing smaller than my forearm. They make a satisfyingly loud, “thwack” when triggered.
When I bought them, the girl at Ace snarked, “hmmm…those look gentle.” I said nothing. Middle aged men like me owe no explanations to anyone but God and our wives. Especially about our gardens. I only smiled. It made her uncomfortable, I could tell. But I have that effect on women anyway.
Of course, I will not use poison baits. That could kill a predator and they are allies. I also think it unsporting and not violent enough to appease my Dark Side.
The most recent rat, a boss for sure, went for a blueberry. The Texas heat and maggots took him back to the earth in two days. He fertilized some eggplants upon which he was nibbling.
The boss rat’s demise ended the rapine for now. However, somewhere in my yard or nearby, their leaders are gathering, plotting and waiting. I feel their malign presence.
This weekend I shall remove the scorched and spent tomato plants (determinate types), harvest peppers (mostly HOT ones because the stupid nursery mislabeled a flat of jalapenos as bell peppers!) and start the fall crop, which we can do in Texas assuming we don’t have a late heatwave, early freeze, hurricane, rat attack, etc.
A day of hot, hard work in a garden nourishes the soul, focuses the mind, and kicks your ass.
Lord, let my Achillean anger pass. At least until I need it again.
Vale, agricolae!
UPDATE: Darcus Victorus duo mures magnos occidit!