The 4x8 Plot: Intruders!
The cost of keeping your tomatoes safe
The 4×8 Plot is a series about my first season with a community garden. This is the second installment but you can read part one, about the seed library, here.
We thought, when we started our community garden plot, the process would be as easy as putting the plants in the ground and starting some seeds. My boyfriend and I got back from the nursery at the end of a long day, excited to be done. Then we looked around us. Most of the garden plots had a small—or large—fence encircling it.
I overheard some neighbors talking to each other. Even though I’ve lived in the apartment for over two years, I only know a couple other residents. At the garden, everyone seems to know each other.
“I just can’t have them nibbling on my garden again this year,” one of them said.
“They can get through everything. Jump right over the fences if you don’t build them tall enough.”
Rabbits, I realized. The fences everyone had weren’t an aesthetic statement—they were to keep the bunnies out.
My boyfriend and I had just spent $35 on plants and compost and now I imagined them being nibbled, our peppers popped off the plants, the tomatoes squished by sharp teeth. It was Sunday and with both of us working, could we really chance an entire week of our new plants being left unattended? “We’ve got to go to the hardware store,” I said.
Another trip then to buy rabbit proof wire and stakes to hold it. We spent twenty minutes in the garden fence aisle, trying to decide the merits of a two-foot versus three-foot fence, whether the panels of one were so big an enterprising rabbit could slip right through it.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, easily the most famous rabbit besides the Easter Bunny (who, while recognizable, I can’t name a single story or myth attached to him besides being the bearer of chocolate shaped like eggs and carrots).
As a child, I’d been on Peter’s side as he disobeyed his mother, went into Mr. McGregor’s garden (where Peter’s father had been caught and baked into a pie—these stories are dark!), and ate up all his lettuces and French beans. Live long enough, I suppose, and you become a Mr. McGregor.
The wire fence to keep the rabbits out cost twice as much as what we’d spent on the food we were growing. “We can use it again next year,” I told my boyfriend, the same way everyone assures bridesmaids they can definitely rewear the matching satin gowns they bought.
It was a headache to install. My back had given out and so I mostly stood there, holding the wire roll, while my boyfriend did the work of putting it in. While I was there, I pulled a few weeds that had popped up and went to throw them in the community compost bin. Right there, next to a lavender plant, was a baby rabbit. We looked at each other, him wondering whether to run to safety, me reflecting on the fact that I’d just spent almost $100 to keep out an adorable creature the size of my fist.
My little nemesis was just waiting for me to turn my back, lower my guard, and snatch up the tender leaves of my pepper plants. My cherry tomatoes! My butter lettuce! My French beans! Rabbits, I learned while researching my fuzzy enemies, often preferred to sample a bite or two of many plants rather than eating just one. They weren’t even thieves; they were vandals.
Not today, rabbit!
In the weeks since we put the fence up, I’ve seen a few rabbits scamper out of neighboring plots—ones who used the larger wire panels which are, it turns out, too big to be rabbit proof—and often see them in the grass nearby, waiting for the gardeners to leave. As crepuscular species who operate at dusk and dawn, they showed up just as most of us were waking up or going to bed. Without us there, they probably danced on the pumpkin vines, feasted on the lettuce, gorged themselves on raspberries.
But not in my garden.
Notes:
I’m out of office! Currently I’m at a residency and after almost three days I finally feel rested enough to dive into the book I’m meant to be writing. Once again, I packed an absurd number of books for 11 days but have already have come up with at least six others I’m mad I didn’t bring with me. (How did I not bring a single poetry collection?!)
Before I left, I finished Where Are You Really From, a short story collection by Elaine Hsieh Chou. The incredible cover of this book caught my attention in a bookstore and as soon as I read a few pages I knew I had to pick it up. (The cover reminds me of the film I Saw the TV Glow which was strange and beautiful and one I think about all the time.)
Each of the stories tackle identity in some way: both how we see ourselves and how other see us. But there’s a weirdness to each of them too. A girl working abroad finds out the roommate she’s been assigned to is her doppelgänger. A mail-order bride sent from Taiwan in a shipping box doesn’t want to be a wife. It is incredibly difficult to write a short story that threads the line between strangeness and the everyday without veering too much into one or the other. Hseih Chou finds that balance perfectly. If you read Kate Folk’s story collection Out There (one of my favorites from a previous year) and loved it or feel drawn to books like Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, this will be exactly up your alley.
Until next week,
I hope your fences are strong and too small for your enemies to slip through,
-Tove
P.S. The main image for this post is one I took of the feral rabbits on Whidbey Island—not my garden intruders—but can you imagine if you had to keep these beasts from eating your carrot tops??
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Enjoy your residency!