Gardening
With Squirrel
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Can you believe it? My third spring
in Etzatlan? And, my third year fighting with a squirrel.
Truth to tell, there might be more
than one, but the one I see seems to have the same face and the same cheeky
attitude. My first year, when the surround of my casita was all dirt, she
burrowed beneath the east corner to build a nest for birthing babies.
Squirrels are cute. Cute when they
are “over there”. When underfoot, I tend to view her as a rodent with longer
hair. Imagine a nest of rodents making comfort under MY house, making more
tunnels, more nests, and, more rodents.
In the interest of rodent control,
ant control, scorpion control and cock roach control, I paved a concrete patio surround.
Mama Squirrel holds a grudge. She frequently stands outside my screen door and chitter-chatters
an uncomplimentary attack on my character.
Last year, after attempting to
burrow beneath my patio, she settled in at the neighbor’s.
This year, to further irritate me,
Squirrel planted corn. She’s not lazy. She prefers my well-maintained pot farm
for her plantings. By “pot farm”, I mean that on and about my wrap-around
patio, I’ve filled a hundred flower pots, and counting, all sizes.
Grain is easy to come by. A huge facility for grinding and
storing corn sits three or four blocks to the west; corn fields to the east and
north. Squirrel fills her cheeks with kernels, high-tails it to my garden, digs
a hole, and spits the seeds and covers them up.
I suspect my flower pots are “storage facilities”. In a
normal dry season, when she needs food, Squirrel digs up the kernels and carries
them to her family.
However, I thwart her carefully laid plots when, with hose
and sprinklers, I make a year-round artificial rainy season. Kernels sprout and
begin to grow. She might plant forty or fifty kernels in one hole. So the
tender baby stalks create a miniature thicket.
By now Squirrel has forgotten which pots she’s planted. And .
. . that Mean Woman, who won’t let her
nest under the house, digs the perfectly tender, juicy, lovely shoots of baby
corn stalks out of the pots and, horrors, throws them in the garden trash.
If she’s paying attention, Squirrel will have noticed another
rival for her corn stash. Yesterday while having a one-sided conversation with
an iguana on the half wall, separating my patio from the yard on the south
side, I noticed a disturbance in my basil pot. My basil grows like a miniature
tree. But I’d recently pruned it. Otherwise, I might not have noticed the
disturbance.
In digging out the squirrel’s stash of corn, the iguana had
uprooted half the basil pot—dirt slung far and wide. It looked like a hound had
been burying a bone. No wonder he looked so sheepish sitting on the wall
eye-balling me while I blathered on. The corn shoots must be delicious to have
diverted Iggy from his usual diet of my hibiscus, canna lilies and roses.
Everything must eat. The rabbits, a pair, thus far, prefer
amaryllis. They like my yard. Perhaps I’m more tolerant of rabbits simply
because they don’t dig holes. They also eat oxalis. Oxalis, whatever its
virtues, is, in my garden, a noxious weed with a network of roots like a
fishnet. I’ve surrendered to its abundance. I no longer attempt to weed it.
Impossible. Rabbits, welcome to oxalis heaven.
Today I found another stash of corn, hidden in a patch of
oxalis surrounding some of my amaryllis. I can either uproot the corn plot or leave it
for the iguana, the rabbits or the squirrel. I give up.
Sondra
Ashton
HDN: Looking
out my back door
March 1,
2018
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