Wabid about Wabbits: Gardener's wecipe for insanity
By Steve Brody
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:52
You know the west.
I’m hunting wabbits, of the most wascally kind — wabbit season at the Bwody house.
The neighborhood where I live is overrun with them, Sylvilagus floridanus, or varmint. They outnumber human residents approximately 87 million to 1.
A few of these Eastern cottontails have set up house in our back yard. And why not? After all, my wife and I have made them feel most welcome, putting out a buffet of their favorite things to snack on — that is, our garden.
It is a young warren, something like a dormitory. Exactly how young these rabbits are, I can’t say for sure. I tried to catch one and count its rings, but that didn’t work. Anyway, I think of them as college-age. Like some college students, they’re most active after sundown, and they leave behind a trail of mass destruction (never mind the raisiny dung).
Who knew these garden-variety barbarians had a taste for fancy microgreens? Of course, they turned up their button noses at all the tougher flora — weeds and other plants we could do without — and went right for the tender, electric-green shoots of our vegetables and flowers.
Our Russian Giant sunflowers, for example. Much of the winter, they towered in my daydreams. I saw myself watering and feeding them, talking softly to them, kissing them goodnight, even playing them classical music — I was sure they would love Tchaikovsky —and watching them grow up and up, their seed heads eclipsing my head in size.
Think of my excitement when the time finally came, and the first shoots pushed up, the fat gray-striped seed husks hanging like earrings from green lobes.
And then think of my disappointment when I found them one morning, decapitated, bitten down to the ground.
“I hope you enjoyed them,” I said to myself, “because this means war.”
I thought of digging a moat, stocking it with piranha, stringing up barbed wire, sowing the garden with land mines and perching somewhere with a harpoon gun, waiting for some cotton-tailed Moby Dick to surface from the ivy.
It was not to be. A cooler head — my wife’s — prevailed. Besides, how could I make war on such a cute adversary? Instead, we followed some gardeners’ advice for warding off rabbits. We sprinkled cayenne pepper and strands of wife’s hair around our surviving plants.
It was not Fort Knox, and I was sure I heard rabbity laughter rattling the ivy. I expected a rabbit to saunter out, with one of our carrots in a white-gloved paw, and ask, “Eh, what’s up, doc?”
The next day, what had remained — with a few exceptions — was gone, as gone as if it had never existed.
Obviously, we had to hope for some higher power to lift this plague.
***
It was a neighbor who gave us something to hope for. He told us about a red-tailed hawk that nested in the neighborhood a few years ago. Like an avenging angel, it had swooped down and cured a pestilential outbreak of squirrels.
Now, if only we knew a medicine man — could we find one in the Yellow Pages? For a modest fee, he could go into a deep trance and try to persuade this hawk to save us. Or he could communicate with old Elmer Fudd himself, now living on some “astwal” plane above Albuquerque, who might reveal how he finally got wid of that wascally wabbit.
Until then, we’ll have to suffer on our own.
(The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.)
Talkback on LancasterOnline
Welcome to the new TalkBack on LancasterOnline. Please use the comment box below to share your opinion on this
article. If you would prefer to use the previous TalkBack forums instead, please use this link.
