Who killed the rock chuck?

Linda and I were walking around the "wild" side of our backyard, and stumbled across the dried corpse of the fat little rockchuck that had been eating my garden.

"Did you do this?" I asked our cat, Panga, who was following us around.

She clammed up. 'You can't prove nuthin', her body language said. 'But you best not mess with me....'

I wonder if my neighbors poisoned the critter. Our far corner is a four corners, and I'm sure all of us were being victimized by the little rodent.

Still, I could help but feel sorry for it.

We were walking around, trying the envision the paths, and the gardening islands between, that we wanted to create. I've been sort of working on it, little by little, but it will probably never really be finished unless I hire some help.

I might do that. Get a couple of dump truck loads of dirt, and create the paths. Start creating the gardening sections.

I've made one decision, for sure. The "wild" half is going to consist of "native" plants, only.

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Meanwhile, the following was written a couple days before:


I've discovered I'm not the gardener my Mom was.

Well, of course not. Not even close.

But I'm beginning to wonder if I inherited any of her green thumb at all.

I basically want to install the plants and be done. But you really need to do followup. Certain plants just never do well for me, even plants that everyone else seems to be able to do. Phlox and lupines always crap out on me.

Anyway, I had decided to not do a lot of moving around or subdividing of plants this year. I wanted to let all of them establish themselves, and then see which ones do the best and in what areas of the garden, and then subdivide.

I weeded the entire garden today, in which I usually also turn up all the soil while I'm at it. I finally got around to actually fertilizing the plants (may be why I don't have a green thumb, eh?) I'm going to put some time release pellets around the plants tomorrow, since we still have a couple months of growing season left.

I was driving by a neighbor and asked her if I could dig up a couple of her plants, assuring her that she wouldn't notice the gap. She agreed, so I went by this afternoon and did the deed.

I wonder if people ever steal plants from other gardens. I'm not normally a thief, but I do covet some of the luscious spreads I see. Surely, they wouldn't miss one little itty bitty plant?