Re: GWL groundhogs, rats and city slickers

**"* <t*@earthlink.net>**

Nature in the garden. I have long been interested in how much killing we 
need to do to grow a decent garden of almost any kind. We kill weeds, slugs, 
snails, aphids, scale and other pestiferous mites and insects; we kill 
gophers and apparently a lot of you kill groundhogs (even though they're 
cute).
  It is satisfying to find out that so many others here also have rat 
problems in their gardens, and yeah, even admitting that you do is, well, 
hardly something many of us would normally be too eager to bring up at the 
next cocktail party (do people still have cocktail parties?).
  When I was a boy every month I used to read, cover to cover, all those 
magazines like Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, & Field and Stream, and there 
were frequently articles on "varmint hunting." The writers told of blasting 
groundhogs, ground squirrels, prairie dogs and crows at distances up to a 
thousand yards with their .222 Swift, or their .22 Hornet varmint rifles. I 
longed to own one of those small caliber hotrod rifles, to have the excuse 
to shoot varmints (no moral dilemma there for an animal loving boy.)
  My brother shot a skunk in his back yard a year or so ago...I wasn't 
pleased to hear this. These days my animal lover side seems to have (mostly) 
won out on my urge to become a great varmint hunter. And the talk of things 
such as "non-indigenous birds" bothers me...too many using this jargon to 
Havahart trap and kill multitudes of English sparrows, starlings, and who 
knows what else. Somehow it reminds me a lot of immigrant bashing.
  Rodney King died last Sunday....and I do wonder, in this less than perfect 
world, in a world where our houses now infringe on so much territory that 
used to be wild habitat for skunks, coons, possums, and even those dreaded 
groundhogs, in our often exceptional but still less than perfect gardens, 
couldn't we somehow (as a goal?) just all try to get along?

But then I must confess, I do keep a BB gun around to shoot at the crows...I 
don't try to actually hit them, just to scare them. All too often when I 
just want to sit out in my quiet backyard, the crows show up and immediately 
start in with that none-too-pleasant racket they make...I do go for the (BB) 
gun. (I resist the urge to shoot at city slickers though.)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rose Marie McGee" <rmnicholsmcgee@comcast.net>
To: "Judy Lowe" <hardbackwryter@yahoo.com>; "Garden Writers -- GWL -- The 
Garden Writers Forum" <gardenwriters@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 9:35 AM
Subject: Re: [GWL] GWL groundhogs, rats and city slickers

> This all reminds me of how while I like nature in my garden...I'm 
> constantly beating it back and not yet done this season. Walnuts and hazel 
> nuts have sprouted everywhere,planted by squirrels. Wild shrubs threaten 
> to take over. We have a neighborhood herd of deer that dine in every 
> garden, raccoon populations are on the rebound and make water gardening 
> nigh impossible. We try to encourage  more songbirds but my dear neighbor 
> feeds crows ever morning and while it's interesting to see the formation 
> as they fly, there numbers seem out of balance. Rats, finally we all 
> admitted we had rats and traced part of the problem to the same neighbor 
> who was feeding raccoons...stopping that really helped. Groups of wild 
> turkeys are seen waddling down the street. They're a non-indigenous bird 
> introduced by the game commission for hunters,. We are involuntarily 
> developing Doug Tallamy's zones but not sure I want to go totally native. 
> Food gardening is my bread and butter and the garden is my
> lab and studio.
> This is not to say there aren't many aspects of this primal tussle I do 
> enjoy such as hearing an owl at night and knowing here is a place where it 
> can live well.
> Rose Marie
> Nichols Garden Nursery
> www.nicholsgardennursery.com
> On Jun 20, 2012, at 8:11 AM, Judy Lowe wrote:
>
>> This groundhog discussion is the most entertaining thread we've had in a 
>> long time! :-)
>>
>>
>> I was especially interested when the subject of rats came up. When I 
>> lived in Boston (Back  Bay area; a block from Symphony Hall), rats were a 
>> huge problem; they were about the size of squirrels. The first years we 
>> lived in our rowhouse, we had no problem with them being destructive to 
>> plants. (I grew everything from roses and shrubs to herbs and tomatoes in 
>> big containers.) But then a rat family (colony?) moved in next door where 
>> the young couple built a foot-high raised wooden platform behind their 
>> rowhouse (over 1870s brick yet), and the rats made a home underneath. The 
>> last two years we were in Boston, they ate everything from seedlings to 
>> clematis blooms. They were somewhat deterred by thorny rosebush prunings 
>> stuck thickly around the edge of the pots.
>>
>> But talking about rats in your garden was always a "yuck" to others, so I 
>> kept quiet about them (most of the time) and listened to suburbanites' 
>> deer tales.
>>
>> As to the city residents moving to the country, I, too, get tickled that 
>> so often they destroy the very things that appealed to them about the 
>> country. When we lived in Tennessee, I disliked the dusk-to-dawn lights 
>> that were always installed by these folks when they moved to our 
>> vicinity. Made it hard to see the stars at night.
>>
>> Judy Lowe
>
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