Garden On, Vashon

I wasn’t going to blog this week—my byline is already all over this week’s Beachcomber in the “Home & Garden” section (in the March 10 issue, pages 15-27, plus a delightful musing on making dirt by Debbie Butler on page 7).

But reader, I need to commiserate with you. I need your insight, your tips, your fellow tales of woe. Because in my garden, it’s Rocky 3, Karen ZERO.

My new kitchen garden, as some of you know, has been under development for months. First went in the four triangle beds last fall. Then in went the cover crop. Then we built a new rubble wall, 30 feet long and 4 feet tall, to prop up its boundary slope . In front of that went a new flower border to edge this potager.

You can imagine my dreams of edible gorgeousness: rainbow chard and raspberries, pea towers fronted by massive purple cabbages, spiky artichokes posing like living sculpture in front of a wall painted orange.

Now imagine my dismay when, one morning, I found my dreams turned like tossed salad. The cover crops of grass, vetch, pea & clover had been pulled and flung across two of the triangle beds. Six-inch holes were pawed into the dark humus. 

I couldn’t figure out which varmint to blame, because I’ve seen both deer and raccoon tracks in the soil. But I knew that raccoons have raided my husband’s birdseed on the other side of the house: we’ve had staring contests with them through his window. And my compost pile has been dumpster-dived any number of times, even though I’ve thrown a weighted tarp over it. THAT’s not the crows.

So, I tried to net my triangle beds against the raiders (see “A much-considered mess” posted Dec. 30, 2009). When that failed, I took Ken Miller’s advice: put in a deer fence.

I bought 1″ metal conduit poles, stabbed them 30″ into the ground and spray-painted them black to make them invisible against the dark forest. I bought an endless roll of 7.5′ deer fencing—the kind with 2″ cells—and wrestled it onto the poles, holding it with zip-ties that came either from my pocket, or off the ground where they’d fallen.

And because a web site on deer fencing warned that deer could crawl, I added skirting all along the bottom, burying it under sods, wiring it to the top course of the rubble wall, or  stiffening it with a stick or heavy-gauge wire painstakingly woven in and out, in and out, of every couple 2″ cells (by then, I’d run out of zip-ties).

We made rustic gates. We made temporary gates. We closed off a breezeway we use constantly, opting instead to “go through the garage.”

And keeping in mind the raccoons, I fastened fencing to pole-tops with fragile “break-away” rubber-bands, thinking that the raccoon’s weight would break the rubber-bands and the fence would flop backwards, throwing Rocky back where he came from.

Finally, yesterday, at 4:30pm, all was finished. I had my gloat and my husband’s applause, and in a moment of hubris, I stood our empty-but-still-fragrant compost pail right in the middle of the most frequently hit triangle bed, and then thumbed my nose in Rocky’s supposed direction. Just TRY to get THIS, I was thinking.

Next morning, I woke to find the pail on its side, scraped clean, next to a new 6″ deep hole.

And I do believe, for the first time in my life, I felt MURDEROUS INTENT.

So readers: I am sure you too have your own Coon Tales to share. As Joe Yarkin, Maury island market farmer, said at the Food Summit, “There’s more raccoons on this island than people.”

I have visions that, unless something is done, when I plant my seedlings out they will end up as Scattered Remains across my garden beds, savaged by You-Know-Who. Readers, I need your War Stories. I need your BATTLE PLANS.

What I’m NOT going to do, is to relocate the food source to OUTSIDE the fence. I had a friend, once, who decided to feed the coons instead of fight them. Whenever I visited him, his basement picture window would be lined with raccoons, up on their fat haunches, scraping at the windows until he threw out more dog food. 

So readers: what’s YOUR solution to a raccoon problem? Send me your stories either as a comment here, or to karendale@centurytel.net. I’ll collect and post them sometime this spring.