The Wrath of Gardeners

City people tend to take up gardening in their yards or at their summer houses with a generous attitude toward summer’s bounty, ready to live and let live. The woodchucks want a few zucchini? No problem, there are enough to go around. The rabbits are decimating the lettuce? Get a humane trap and move them elsewhere.

Soon enough, though, they realize it’s not that simple. The animals do not take one or two tomatoes as if they’re in a greenmarket in the Hamptons; they go down the row sampling, so that everything is ruined. Or they uproot and destroy a crop, without eating a thing, in their search for insects and grubs. There is, in fact, a sameness to the stories the gardeners tell: “If they just had taken one head of lettuce, or a few strawberries — but they decimated the whole thing!” After a season of grueling labor and multiple attempts at benign deterrence, the sight of a trashed garden is often the last straw: the moment when a gentle gardener will suddenly go Rambo.

So, you've met my squirrels? Read the rest of this great wrath-of-gardening Times article.

I couldn't bring myself to fire an airgun at the fuckin' squirrels and after they'd notched up $1000 in damage on my patio: Years of Christmas lights eaten through (hey, I'm the eternal optimist... sooner or later they gotta get electrocuted, no?), a hammock devoured, chair cushions destroyed, my ornamental crow (that was my mother's) completely attached and chewed and mangled and ultimately discarded, garden after garden after garden has been just crushed. They've eaten all my labours.

Murder was always on my mind. I would have killed them. I just think it's against the law and I'm all pussy about that shit. Fuckin' squirrels!