SAVAGE GARDEN: self-defense

Yay, Heath Ledger is finally ripe! I got my first tomatoes from my garden this week. Well, they’re not really my first tomatoes, because my first ones vanished mysteriously, but I’m glad that I’ve started to see delicious results, because the Savage Garden has been a giant pain in the ass lately.

After arguing about it for a couple of months, disagreements with my landlord finally reached a head (he thinks my plants are unsightly, I think he can’t point to anywhere in my lease that says I can’t keep plants on the front porch), and when it came down to “get them off the front porch or I’ll throw them away,” I decided not to risk it and put them in the backyard. Technically, my boyfriend moved them to the backyard while I was at work one day, because he could tell that I was super pissed about it and he is nice.

The backyard has jillions of mosquitos because the neighbor has a bunch of empty pots with stagnant water, and there’s less light than there was in the front, but the garden is doing pretty well (although my legs are not).

Except! Something is stealing my veggies!

I thought it must be a human for a while (all the other apartments in my building have access to the backyard), because it never just takes a bite and leaves the rest; it’s like there’s an almost-ripe tomato there one day and then the next day I go out to pick it and it’s gone. And if you look above, the stem of the ghost eggplant is cut pretty cleanly.

But I saw a squirrel doing something fishy with one of my tomato plants one day, so I guess maybe squirrels are smarter than I give them credit for. Or the backyard is infested with gnomes, I don’t know.

I took my cayenne pepper shaker and shook it on the buckets and made a little protective pepper perimeter around everything, sneezing the whole time. I haven’t had anything stolen since then, but I’m not sure whether to chalk that up to the pepper or to the fact that all the low-hanging tomatoes are gone or to the fact that I’m super careful to pick them as soon as they get close to ripe now.

Another thing: when I was making the planters, I had one set of buckets that was slightly smaller than the others. I put a tomato plant in it anyway, and the roots are already showing at the surface, which means that the plant has completely filled the space. So FYI, tomatoes do indeed need a full 5-gallon bucket.