Again with the garden

Heliotrope: Too poison for rodents, too textured for
slugs, and still it smells lovely in the evenings

Remember a couple of months ago I wrote about the garden I was planting this year and how I was trying to stop putting things off?  (here)  Since writing that in early May, the weather has warmed (maybe a little too warm) and summer has come.   All my little windowsill seedlings are long since gone from my windowsills and sent out to the garden to take their chances with the uncertain world outside.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the world outside has not been very gentle with them.  The very first week some kind of animal (chipmunks or rabbits, probably, I've seen both around from time to time) decided to eat all my broken plate 4 o'clock seedlings, all my moppy white snowdrift marigolds, 11 out of 12 of my summer berries scabiosa, and 11 out of 16 of my 2 types of zinnias.  It was a massacre out there, no doubt about it.

After the first strike, I sprayed liberally with Havaheart Deer-off (promising to repel deer and rodents, not, I should note, purchased because I was feeling like "having a heart" at that moment, because I really wasn't. Not at all.).  Deer-off, all promises aside, didn't seem to do much at first and the carnage continued, but eventually either the rodents got sick of Deer-off flavored seedlings or they found better things to destroy somewhere else.  At any rate, the 1 remaining scabiosa and the 5 surviving zinnias still live, so at least that's something.

It was depressing and maddening and not at all what I planned to happen.  That sort of thing seems to be happening a lot to me lately (Hi there, cancer, did you hear me say that? Yes, I meant you.).

After I got done screaming (figuratively, not literally), I ended up plunking more dirt in some seed trays and planting the remaining 4 o'clock seeds and some lunaria seeds that I had gotten as a freebie a few years ago (it was too late in the game to replant scabiosa or start again with giant marigolds).  I then went to the garden center and purchased some thick, healthy vanilla marigold seedlings (kind of like the snowdrift ones, but not as mopsy) and some heliotrope that I'd never heard of before.  I sprayed them 3 or 4 days in a row with Deer-off because by then it was like a talisman for me.  Also because I was already psychotically dousing the zinnias and that poor lonely scabiosa with it daily, so it wasn't much effort to get the other plants while I was at it.  And I laughed with evil glee when I read that heliotrope is poison to most animals and they tend to avoid it.

(And yes, I do know that a smarter woman would have probably skipped the marigolds and 4 o'clocks entirely instead of going for exactly the same darn things that got devoured last time.  All I can say is I wanted them so badly that I thought I might as well give it one more shot before giving up their ghost.  Besides, how much did I really have to lose at that point anyway?)

For reasons I can't explain, the rodents never even tried to eat the new marigolds and things seemed to be turning out safe enough for the new 4 o'clocks and lunaria (I'd like to thank Deer-off, but since it didn't save things much the first time I'm not really convinced it suddenly upped its usefullness now, but one can hope).  That was until I found out that slugs really, really like lunaria.  And vanilla marigolds. And also the purple nicotiana that I had previously thought was safe since it seemed to be of no interest to the rodents.

Those stupid slugs look relatively small and not very fast or smart, but, especially in large numbers, they can take down a ton of stuff in very little time.  My lunaria were mostly leafless, my marigold buds were half gone (not half the buds, half of each bud, which makes the blossoms look lopsided, nasty, and very obviously slug bitten), my nicotiana looked like Swiss cheese and never got any bigger because every time it made one small bit of progress, the slugs made two.

And again I was depressed and dismayed and kind of ticked off that no matter what I did, half of everything seemed to be failing and my stupid, beautiful garden plans were rapidly spinning into nothing more than a tasty treat for an ever increasing army of rodents and slugs.

But then I thought about these:

The crazy half-double petunias (or maybe double petunias, they look more double to me) that I'd never gotten around to planting last year and was determined not to put off again this year were blooming.  And no one was eating them. And they were making me happy and unreasonably proud.

So, after screaming and stomping my feet and shaking my fists didn't scare away the slugs (the neighbors are probably a different story...), I turned into slug hunter.  I bent over the garden in the mornings and again in the evenings, picking off the white slugs, picking off the orange-brown slugs, digging holes to sink in cut open soda bottles filled with beer (I'm told slugs like beer and the yeast smell lures them, if not maybe free beer will at least win back the neighbors).  Finally it looks like the slug population is dwindling.  My plants are starting to grow faster than the slugs can take them down and my slug hunting isn't turning up that many of the nasty slimy things anymore.  There are, of course, plenty more slugs in the world, but for now I seem to have the upper hand.

So now I have this:

And I have hope that the various remains of my poor ravaged garden will finally recover and grow and maybe, eventually, have more blossoms for me.

And, because metaphors are almost as much fun for me as imagining rodents grimacing and running off making gagging noises after eating Deer-off drenched 4 o'clocks, I'm sure you can see what I'm reading into this.  Plans getting thrown off over and over and over again; dealing with one problem (rodents, stage III) only to have to jump right back in with the next problem (slugs, stage IV); trying to keep one step ahead; and very consciously doing what I can to try and move past the setbacks.  And, hey, at this moment I'm winning on both fronts so that's something good.

Plus, for what it's worth (for those of you who read the first garden post), so far nothing at all seems to be bothering my morning glories.  No blooms yet, but they're vining all over the place and pretty morning flowers shouldn't be that far away now.