Garden VI: The Thieves

I remember walking out from the car and heading towards the garden. The August sun had made the day hot, and it had been a long day working at mosquito control. I wore my green dickies, a slightly worn white Hanes tagless t-shirt, and my wal-mart 14.99 hiking boots. It had to have been around 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon because I usually got off of work around 3:00. My hair and beard were pretty short then, but I still felt the heat. I had planned on making this trip to the garden a short one. I had one thing on my mind...corn.

In my last post I wrote about how I waited a long, long time to get my tomatoes to grow, ripen, and taste delicious. Well, I waited even longer for the sweet corn. Sweet corn seems to take forever to grow, but once it does, it's worth the wait. The last time I had come to the garden, I peeled back the husk on one of my ears of corn, and saw that the corn would be ready in just a few short days. The night before and all day during work I thought about how wonderful it would be to harvest my very own batch of corn. I thought about all those times I bought corn from roadside vendors and I took it home to husk, boil, douse in a copious amount of butter, and lightly salt it. I dreamt about each bite, and how occasionally the juice would squirt onto my hand or maybe onto my cheek. I smiled to myself when I thought about the corn getting stuck in my teeth, and how I would just chuckle knowing that this time it was MY corn getting wedged in between my chompers.

As I walked to the garden that day, a sight had caught my eye. My garden looked different. Something wasn't right. It looked out of place. My fence, made of posts, and twine, was still in place. My tomato plant was still dominating the back corner of the garden. My zucchini and butternut squash vines were still crawling all over the place. The seven foot tall sun flower was still soaking up all the sunshine rays. Only one thing was missing from this 20' X 20' plot.......my corn. My mind started racing...."what happened?" "How could this be?" " I was just here a few days ago! Everything was fine, the corn looked good." "How could everything have fallen over?" "How could get it trampled like this?" "I don't understand." "AAAAAH, if it was Mario, I am going to be so mad. They warned me about him, coming in and stealing people's vegetables. I'm calling the city of hopkins, and reporting that guy! Oh, I'm calling the mayor. He's got to be able to handle this." "AAAAH, POLICE, POLICE someone has taken my corn!!! My precious, precious corn!!!" Then like a lightening bolt direct from the cloudless sky, I remember some advice someone gave me just about a week earlier. "You better watch that corn, rookie, the raccoons like to steal it. They always seems to get it the night before you are going to pick it. It's like they monitor your corn better than you do." This statement was a direct hit. I looked at the ground and sure enough I could see those little foot prints in the dirt.

In the end, all of my corn had been taken by the raccoons. Sure there were a few empty cobs laying on the ground, and maybe there was still one ear on the broken stalks, but it wasn't edible. By this time, the ear was insect covered, and they were getting a good meal out of it. All of gardening was an experience. I learned a lot that summer. The rest of the time, in my garden, I sprayed it with a homemade animal repellent. The repellent worked, but it was far too late to save my long awaited batch of corn.