The Groundhog(s)

Gardeners often ask questions of a farmer, thinking we must have surely solved all the home garden troubles they encounter, since we, from their perspective, can grow an even BIGGER garden. It turns out, though, that most of the gardener troubles seem to be unrelated to farming: we farmers are really good at organizing thousands of plants in a field, but we really don't know much about growing a few plants behind a house. I remember when I sold at farmers markets, with a big table of tomatoes laid out, people would often ask about squirrels eating their tomatoes at home, and did I have that problem, and what did I do about the squirrels? Well, the farm is actually comprised of...fields. So, there are no trees around, and, sorry, no squirrels.

One perennial frustration we DO share though, is protecting our lettuce from all the animals that would rather eat it. Colloquially, this would be bunnies. But although there are bunnies around here, it turns out they are largely benign—and very cute. I've never actually seen one eating lettuce, or any other crop (not even carrots). Deer are the major pest here, so much so that we all spend thousands of dollars and tear our hair out anyway trying to keep the deer out of the farm, so good are they at finding the one little hole or gap in the fence. They LOVE lettuce and are quite happy to take a little bit of lettuce every night until we farmers figure out how they're getting in. I've attempted to chase deer out of the fence and watched them enter a small patch of tall grass with no escape... but, after driving through the grassy patch to flush them out, discovered that they have positively disappeared. This year, though, the fence has been 100% all season—no deer in the early lettuce—and I thought I had it made.

I was wrong. This year, seeing the tasty buffet before them with nary a deer in sight, the groundhogs moved in. This is is a first! Groundhogs live all around here but I've never had trouble with them in the lettuce. In the greenhouse this year, many early lettuce transplants had already been munched down in their trays (no mice in mousetraps, no larger rodents in their traps, no deer inside the fence...could it have been birds?? I still have no idea what it was, although the eating has stopped), and, since those little plants went in the ground already a little eaten, it took me a minute to figure out what was going on. Every time I looked at the baby plants in the field, they still looked a little eaten... but they had *always* looked a little eaten so I didn't think a lot about it. Eventually though, I admitted that this was new damage.

There is a big groundhog hole near the lettuce patch, but since we'd never seen a ground hog dash towards it as we drove by, we assumed it was old and abandoned. Just to be sure, I kicked the excavated dirt back into the burrow to close it up. And, well, the next day it was open again. Somebody was living there. I got out the groundhog trap, and baited it with lettuce—the very lettuce they had been eating—and got lucky this first time. It only took the better part of an afternoon to catch it. Yet, the next day, there was fresh damage. I again went to kick in the dirt to close up the hole, and see if it would re-open, and this time, a groundhog was looking back at me from inside the hole, taunting me with its comical rodent buck teeth! I met its gaze and taunted it back, ineffectively. I reset the trap. Eventually I caught that groundhog, and then over the next couple weeks, two more out of the same hole. Now, finally, the hole has stayed closed after being covered with dirt: nobody home.

I've been planning to write this story to you for the Week 2 newsletter for a little while now. I planned a triumphant story of farmer besting the perennial foe. This evening, however, I walked down the aisle in the lettuce thinking about what to write and admiring the bushy new growth in a part of the row far from that groundhog hole—and then, WAIT, why is that one freshly eaten?? No deer prints. It must be a small animal, and I considered for a minute the bunnies, but then decided to take a look around the fenceline near that section of eaten lettuce, knowing that groundhogs rarely travel far from their burrow to dine. Sure enough, there was freshly dug dirt, standing out light brown against the green grass, and a hole down into the earth.

I reset the trap.