visitors

Back in the day, when spring was surging, I would go on a field walk every morning, just to see what kind of visitors I was getting. I knew exactly when the cucumber beetles showed up on the tomatillos – they were slow and stupid in the cool hours after night, and I would pick them off with ease. I knew where the rabbits were coming under the fence, and what they liked to eat.

These days, my hours are irregular, and I get surprised easily. I didn’t realize I had cabbage loopers on my red russian kale until they’d munched through the lower quarter of the row. I couldn’t figure out what was pooping in the tomato haus until I randomly caught the neighbors guinea hens in there at dusk a few days ago – they honked in alarm and doddered off down the rows when I closed the door behind me.

The visitors I’m really concerned about are the mice. Up until this point, they’ve been happy to colonize the compost pile outside the garden fence, and I’ve been careful to keep feed out of my greenhouses, and we’ve enjoyed a relatively harmonious detente. But yesterday I caught this absurdly cute bugger while I was stacking pots in the seed starter. He was really too pathetic to smoosh (I relocated him, which is technically illegal) but an obvious harbinger of things to come – as the seasons change, we’re all looking for shelter. I’m going to put off trying to kill them until they actually start eating things I need. Perhaps the detente will stand.

Ditto the black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on my bronze fennel. They are basically my favorite bug in the world. I feel lucky to have like five or so of them. They will probably eat all the fennel by the end of the month. I don’t really care. I didn’t have plans for the fennel. In a life that is so much about production, about the physical objects I bring to the table, to let some of them go is a small, necessary extravagance.