Mine keeps the volunteer saplings and broadleaf weeds in the planting bed around my deck trimmed back pretty well. He doesn't seem to like the groundcover plants or ferns very well. (No idea what the groundcover is- it has 2-tone green leaves.) Hey, not like I would ever get around to cleaning the bed out. I suppose he is also responsible for the mound of dirt at the back corner of the slab holding the old dog pen my shed sits in- guess I oughta attack that with a shovel before frost season, so the corner of the slab doesn't break off....
Those groundhogs LOVE mulberry leaves. A young one got into the veggie garden once under the fence (since reinforced). What did it eat first? The leaves from the mulberry shoots growing up amidst the daylilies that run along the fence line. (It did not live to see the next sundown.)
Pollan: Nutrition 'Science' Has Hijacked Our Meals -- and Our Health
Like a lot of Americans, my understanding of nature and our relationship to it was shaped by Emerson and Thoreau and Melville and Whitman. When I actually started to garden, I realized all those ideas about the romance of nature were distinctly unhelpful. Thoreau's love of wilderness and worship of the wild really doesn't equip you when the pests come and destroy your crops, when the woodchuck attacks your broccoli.
I got into trouble following their philosophy. I didn't have a fence, for example. I thought a fence was too alienating from the natural world. I got into a war with a woodchuck -- just like Bill Murray in Caddyshack -- until I was defoliating my property and pouring gasoline down a woodchuck burrow. I was like William Westmoreland in Vietnam, willing to destroy the village to save it.
I realized then that the garden was a very interesting place to examine our relationship to the natural world. Traditionally when Americans want to think about nature, we picture the wilderness, we go camping, we go to Yosemite. But nature is happening in our homes, in our gardens, in our lawns, and on our plates.
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