Caught in a Trap

The cause of all trouble, the root of all sorrow, the dread of every man lies in this one small word - sin. It has crippled the nature of man. It has caused man to be caught in the devil's trap. - Billy Graham

We use an assortment of traps around here in order to catch predators, pests, and vermin.  We realize we're not going to be successful in eliminating every pest, nor would we want to.  There is a natural order of predator and prey.  For the most part this balance is important to the landscape.  For example, killing every single rat snake would eradicate the fear in the henhouse when collecting eggs and you find yourself eyeball to eyeball with a 6 foot snake eating eggs.  These snakes are harmless to humans, but can really scare you!  If you killed them all, your rat problem would be a huge.  

One must learn to pick your battles.  Squirrels, for example.  Playful critters, for sure.  Fun to watch in the yard.  However, the population of these "tree rats" has exploded here lately due to a favorable pecan and acorn crop.  I like having them around.  We do eat the occasional squirrel in a brown gravy.  If meat prices continue to rise, we have plenty of fresh squirrels for supper that are only a .22 long rifle bullet away.

The squirrels have really gotten emboldened lately.  Yesterday after church, one sat on our window sill and watched us eat lunch.  Very rude of the old fellow!  Then, after planting rows of snap beans, lima beans, corn and peas, something was digging up all the seeds!  The deal breaker for me occurred last week.  After planting all of the vegetables, I've gotten in the habit of planting two varieties of Sunflowers on the perimeter of the garden in the cinderblocks the border the picket fence.  I bent over and planted a 30 foot row of sunflowers.  Back breaking work, to be sure.

The next morning, imagine my dismay to see the sunflower seeds all dug up and eaten by our bushy tailed friends.  This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.  I set a small cage trap right on top of the cinderblocks and baited it with (you guessed it) Sunflower seeds.  For three days - nothing.  Then, this morning, our friend's greed got the best of him.  Caught in a trap!

He realized what a pickle he was in.  There was no way out!

No amount of clawing against the cage would save him.  There is no parole from this incarceration.  Justice must be served.

I'll leave it to your imagination about what happened to Mr. Squirrel.  You might say he went on a long vacation from which he won't be returning.  You might say he was sent off to "summer camp."  For those with a soft spot for our furry friends, I'll spare you the macabre details.  I will, however, leave a clue.  This is our cat, Ginger, visiting the prisoner...

Visiting hours at central lockup are now closed.  There will be no more seeds dug up in the garden - at least not by this fellow.

A Garden Pest

This afternoon I picked a couple heads of cabbage and brought them into the kitchen.  Bad idea!  Not bad to bring the cabbage in, as we love cabbage.  It was bad to bring them in without spraying them OFF real good with a hose outside.  The outer green leaves of the heads of cabbage harbored a bunch of snails.   Snails were all over the kitchen counter.  Snails are a bad garden pest at this time of year.

Snails are herbivores and love to eat garden produce.  Cabbage appears to be their favorite.  I took a few pictures of the slow moving garden pest as he sat atop the fence post going into the garden.  I suspect from his vantage point he was scoping out which produce he was going to have for supper!:

Up close, the snail is a strange, alien creature.  They move about (slowly) on a slide of mucous that they make.

He'd better not push his luck, though.  His top speed is 1.3 centimeters per second.  I can catch him.  The 'eater' may become the 'eaten.'  Garden snails are edible, you know.  He doesn't have to worry about me eating him, however.  Speaking of slow...  I'm going to slowly slide off to bed.  I'm tired.

The Resident Toad

While picking okra something caught my eye.  It was moving and startled me at first, but then I looked closer.  It was perhaps the biggest toad I had ever seen.  It was so fat and plump it reminded me of myself after a big Thanksgiving meal.

Toads are a gardener's friend.  They devour insects, slugs and snails.  I read that they can eat up to 10,000 garden pests in a single summer.  By examining this guy's girth, I would say he is well on his way to eating that many or more!  I hope he keeps at it.  There's lots of stuff for him to eat in our garden.

They like moist environments and plenty of cover and the garden certainly has exactly that habitat right now.  I am very thankful for Mr. Toad taking up residence in our garden.  I thought that I would pick him up, thank him, and ask him to invite some more of his toad family to reside in our garden.

He thanked me right back and promptly pee'd all over my hand.  I guess I had that coming!  I immediately thought of the old tale that toads will give you warts.  I set Mr. Toad back down in the garden, watched him clumsily hop away and then I went inside and washed by hands real good.  Actually, toads cannot give you warts.  Warts are caused by a human virus and cannot be transmitted by toads.  Old fellow got a bad reputation.  I did learn that the bumps behind a toad's ears are glands that emit a poison that repel its predators and can irritate human skin.

There's good and bad with everything, I guess.  I think in Mr. Toad's case, the good outweighs the bad.  Long live Mr. Toad (and his friends) that have made Our Maker's Acres Family Farm garden their home.  Bon Appetit, fat toad!

An Epitath For A Rat

One of the reasons that I gave up on having an above-ground compost pile and resorted to trench composting is the rat problem.  We live in the country and are surrounded by woods and fields and so they are everywhere.  I don't want to put out poison as I don't want our chickens getting into it by mistake.  Our two rat-killers (cats) are still too young to put a dent in the rat population, but I see that changing soon.

Aside from just being nasty critters, carrying disease and whatnot, rats are beginning to cause problems in our garden.  We didn't get a single cantaloupe this year.  The rats devoured them all!  You can see below how they ate up this butternut squash before I could harvest it.  Of all things - eating our butternut squash!  Of course you know, this means war...

Although we don't eat the birdhouse gourds, they also fell prey to rats as well.  This birdhouse gourd won't be converted into a birdhouse thanks to those pesky rats. Okay, so enough of this!

I set out 3 predator cage traps of all different sizes in the garden baited with the leftovers of our catfish courtbouillion supper, but caught nothing.  I figured the 'fishy' smell would attract them.  It did not.  I don't give up that easily, however. The next night I baited the traps with some Ol' Roy dog food.  Bingo!  Got Em!  The dog food that Sam Walton fed to his dog, Roy, proved to be the rat's un-doing.

He (or she) looked up at me with begging eyes, hoping that I would show some sympathy or compassion.  Not a chance.  This guy, or some of his family members, have wreaked havoc in the garden this year.  For that crime, he'll pay with his life.

It is hard to get perspective, but this is a big old rat.  He measured 16 inches long from nose to end of tail.

To the victor goes the spoils.  This time, I was the victor and the spoils were that the rat became compost material that is buried beneath the okra rows.  Hopefully, I'll catch many more, eradicating the rat population and giving me free organic fertilizer.  I took off my boutonniere and tossed it in the hole.

I was so moved by the burial of the rat, I wrote a eulogy for him:

Here lies the rat that came out of the woods to eat our butternut squash,

He didn't expect a varmint trap that gave him the kibosh,

I call him 'he,' but I'm not sure if 'he' was a girl or a boy,

His final meal was a delectable treat of dog food named 'Ol Roy.

I'll bait the traps again and again until I catch them all.

For we have more produce coming in from our garden for the fall.

Ashes to ashes, Dust to Dust - the rat gets buried in the ground,

The same fate waits for all the other rats that choose to come around.