The garden has finally, and definitively, tooken.

We have been eating fresh greens every day for about three weeks, which is great.

The first head appeared in the broccoli overnight. I have six plants in the box, two big ones and two tiny ones indoors. I imagine I’ll rotate these to the outdoors as we harvest.

Tomato cuttings all propagated successfully. Next week I will be shifting all the tomatoes outdoors and see if I need to buy more plants this year or not. I didn’t do any pruning on the two I kept from last year until it was clearly too late to be of much good, and the really hardy one, a beefsteak plant, now has some sort of mildew. The cherry plant is fighting the yards and yards of stem it has to push juice through and seems unlikely to last much longer.

Potatoes all sprouted, onions are fine, and the carrot seedlings are mostly OK, save for some residual critter-diggins issues. That crittur, as yet unidentified, is the proximate cause of this post.

I laid in some corn, waaay too early, and it was unclear to me that the seedlings would survive the snow and such we went through in April. As it happened, the seedlings mostly did fine with the snow, but the continued low temperatures more or less arrested all growth and beginning about three weeks ago, they began to die back. That was fine with me, I just shifted the runty sprouts about until I had consolidated some new planting room and added potatoes.

About a week after I noticed the critter diggins in the carrots, I noticed that the animal had started digging in next to each corn seedling as well. At first, I just packed the soil in, thinking that since the seed had sprouted there was no decent food for tiny fellas.

In the last week, I have come home to see two or three of these tender stalks literally nipped at the base of the plant. The combination of digging and nibbled stalks makes me think it’s either rats or squirrels. I haven’t seen a rat around the house for a couple years, but I see several small, generally cheerful, squirrels every day.

I’m still cogitating, but based on this weeks loss rate, I will not have any mature plants from this run at corn. I gather I can replant now and still get a crop, which is fine, but I’ll need to resolve the problem. I suppose I wouldn’t be as irritated if the crittur was actually eating the stalk, but nooo! It’s nip and nibble and off to the next stalk!