Come One, Come All, to My Springtime Backyard Circus

By Jessie Milligan, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

Apr. 8–It’s April, and that means it’s high season for learning how to co-exist with the wildlife and wild weeds in the garden.

My small dog, and, yes, he does fall in the category of “wildlife,” is happily romping and rolling around in green grass and dandelions. Sometimes the dog, neighborhood cat and wild rabbits are all in the yard at the same time. There they are, the bunny peeking out from behind a shrub, the cat stalking around, looking guilty, and the dog rolling in the grass.

It would be a happy, pastoral, kind of lion-lies-down-with-the-lamb scene were it not that the dog is watching and learning from the animals who have not been trained by me.

The other day my dog leaped over the foot-tall fence that surrounds the raised vegetable beds. His particular style of springing resembled a rabbit’s. Or a cat’s.

The dog? I thought I trained him not to jump in the raised vegetable beds. The cat? It presumes that the asparagus is merely a nuisance in its sandbox. The rabbits? They can’t help themselves. They bounce into the beds and nuzzle the parsley.

The cat, in particular, went a little wild after I put a springtime feeding of fish fertilizer on the beds. Her little paws made big holes as she dug and dug, looking for the fish.

The dog apparently had been learning tricks from the other small creatures.

“You are so hanging out with the wrong crowd,” I told the dog.

He went inside and rolled around on the bed, depositing as much pollen as is caninely possible.

I stayed outside and planted lettuce in almost 3-foot-high pots on the premise that bunnies cannot jump that high. Or can they?

I poked tomato cages into one raised bed to create an obstacle for small leaping animals. On another bed I lay a trellis down flat, hoping against hope that the potatoes will grow up and around it. My back yard now resembles a track-and-field obstacle course for the animal kingdom.

The rest of the beds are prepared with organic soil amendments in anticipation of perennials to be added soon. The weeds have greatly appreciated my creating a fresh and fertile spot where they can establish themselves.

I decided to shop for a weed-removing tool one Saturday morning, but that was not to happen. I would like to report I was injured while partaking in an extreme sports event on the previous Friday afternoon. The truth is, I sprained my foot walking to the library.

I went home and watched the weeds grow. I felt my foot swell. Then, I watched the weeds flower. Purchasing the weed tool would have to wait, at least for a while. One of the tenets of organic gardening is putting up with the not-so-perfect. I’ll have to learn to co-exist.

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Jessie Milligan, 817-390-7738 jlmilligan@star-telegram.com

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Copyright (c) 2007, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

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