A Confession

I hate my new neighbors. They are driving me crazy. Over the last few weeks, I have waged a silent war with them. 

Over what, you ask? 

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...

...trespassing

...petty theft

...destruction of private property

Isn't that enough?

I am upset so this may not be making sense. Let me start from the beginning. After we moved in and got over some of the major hurdles of our new home, we started to work around our yard to try to make it our home. 

I picked out a piece of our property to put my vegetable 

garden. As this area was the most unkempt, due to weeds and such, it was the perfect area to redo anyway. Plus it gets lots and lots of sun here. Christian rototilled the area in question for me.

Everything was going great. I got some strawberries back in February. And my brother got us a couple of blueberry bushes. I started a bunch of seeds for tomatoes, summer squash, and basil. 

Now most of the seeds have 

germinated and are almost ready to go into the ground. But then one day, I went out into my garden to find this...

Now, prior to this, I had lost most of my ripe strawberries to pill bugs and earwigs and such. But to come out and find that your plant is completely gone...sheared off at it's base is just mean. The culprit, my new neighbors:

The Gophers

So, every time I found a hole, I filled it in. I would try to collapse as much of the tunnels as I could in the process. I hoped that the little creatures would find it a nuisance to make it's home in my yard.

But it continued to be a nuisance. It made a bypass through my lemon tree. Then next to one of my blueberries. One day, I found a new hole that must have been excavated minutes ago as I had just made a survey of my yard. So, I took a hose and put it down the hole to harass it out of my yard. I sent a ton of water down and finally, it started to back up and I turned the hose off. To my surprise and shock, the little varmint came peeking out of the very hole. It was a bit dazed and apparently half drowned. I didn't know what to do so I grabbed the nearest thing to me, which happened to be a cultivator and brought it down on the thing. It ducked back in to the hole. I decided, that I was going to make an impression on the dreaded thing and started to cave it's tunnel after him so that it would know that my garden is a dangerous place to be and that maybe it should build elsewhere. I caved in almost 3 feet of tunnel (it was easy since the ground underneath was apparently soft and muddy from the water I shot down). But alas, the thing was must still not have recovered from the water and did not get very far, because when I brought the cultivator down on a section of the tunnel, a skewered little gopher came up at the end of my cultivator!

I was so grossed out. I dropped the thing and left. I had to wait for my husband to get home to dispose of the body for me. I was shaken and disturbed. Something had to be done. Because now, I was afraid to go into my own garden. And the little beasts continued to defile my garden undaunted without their little comrade and without skipping a beat. They have sheared off half of two more strawberries. I can't set a trap for them. I haven't the stomach for it. So, this morning, after dropping off Emily to school, we headed for Home Depot to get some poisoned bait for the dreaded creatures. 

To be continued....