Squirrel Season 2015

Nanny called yesterday and said, "The squirrels are getting more tomatoes than you and me put together.  I saw one run out of the garden with a tomato in his mouth."

It just so happens that The Nephew is home from the boat, so I said to Nanny, "You tell The Nephew his assignment for tomorrow is to go squirrel hunting!"

Later that afternoon, I went down to start the sprinkler in the garden.  The grass and morning glories are thriving; the vegetables, not so much.  The July heat is atrocious.  Some of the vegetables are digging it, but not the green beans and butterbeans.  They don't seem to be dying, exactly, but they do seem unwilling to work in this heat.  I'm going to try to keep them from getting lost in the grass long enough to see if they perk up and go to town when the weather cools off. 

I don't much like these Mascotte beans.  This is the second year I've tried them.  Last year's TGF (Total Garden Failure) didn't give them a fair shake, so I planted them again this spring.  I like the idea of the beans growing in the top of the plant, where they're not such a pain to pick.  The first planting sprouted sparsely, and I had to re-plant a couple of times to get a decent stand.  Then the monsoons came, and drowned one whole corner the garden.  I replanted that corner AGAIN when the ground dried.  They came up fairly well, but now they are gone.  I don't know where they went.  The original beans that didn't get too wet grew nicely for a while, then became sort of stunted-looking, but I started seeing tiny green beans hanging up in the tops of the plants and thought they were about to crank up.  I like to pick my beans when they're about as big around as a drinking straw, so I waited and watched for them to get bigger.  And I never saw many eating-sized beans.  I picked everything worth picking last night, and ended up with a cereal bowl of green beans.   A rabbit may be helping me harvest them.

I went back to the garden this afternoon to do more watering.  As I went down Nanny's driveway, I heard a gunshot, and looked around, and spotted The Nephew shooting up into the trees at the edge of the hay field in front of Nanny's house.  Don't expect me to feel even a twinge of guilt for pronouncing sentence on those squirrels.