This year I grew some beautiful morning glories, moonflowers and black eyed susans using my porch banisters as a trellis. I sized and built the planter trays from scratch, I installed an automatic watering line with each partition havig its own mini sprinkler.

It looks picutreseque cottage core. Vines grow up and around the porch, pretty mixtures of flowers…

I killed so many slugs… so many goddamn ^fuckyouslugs (and beetles, ^{fuck you japanese beetles}) to make it happen…

Grasshoppers liked my lettuce way too much. They can eat the plants outside of the net.

I take photos of the insects, send them to my bird scientist friend, and she tells me if they are beneficial bugs or invasive or bad for the tomatoes. Only if they’re invasive or specifically bad for tomatoes do I squish.

I used to grow vegetables in a garden until the groundhogs showed up. I bought a “humane” box trap, but every time I caught one it would rip out its own claws trying to escape before I could dump the literally bloody critter a few towns over. I have no idea if their claws grow back, probably not. The whole routine was just too depressing so I gave the trap away and had the garden dismantled and plowed under. Now I buy vegetables at the local farmer’s market.

Come to my part of the world. You can’t have an unprotected garden out in the open. Deer will eat it, to the ground. Even “deer resistant” plants. To the ground. And it’s illegal to shoot them outside of a small window of time in the fall. They will destroy a garden far faster than any invertebrate I’ve ever encountered.

Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.

—The Denial of Death

Love the purely geometrical gun, labeled

gun

The pink thing is shooting a poop