Good-bye, Peas. Hello, Neighbor

Look at those peas (the ones in the squarish peat pots on the front right). They were my last hope.

I put them in the garden.  I used taller toilet paper collars than last time, but to no avail.  The universe is against me.  I don’t know what ate them this time.  Deer?  Geese? (The tomatoes you see in back are doing great.  It it weren't for them, I might give up on gardening forever.)

I went to Home Depot with a broken heart (I really love peas from the garden) and bought plants to replace them: cucumber, sweet red pepper, and basil.  One of the basil plants I grew from seed got eaten a few weeks ago (I think by a goose: there was goose poop in the garden), so I was worried.  I got up at 2:30 a.m., took a flashlight, and armed myself with cayenne pepper.

"Are you looking for something?"

My neighbor across the street was in his driveway talking on his cell phone.  Odd.  "Yeah, the animal that keeps eating my garden."  This is the first time I've ever talked to him.

"You have a garden in your front yard?"  Like he hadn't noticed before.

 So what.  He had a used car lot in his driveway a few months ago.  And he conducts business there at 2:30 a.m.  I sprinkled cayenne pepper on the basil.  "Well, they haven't eaten anything yet tonight," I said.  I went back to bed, he went back to his phone call.  Nice to have met ya, buddy.

Why the Whole World Doesn't Go Organic

1.Compost is stinkin’ slow.

 I started composting last fall in black plastic garbage cans. The man at the garden store said he gets compost out of his compost tumbler every month when the weather is warm.  Great, I thought.  I'll save $150 dollars by buying black garbage cans instead of the tumbler, and roll them around myself, and by spring I'll have compost for my garden.  Well, the garden's been in for a month, my compost has been composting for 6-9 months, and it still isn't ready.  It's supposed to smell sweet and earthy.  It smells like wet dog+rotting corpse+human excrement+cow manure. See that thing on the upper left that looks like a plastic bag?

It's a "degradable" compost bag I used to line the compost caddy under my kitchen sink.  It's not degrading.  None of them are degrading.  If I haven't showered and I'm feeling brave, I take a stick and poke holes in them to get the rotten food out.  Mostly I just shake my fist at the garden store man and shout "WHY ISN'T THIS COMPOST COMPOST YET?"

2.  Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

 I planted my peas last month and found out I have a cutworm problem.  I wanted to be earth friendly, so I put a toad in the garden,

put toilet paper tubes around my plants,

and dug around looking for grubs.  I only found one.  And now I have no pea plants left.  That's right: none.  Apparently the toilet paper tubes weren't tall enough and the toad wasn't hungry.  My organic sources say to work "beneficial nematodes" into the soil in early spring to kill cutworms.  I'll contact Captain Picard and ask him to get me some next time he's in the Gamma Quadrant, but for now, I'm going with Ortho Bug-Geta.  The garden store guy says it's perfectly harmless.  It's banned in California and is harmful to children and pets, so like he said, perfectly harmless.  Regardless, this is war.  Die, cutworms, die!

PS If you are new to organic gardening and are having great success, don't tell me about it unless you want me to hate you.