Pest (out of) Control

I went to check on the garden last night and found that, while the wire grid is still intact (guess they're not alien rabbits after all), the little fiends have shifted their attention to the sprouts. They wrought devastation amongst the corn seedlings, and I was reminded of Pa Ingall's bad pun in whichever of the Little House books it was where they were attacked by crows:

"One for the gopher,
Two for the gopher,
Three for the gopher,
Four don't go-fur"

Not that I would recognize a gopher if it started gnawing on my foot, but something out there has an elevated sense of entitlement as regards my veg. We may have to resort to a chicken wire cover or something.

I did give a passing thought to spraying everything in the garden with something like Bitter Apple, but a couple of things stopped me. First, the dogs and cats all pretty much ignore the fact that I've sprayed something desirable with bitter apple - if it doesn't deter them, why would it deter gophers or rabbits or squirrels or whatever? Second, the idea of Bitter apple is to make things unpalatable, so maybe I don't really want it sprayed on plants that are growing my food.

I also found that in my frenzy over the weekend to get everything labeled, I'd apparently mis-identified romaine lettuce (at least, that's what I think it is now) as carrots. The carrots have started making an appearance in a couple of squares I don't actually recall planting. Fortunately, I hadn't got round to putting anything (else) in them yet. And since on Sunday, I planted at least one more square of carrots, I suspect we're now well stocked.

We've got the sprinkler system revved back up for the summer, at least sort of. It's emitting water all right - unfortunately in some zones, the emission is in the form of a bubbling pond that floods the driveway, rather than anything sprinkle-like. I think we have at least 2 more heads to repair - and I really hope that's all that's wrong with the one by the driveway - that we didn't puncture the supply line when putting in solar landscape lights on spikes. I have the whole system turned off for now - until we get the two heads replaced and aren't in danger of the $900 water bill we got once last year when we had some similarly profligate, but undetected leak.

But you know what? It's Spring! And the "big temperature drop" forecast for this week is into the 60s. Finally!