Last year I let a groundhog eat almost everything in the garden beds and pots scattered around my backyard. Not all at once. It ate my garden bit by bit, leaving some things standing next to plants that got razed, as if to fool me into overlooking the mounting damage. The tactic worked, until he began doubling back around the circuit, picking off crops he had left on his first pass and those that had grown back. Still, I was slow to act because I had occasionally seen a groundhog near my garden in the summer of 2018, and didn’t lose much at all. Over the course of the summer of 2019, the groundhog ate almost everything including parsley, kale, cabbage, collards, chard, peas, beans, summer squash, winter squash, watermelon, okra, lettuce, spinach, potato plants, zinnias and tomatoes.
What pushed me to put an end to it was catching him in the act of climbing a couple of feet up a tomato stake, snatching a green tomato, and bounding into the woods with it clenched in his teeth. I borrowed three successively largely traps before I managed to catch him. I was told that groundhogs are fools for cantaloupe, but it took a fruit salad of cantaloupe, apples and bananas to catch my gourmet marauder. I released him in a park about half a mile away, which I later learned was probably not far enough. He hasn’t come back yet, but this year, I’ll act on the first sign that he or she or any others of their ilk are taking a fancy to my garden.
The few things that the groundhog did not touch included basil, oregano, lemongrass, peppers and the tomatoes he couldn’t reach.
One bonus was that my bumper crop of lemongrass and hot peppers got me thinking about what to do with that, and the answer was fabulous Thai curry paste (a puree of lemongrass, shallots, chili peppers, ginger, garlic, turmeric, cumin and lime zest).
