Another Calamity!

When I was a kid I used to think the cartoons about farmers trying to keep crows, rabbits and other wisecracking miscreants out of their fields were pretty funny. Oh, look at that, the farmer's going to use dynamite to try to get rid of the rabbit, and why, because he nibbles a few leaves?

Not so funny any more.

Our garden's been getting into the swing of things lately. We'd planted a six-foot row of lettuce from seed, and though the lettuce plants weren't ready for harvest yet, they were three or four inches high, very numerous, and hinted strongly at a bumper crop of leafy greens in the near future. But something got in the garden and ate all the lettuce. It didn't nibble a few leaves, it didn't eat one or two plants, it ate them all down to the ground. Stumps are all that are left, and I don't know if they'll come back or not.

What would do such a thing? Quail are my first suspects, but I haven't seen any quail in the garden. But we did see one of those little squirrel dudes climbing up and over the fence that was designed to keep him and his kind out. Could one little squirrel devastate the whole row of lettuce? Not without groaning, but maybe if he had all night, and if his friends and family helped out, maybe. Meantime, our dogs are so obsessed with standing on the steps and begging to be let back in they wouldn't notice a hippopotamus in the garden, and the enormous owl that hunted around here for a while seems to have moved on.

I don't know what's going to happen to the little squirrels. I like them - but I also like lettuce. Squirrels beware.