Dang, that sounds like a country song.

It is time to fess up and explain what happened in the Secret Garden. The ugly truth is that I tried to have my first-ever vegetable garden and the stupid groundhog emerged victorious. The wind is officially knocked out of my sails. Groundhog 1, Deb zip. No beans, no chard, no peas, no squash.

I planted my beautiful heirloom beans (which had already yielded a full serving of veg before I even got them out the door). In two days’ time the cheeky rodent–who stands on its haunches in the mornings and mocks me from the field while I yell obscenities from my window–had stripped the stalks bare. Not of beans, mind you, but of the leaves. ALL of them. There were actually a few beans still dangling miserably from what was left of the stalks. Groundhog left them there, kind of an in-your-face taunt lobbed at the humans who had tried and failed (miserably) to trap and relocate the destructive little miscreant. Handsome Chef Boyfriend walked out to check the trap one morning to find the creature sitting on a piece of cantaloupe meant to be bait.

As my great-grandmother Gracie would have said, it aggravates me. Only she would have put the emphasis on the third syllable, like this:  it aggraVATES me. Yessir, that it does. And I want to deal with that dumbass groundhog the way Gracie used to threaten her husband Ed when he misbehaved:  stitch it in a sheet and beat it with an iron skillet. (Only Gracie would have called it an ARN skillet.)

You may be wondering why I have included photos of these gorgeous plants in this post. These are right on the property, planted by people who lived here before me. They are beautiful and alive and I get to look at them every single day. I decided showing you photos of pretty flowering plants would be more entertaining than a picture of dead bean stalks.

I have only a vague plan now for the thriving young tomato plants that are still inside my loft. I am going to try a container garden, like my bloggy friend Katie has done. (She is hugely inspiring.) I am hoping I can put containers somewhere outside, out of reach of the hog. Still hoping beyond hope for Gracie’s tomatoes.

I leave you with a photo of Handsome Chef Boyfriend’s own vegetable garden which he sent me when he arrived home earlier today. Showoff.