I mentioned my woodchuck (groundhog) issue earlier – how they’re huge, eat everyone’s gardens, and nothing can stop them. Last year I tried to grow lettuce, kale, and rainbow chard, along with quite a few flowers. The woodchucks ate everything. The year before I had six heads of cabbage and the woodchuck ate them all in one night. If I could catch one, I’d beat him senseless with a 2×4 or whatever I could find. But that’s gross (and difficult) so I bought a live trap. Tony wants to catch them in the live trap and drive them out to Monocacy Battlefield or Little Bennett State Park. He gets angry when I say I’ll just kill them and save the gas. I’m teasing him though, I don’t care how far he wants to drive them.
I set up the trap and tried apples, lettuce, peaches, fruit with peanut butter, more fruit with honey – nothing worked. Finally we put a head of cabbage in there and caught something I’d never seen before in my life. Unfortunately I did not take a picture of it. I spent hours online trying to identify him – he had reddish-brown fur (darker than a fox and not spikey like a muskrat), paws like a raccoon, and a regular head and tail. He was probably some never-before catalogued species or an alien and we dropped him off in the state park.
Next we got an opossum; most people think they’re ugly but I thought he was kind of cute, especially when he was playing dead. Next a couple squirrels and a cat went for the free food. The squirrels and cat did not get a field trip to the state park. Meanwhile we keep filling the woodchuck holes with gravel, dirt, and rocks, and the woodchuck keeps digging them out.
One of the neighbors tried shooting a woodchuck and he said the bullets bounce off of them. Finally he pitchforked it. Actually, the woodchuck cornered his dog in the yard and he didn’t know what else to do; he didn’t feel too good about it.
Now my other neighbor tells me the woodchuck has a girlfriend over in the cemetery and they’re having a great old time over there. So Tony says we should keep putting cabbage over in the cemetery so that the woodchucks stay full and don’t have to come back to our house. I haven’t quite figured out the logic of that one. Meanwhile the trap has now been decommissioned. The other neighbors have bigger gardens than me, so I may be safe this year — so far so good.
