I mentioned my previous groundhog posting, that 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 a lot of annuals, and the woodchucks ate everything. The year before, I had six heads of cabbage and a woodchuck ate them all in one night. If I met one, I’d want to beat him senseless with a 2×4, but that’s gross (and difficult), so I bought a live trap. Tony wants to catch them and drive them out to Monocacy Battlefield or Little Bennett State Park. He gets upset when I say I’ll just kill them and save the gas. I’m teasing, and 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 tried to identify him online. 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 a never-before-catalogued species or an alien, and we dropped him off in the state park. Then we got a cute opossum. Most people think they’re ugly, but this one was cute, especially when he played dead. Next, a couple of squirrels and a cat went for the free food. The squirrels and cat did not get to go on 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 his woodchuck, and he said the bullets bounced off it. Finally, he pitchforked it when it cornered him and his dog in the yard. He didn’t feel 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. Tony says we should put cabbage in the graveyard so the woodchucks stay full and don’t have to come back to our house. This year a woodchuck is getting to my broccoli plants by moving the 2x4s that hold the crop cage mesh down. We’ll see what we get next – I’m guessing just rabbits because we’re overrun with them.
