Last time I was explaining how proud I was of myself for figuring out a way to keep the varmints out of my tomato patch. I never had varmints the first two years I grew tomatoes in a home garden. I just stuck some plants in the ground, watered them when they looked wilted, and enjoyed a bounty of fresh tomatoes. It all seemed so easy. Why did the garden store stock so much paraphernalia for gardening when it took so little effort?

I experienced the reality of home gardening in year three when muskrats found my garden and developed a taste for the tomatoes. To make matters worse, the muskrats would gorge themselves on the fermented fruit under the peach and apple trees in my yard. The drunken muskrats would then develop a good case of “fear of nothing” and do just about anything to get to the tomatoes, including the scaling of my chicken wire fence around the garden.

I had to think of something or the boozed-up muskrats were going to destroy my entire garden. Although generally known as a ground hugging animal, the rowdy rodents from the salt marsh behind my house were now adept at scaling a four foot fence.

I designed a roof for my garden made out of chicken wire and secured the fence around the garden with large heavy logs. I tightly connected the chicken wire roof to the chicken wire fence and put a wooden pole in the middle of the garden to support the roof. Now the muskrats were unable to tunnel under, or climb over the fence. My tomatoes were safe.

I enjoyed the fruits of my labor for about two weeks. The plants grew like weeds and I was harvesting four or five tomatoes a day. Even more impressive, the plants were really blossoming in the hot summer weather and were soon covered with tons of fat green tomatoes that would soon mature into a bumper crop. I made plans to learn how to can tomatoes, salsa and pasta sauce and even thought about the need for a second freezer to store all my fresh tomato creations. There was no way I would be able to eat all those tomatoes when they ripened at the same time.

The Day of the Great Undoing dawned hot and extremely muggy. We were in the middle of a heat wave and most of the plants in my garden were showing the stress from the extreme heat ... not including the tomatoes, of course. With some regular watering, the tomatoes were relishing the hot, humid weather and thriving.

There was a chance of thunderstorms pretty much every afternoon but it seemed as though the storms always missed us. The sky would darken and the thunder would rumble in the distance but the storms never made a direct hit on our little neck of the woods ...

God Bless America.

Enjoy!