Ninety Eight Degrees

It's July.  And it's Hot.  And Tim and I lost patience with ourselves and each other at about 89 degrees.  And then in the mid nineties we both lost patience with the garden and more specifically wildlife in the garden.  The boiling point was 98 degrees.

It's rather annoying to come out in the three mornings out of every week and have to spend 10 minutes cleaning up stuff like this.  If I had the time and the patience, I could fill this blog with the destruction of the past 2 months.  From the robin's next on the front porch (x 3), to the swallow's nest on the garage light.  The deer nipping off blooms here and there.  I could show you plenty of stems without flowers.  9 geranium stems this morning alone.  Geraniums?  I have netting and fencing and electric strung far and wide in various tried and proven booby traps.  We spent a couple of hours in the hot sun today, stringing up a new electric fence around the black eyed susans, and I joyfully baited it with foil squares smeared with peanut butter so she gets it on her wet little nose and not on her insulating fur.  (Tim says I'm vengeful)

The raccoons have been extraordinarily annoying this year.  I sort of cured them of rootin' around in my pots (see above) but I have more pots than rat traps, and it takes at least three per pot to cover all angles.  I am tired of vacuuming potting soil out of the gravel (it lifts the soil and leaves the gravel) and replanting petunias, righting watering cans and rounding up discarded seed potatoes and baby eggplants with tooth marks in them.

The demise of the garden ornaments was sort of the last straw.  And lately we seem to have developed a mysterious genetic flaw in our coon population.  One died of lead poisoning, two seem to have had major heart attacks, and the fourth begged to be relocated far far away.  **Shrug** I don't hold out much hope for any others that might be lurking out there.