An Iowa Garden

Gardening is man's feeble, and in the end futile, attempt to manage nature; to bring order to a wayward natural world that we really barely understand. It doesn't help when the garden sheperd also has an obsessive personality... take garden paths. The front entry path to our garden had been built with quite a bit of effort and time, and it was a perfectly fine path, but then the moles came. In making flower beds in the woods, I dug out the clay soil and replaced it with loose compost; wonderful for little plants, but I hadn't realized it was like building swimming pools for every mole in the neighborhood... they can plow around in the loose soil like little motorboats, eating the fat worms that proliferate in the rich soil, popping small plants out of the ground like so many corks out of bottles. This damaging intrusion into my perfect garden world is, of course, totally unacceptable, requiring a response; the more complicated and time consuming the plan is, the better... I am the Wile E. Coyote of gardening. Therefore, as I've related before, I've been digging a two foot deep trench around the whole garden, and placing a thick plastic mole barrier in the trench, then filling it back in... I just ran one of these trenches up this path, ripped off the old ground cloth, replaced all the bark on the path, and reset the limestone edging.
Peace has again returned to our garden, but it's an illusion... an uneasy and transient truce with a world of weeds and critters that I'm quite convinced have meetings at night planning their next foray into our little Eden on the hill.