Can You Guess What This Is?

More to the point make a guess as to why it's in my garden? Want to try again? Go on, I'll wait. I'd be surprised if you did guess it actually. It's a black knee high stocking and this is why it's in my garden.

If you read this blog on a regular basis you'll know I have an extensive vegetable garden and I usually manage to produce the bulk of our veggies with quite a bit going to the neighbours and to the free food trolley a few doors up. In fact the biggest problem for the summer vegetable garden is usually not getting overwhelmed by it. This year things are different.

It started when I noticed that the growing centre of my kale plants were being destroyed. It looked like something had been chewing on them and was to say the least annoying because they were still producing tasty leaves. Unable to do anything about this - and as the plants had started to die - I pulled them out. No matter, I thought. The summer crops are coming in with multiple buds on the zucchinis, tomatoes and cucumbers. It'll all be good.

Then I noticed that the centres were being eaten out of all the female zucchini flowers when the buds were about to open. As well the male flowers were disappearing before they even got as far as opening. What to do? I remembered the knee high stockings I had bought to provide protective slings for the rockmelons (cantaloupes to those in other parts of the world) that I have been training up the fence. W\hat if I covered any close to opening zucchini buds with them - and maybe I could cover up the forming fruits, too. Could it work? It did.

So every night I go out and tuck in any female zucchini buds on the verge of opening and put covers over any fruit already forming. So far so good and the only problem is - apart from needing an ever increasing number of stockings - that I have to go out in the morning early enough for the bees to do their work. It's rather lovely to gently pull the stocking off a flower and see it spring open into a glorious golden blossom.

Sadly though, no matter how lovely the flowers may be, with no male flowers, however industrious the bees, it looked as though zucchinis were going to be off this year's menu. Then I had a flash of inspiration. I have a large patch of butternut squash which are blooming madly. They are quite different in many ways but they are the same family of plants, so, since I'm not intending to save zucchini seed I wondered if they would be similar enough to fertilise the zucchini and give me fruit?  Much to my relief they were.

So there's the tale of my zucchinis trials and if you'll excuse me now I'm off to put them to bed for the night.

Oh I nearly forgot. I've finally seen the culprit. This morning I went out a little earlier than usual and caught sight of a small black creature, almost certainly a rodent of some sort, about to investigate the ripening tomatoes. It scurried off so I'm not sure whether it's a young rat - seems unlikely because it's been helping itself for some weeks and it would have been full grown by now - or a large mouse. It certainly doesn't look like any animal native to this area. Now all I have do is to work out some way to rid myself of it. Any suggestions gratefully received.