Covert Operation

Beans Reach For The Sky

Cindy's green beans have been fading a bit lately, which is a good thing since she has already stuffed the freezer with as many packages of frozen beans as it can handle.

Still, she was surprised as how rapidly some of the plants were fading; many of the leaves seemed to be shriveling as if their roots had been cut off.

That led her to peel back the experimental mylar mulch she had used in that vegetable bed to encourage plant growth, and discovered.... yup, gophers.

She knew that these varmints were gophers instead of the ubiquitous California Ground Squirrels because they had left the tell-tale surface mounds of gophers instead of digging deeper tunnels the way the squirrels do.  

They were able to dig into this raised bed because she had decided not to line the bottom of it with hardware cloth as she had most of the previous beds we had constructed.  So that made it easier for the varmints to tunnel in, and she hadn't noticed because the mylar covered any signs of their covert operation.

So that means a fairly extensive remodel of the two beds is needed to line the beds with hardware cloth and also to amend the soil.

But who knows, maybe the gophers will have softened up the ground below and make it easier to dig it out.

Or maybe we could contract it out to the squirrels.