On February 10th, we had a pretty catastrophic thing happen at the farm.  Over the course of approximately four hours, we received 3.40 inches of rain.  It was a deluge…absolutely torrential.  Admittedly, I did sleep through the majority of it with the exception of about 4 seconds at 4 in the morning when I peeked through my blinds to see rain falling so heavily that the entire world appeared white.

When I got up that Sunday morning, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, the grass was green….and my front yard had washed downhill.  The front yard that we have slaved on ever since the day we moved here.  For any new readers, you may want to take a look back at my posts about the Bermuda grass situation.  In a nutshell, the yard which we had decorated beautifully with a fence, gates, landscape timbers and 15 raised beds was razed flat to the ground because it was infected, YES INFECTED, with Bermuda grass.  After four years of battling the grass, we finally had enough and tore it all out this past September.   For many weeks, we sifted soil by hand to remove any remaining grass and we added countless bags of mulch anywhere that we didn’t want our plants to grow.  I have boiled down the process to a few sentences, but it took many  months of work to get where we are today.  Or at least where we were Saturday, because on Sunday about a quarter of my mulch was gone and my newly seeded wildflower bed was all but washed away.

As I was looking at the damage done, my eyes fell on my arugula/Asian greens seedlings.

Wait.

Where the hell are my seedlings?  I frantically bent down, and performing some immediate Front Yard CSI investigative techniques, I discovered that the greens had been mowed down by a wild rabbit.

Great, so not only did my garden get hit by a flash flood, but now the seedlings that I had been waiting for since January got completely assaulted by a buck-toothed, garden-destroying furball.  It was just too much.  I should also add that I was in the murky depths of a hormonal fog.  So I was on the verge of tears standing in my garden, trying to take in the destruction that lay before me, trying to decide whether to give up, cry, or find some stray dynamite and do the entire thing in.

In the end, I got over it.  Jason vowed never to touch it again, and so far, he hasn’t.  He would love nothing more than covering the entire thing in about 10 inches of mulch and saying to hell with it.  Myself, on the other hand, being the type who is either absolutely insane or loves self-punishment, decided to keep forging ahead and take a clue from Mother Nature.  A good lesson here is to never work against Her.  Bad idea.  This time, I noted where the run-off had been the worst and just worked around it.  Why would I plant or put mulch there if they’re just going to get swept away?  Now I officially have my very own “Horseradish Island”…my way of working with Nature by allowing water to run around my horseradish bed in a natural, teardrop-shaped form rather than trying to keep a 4×10′ rectangle.  I also added some rocks to the upper sides of some of the beds to prevent any further erosion.

I ended up not crying, and not setting off any explosives.  As for the rabbit, two weeks after the flood, Jason called to tell me that a certain little furry enemy of ours was lying dead in the ditch beside our house.  I like to think of it as Mother Nature’s peace offering.

I accept.