Author Tells of Being Bitten By the Gardening Bug, Battling Woodchucks - Health - redOrbit

Author Tells of Being Bitten By the Gardening Bug, Battling Woodchucks - Health - redOrbit

Here's a book that appeals to me. I'm going to look it up later on Amazon.com. It's fun to read the commentaries which follow after the formal reviews. Of particular interest to me was the battle with the groundhogs. I think most rural gardeners have had some experience with those cute but destructive furry creatures. Apparently, the author of this book never heard of shooting at them or "having them on a plate" along with the garden vegetables he grew. There was a man I knew a while back who made a great stew of goundhog meat. He had a peculiar and colloquial voice.

"Waaaallll (well), bring 'er in and I'll a skin 'er," he told me once when I'd shot a groundhog.

I hadn't shot at a groundhog again until last year when there was a particularly voracious one who had made a home under a shed just a few feet from the vegetable garden. You can keep on reading because my story has a happy ending. Fat as he was, that groundhog, I took aim and missed, watching while he scurried across the yard and into the woods, never to be seen again. I checked for blood; there was none. Clean miss. Happy ending.