chipmunk (chip’ munk) n. Any of several small striped terrestrial squirrels of the genera Tamias and Eutamias; has cheek pouches and a light and dark stripe running down the body.

That’s for everybody else, even ourselves before this year. Kids at the campground, hikers in the woods; city kids sighting one on TV. Here’s how it goes at our house:

chipmunk (chip’ munk) n. Any of several bazillion small greenhouse & garden-dwelling pests of the genera Voracious and Devious; has a mouth with a small striped body attached.

Jess first noticed them when her cucumber plants started disappearing in the greenhouse. Mice? Squirrels? Openings are too small for skunks or coons. Small planting cups were spilled on the shelves. Her kale plants started disappearing. She sprayed her plants with cayenne pepper, but a daily deluge of rain washed it off the outdoor plants without affecting the culprits. Alarmed, she set out rat poison in the greenhouse and started keeping watch.

Then she noticed a family of chipmunks that had moved in to the woodpile behind the greenhouse. She started seeing chipmunks inside the greenhouse, and when she found that some of the tomato plants she had raised from seed nibbled through the stem, that was it. She called out the artillery.

She doesn’t like firing my .357 magnum, so she posted me as sniper. The little buggers would stand up on top of the wood pile and wait for me to fire. I emptied the revolver of six .38 shells and hit —none. Or if I did hit any, they were quickly replaced by another rodent, sitting atop the woodpile with his paws in his ears, calling “Nyah nyah nyah.”

Neighbor Tim heard all the ruckus and came up with his .22. (That’s a much better rodent gun, but we can’t afford anything right now. That’s why losing our garden plants is a big deal.) I felt better when Tim spent the rest of the evening and part of the next morning up at our garden and hit —two.

Jessica’s plan worked better. She filled a 5-gallon bucket half full of water, sprinkling birdseed on top so that it looked solid. Then she leaned a piece of scrap wood up as a ramp to the bucket, and smeared the wood with peanut butter and birdseed. The rodents climb up the ramp, fall in and drown. That works lots better, and peanut butter is cheaper than bullets.

Oh, the cute little chipmunks! That’s how we felt until they started eating our food supply. They can be as cute as they want—elsewhere. They won’t starve; the woods are full of chipmunk food. There’s no reason to eat the people food when we can hardly afford to feed ourselves; and you can’t reason with rodents.

Will the contents of this picture feed our family of nine for the next year? Probably not. For one thing, I don’t like the taste of tires. I meant, once everything’s growing, will it produce enough food to last us through until the next harvest? Probably not. But it’s a good start.

On the far left are the fruit trees: various varieties of apple, pear and plum. Between them grow sunflowers and chamomile. On the left you can also just make out one of the two raised beds Jess built (yes, I know she’s amazing) to contain five kinds of squash (spaghetti, zephyr, “little dumplings,” zucchini, and crookneck); pumpkins; and edible gourd. Then come the regular raised beds, that are already 80% planted and will grow green beans (under the white fabric), arugula, beets, kale, cabbage (red and purple), onions (purple and yellow), endive, carrots (2 varieties), lettuce (3 varieites), swiss chard (2 varieities), green onions, radishes, spinach, and snap peas. Then comes the greenhouse, containing leeks, tomatoes (3 varieties), broccoli, celery, cucumbers (3 varieties), collard greens, chinese cabbage, bok choi, watermelon, cantaloupe, and various types of peppers (cayenne, jalapeno, banana, Hungarian wax, and green [2 varieties]). The tires contain potatoes; the idea is to drop tires successively around each plant to contain the dirt we add as they grow.

Missing from this shot, as far as home food production goes, are all the poultry; the horseradish and asparagus in the far left corner of the garden; the berry patches—blue, straw, and rasp; the herb garden and rhubarb cages*; the vegetable contents of the greenhouse; apples, elderberry, huckleberry, and grapes from neighboring lands (we pay for the grapes); our overflowing root cellar; and the deer I’ll shoot this fall. The herb bed contains marjoram, basil (2 varieties), sage, dill, parsley, garlic, thyme, chives, cilantro, and oregano.

And Jess has done virtually all of this.

*Once it gets going, rhubarb needs cages. Not to climb one, like tomatoes or beans, but to protect innocent passers by from getting swallowed up in the rhubarb jungle. We have five (count ‘em) rhubarb plants. You’ve been warned.

I was going to try recounting how many varieties of plants Jess has planted here, but I can’t count that high. There are lettuce and sunflowers and tomatoes and peppers, watermelon and snapdragons and squash and good grief, I can’t remember. Since this picture was taken last week, the window-seat garden has burst forth and multiplied. The lids of most of these strawberry-box gardens have been hinged open to allow their vigorous occupants some headroom.

Jess has been storing these strawberry boxes since last summer, when we bought all the strawberries to freeze and can for jam. (The sad truth is that our own strawberry plants didn’t produce enough fruit for much more than surreptitious mouth-popping, or  adding the occasional tang to a bowl of corn flakes.) The plastic clamshell boxes serve as mini-greenhouses, and many of the warm-weather plants will be hardened off and transferred to the real greenhouse when they’re big enough.

And where’s Jess meanwhile? Oh, she’s down in the real garden, planting cool-weather crops like spinach and radishes. Yeah, I know; it’s only March. She loves to get her hands into the dirt.

Well, the glass is finally on the greenhouse. Yahoo! All I have to do now is finish wrapping it with plastic sheeting to keep the snow out of it. You can see that we’ve put our bikes and various other summer paraphernalia in there to keep them out of the snow; but later on this winter I’ll go in and start building shelves in preparation for spring (and I’ll have to find someplace to put the bikes meanwhile. Won’t that be fun.).

These sheets of glass are each 4’x7’4”, except for the one on the side of the building which is about three inches wider. They came from the local credit union. When they had just started construction, I happened in, and just happened to be talking to the branch manager, and just happened to notice they would have to tear out their old windows, and happened to ask what were they planning to do with them, and she said “I don’t know” and I said “Can I have them” and she said “Sure” and thanks to some friends who know how to move glass, I got them. Thank goodness for friends! Thank goodness for “coincidence” that has me happen upon thousands of dollars worth of free glass.

In fact the panel that’s nearest you in this shot still has the bank hours silkscreened on the inside. It will cast a “Lobby hours 9am-5pm” on our sprouting beans and lettuce next spring. That’s fine by me; there’s a lot of money in these glass windows and I’m glad I didn’t have to pay for them.

It’s worth it to ask. All they can say is no. It’s also worth it not to be too proud to accept other people’s perfectly good castoffs. The shirt I’m wearing right now would probably retail for $60, but my wife got it at a $3-a-bag sale at the thrift store, which means it cost about twenty-five cents. Yahoo!

Here we have quite possibly the oddest photograph yet posted on The Self-Reliants. If you can guess what it is in two seconds or less, you win! Time’s up, it’s carrots. I had to stir up these few from their long winter’s nap so I could get a picture. They look curly and squat like most of our home-grown carrots from previous years, but there were some splendid specimens this year too. I wanted to get a shot of some of the behemoths Jessica pulled out of the garden, but they came out of the ground and went into the sawdust lickety-split, before I had a chance to record their monstrosity for the ages. (What’s that, you say? Just photograph them when she takes them out again? Won’t happen. When she pulls them out it will be approximately four minutes before they get hacked up and tossed into soup, and at that time I will still be at my employment, counting the seconds ‘til 5.)

We’ve heard tell that you can actually store carrots in the ground, and pull them up as needed over the winter. In our neck o’ de woods that won’t happen either, since when the snow gets going it will take a backhoe to get down to ground level. We pulled these guys up and now they’re sleeping in the root cellar. But I’m so encouraged at this year’s crop that I’d like to plant twice as much next year. It’s great to have a garden that actually produces. Wait, is that a pun?

Well, this year our garden pumpkins were dinky (again), and I was going to say I didn’t know why– but I think it do. They need feedin’, and we didn’t feed them. All the manure went to the other plants and flowers, and our pumpkins struggled along as best they could.

Enter Jean, an older lady friend of Jessica’s in town, and her spacious garden with its dumptruck load of manure every spring. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another garden as productive as Jean’s, and her friendship with Jessica has certainly borne fruit. As here: This behemoth is the biggest I’ve ever seen outside a county fair. We’ll be putting manure on our pumpkins next year.

As for Halloween this year, we’re far enough out in the sticks that we don’t take the kids trick or treating. (And anyway, anybody lurking in the woods at nighttime around here is liable to get shot.) We’ll be taking them to a Trunk-or-Treat in town. But the kids have all drawn and painted our cantaloupe-sized pumpkins from the garden, and left this guy for Dad. When I get a chance I’ll draw on it, and then after the tooth-rottin’ festivities Jess will wash them all off and can them. That’s a lot of pumpkin for pies and cookies. No sense wasting it for a lopsided Jack-o-lantern.

Well, it did its best. I should have had Jess hold her hand in this shot for scale, but this is actually a cantaloupe about the side of an egg. It’s actually an Alaskan cantaloupe (that’s what the folks at the seed catalog called it), so we thunk it would do well up here in the woods. But the cantaloupe never sprouted with Jessica’s other seeds this spring, and when she planted more seeds outdoors and watered them all summer, the biggest cantaloupe ended up about the size of an egg.

We didn’t eat any of it, but Jess saved the seeds. We’ll see what develops next year, when we have a greenhouse. More manure would have helped, too. But next year we’re hoping to get a trailer hitch for the BGF, and a used trailer (somewhere), and then we can haul manure and wood and noisy kids anytime we need to, without a pickup truck. And the upshot is, maybe we really can grow our own cantaloupe. Large enough to eat, that is.

Adam and Jen posted a note Sunday at church: Help! Come pick beans and I’ll give you half of what you pick! So on Monday evening, we went.

Their garden must be half an acre in size. String beans, corn, tomatoes, and I don’t know what all. The beans apparently came on too late for them to sell many at the farmer’s market, but when we got there we had never seen so many growing in one place. Many were six inches long—or better. Some were as thick as your finger. You just picked up a branch off the ground and a dozen huge beans came with it. In about an hour we had picked four large grocery bags full (paper or plastic? Paper), and Jen helped us load them into Dexter’s trunk. When we got home Jess said, “What about Jen’s half?” Oops, forgot that part.

Jess took her beans back to her yesterday morning, and Jen told her we can come out later and help pick whatever remains. Um, okay. We appreciate the way people help us out. If we ever have a garden that’s half an acre in size, we’ll reciprocate.

Shown above are the results, right after I discovered half of it had to go back. On the left are the two boxes of elderberries Jess and I picked along the highway on Saturday. On the right is Noodles the cat, investigating. The yellow thing in the middle is Jessica’s corn-shaver-offer-thing, which she lent to Jen.