It’s a seductive vision. Photos show raised beds bursting with clusters of heirloom tomatoes, lush, towering basil plants, and rumpled lacinato kale leaves arched in conversational groupings above masses of oakleaf and butter lettuces that cool the feet of the higher crops.
It will look like Bi-Rite’s produce section in your own garden.
You can imagine yourself luxuriating in the earthly delights of your edible urban paradise, sipping mocktails, let’s say, in the late afternoon sun as you pluck a perfectly ripened strawberry from the masses tumbling effortlessly over the side of the raised beds, the still-warm sweetness of its bright red skin against your teeth.
It would be glorious, if only reality would cooperate.
A week or so after planting my seedlings, during my early-morning garden inspection, I noticed some of my lettuces nibbled down to a few leaves. I didn’t think that much of it. After all, I had a spirit of equanimity and generosity about it. There was plenty more lettuce in the planter bed, right? I’d just have to grow a little extra.
The second morning, the planter was a patchwork of gaps in my rows of lettuce seedlings. Broken windows theory, I remembered, says to fix small damage right away, so I tidied the bed as if the neighborhood rats were reading the signs.
Food gardening is a low-trust activity in a high-trust world.
By the third morning, it was all gone — the entire bed razed to the ground by rats.
My once-promising edible patch of paradise had been transformed over three nights into a ragged hellscape of stumps and stems.
I was Charlie Brown, airborne and then flat on my back, the AAUGH! bubble still hanging over the stumps.
I didn’t have the heart to replant straight away. Naturally I turned to the internet. There I found a lot of glossy photographs and a few hand-wavy mentions of protecting your crops, but very little specificity. “Protect your plants with netting or wire mesh,” but no pictures of netting or wire mesh. Just page after page of tidy cedar beds with nary a cage in sight. More beautiful lettuces gleaming in the sunlight. Sites like Houzz and Gardenista were the start of my woes and the dead end.
Eventually, the seduction of more promises led me back to the starting point. I planted more of my little plant starts. They were mowed down as quickly as I planted them. A few wisps of uneaten roots taunted me from the soil.
I signed up for a food-growing workshop at Garden for the Environment, hoping for better ideas.
The good news is, they are, in my opinion, pioneers in the use of elegant and effective rodent barriers, known in polite circles as exclusion baskets. Their exclusion-only approach works, as evidenced by the beautiful lettuces and strawberries growing unmolested within their screened walls. They also offer practical reassurance that a rat-attacked garden in the city is not a sign of failed moral character. The bad news is, you have to build them yourself, from scratch out of one-quarter inch hardware cloth (wire mesh), wood, staples, screws, and clips.
But instead of building anything, I gave in to temptation one more time. I assured myself that this time would be different. I planted some arugula seedlings I had carefully nurtured. They were gone the next morning, roots and all.
I realized I wasn’t just the one flat on my back again. I was the one who kept agreeing to take the running start.
If I wanted anything to change, I was going to have to grow up as a gardener.
Food gardening is a low-trust activity in a high-trust world. You have to be vigilant against destruction.
I already owned a staple gun, saw, and screws, so I went to the hardware store and filled my shopping cart with the rest: galvanized wire mesh, wire cutters, cut-proof gloves, 1 by 2 redwood boards, heavy-duty zip ties, and clips.
When I got home, I lugged everything to the garden and started building.
I cut and screwed together a rectangular frame with sides that tapered toward the top. This sat on the soil in the trough planter. It wobbled, but it worked.
Cutting the galvanized mesh to staple to the frame was hard enough, but wrestling with it to form the sides and the top was a new experience for me as a garden sculptor. I finally figured out how to fold each side first into something resembling a triangle with reasonably clean edges. Each of these I could zip-tie to the next side as I moved around the frame.
Quarter-inch hardware cloth is tough. I had to want it badly.
After a few hours, my first trough planter wore a scaled-down, slightly cruder version of the Garden for the Environment frames. It had to be lifted off whole instead of hinging elegantly. Perhaps my next effort will be more sophisticated. I zip-tied the smaller round cloches into tubes for my round pots and clipped together the tops of their mesh with silver-toned binder clips.
When I had finished building, I entrusted the new seedlings I’d grown to each basket, said a small prayer, and went upstairs to tend the scratches on my arms, make dinner, and watch Lanterns before bed.
The next morning, I came downstairs for my first garden inspection of the new era. It had only been one night, but none of my lettuces had been devoured. Plum-colored lobes of red oakleaf looked back at me. Lime-green little gems winked. This in itself felt like a miracle.
If you want to eat your own home-grown salads in this city, you have to commit to the path of the impeccable garden warrior. Learning how to protect your crops — and keep protecting them — is the only way.
