(NOTE:  This posting has been delayed in order to prevent site investigation by the Town Zoning and Planning Board)

Just in case you were imagining springtime in Vermont as an idyllic vernal fairy-land, here’s a story to bring you down to earth.  Literally, down into the earth– into the compost, that is.

On May 1st, after the girls’ bedtime, T. and I were outside working in the violet twilight.  I was building a rustic cedar tower for my Heavenly Blue morning glories to climb.  Nearby, T. was turning over the old, mostly-composted black compost from the wooden bin.  It was wet rich dark stuff, full of odd scraps… half-lemons, avocado pits.  

Suddenly I heard something scurry in the dry leaves.

“RAT!” yelled T.  We paused, then kept on working.  A single rat is no cause for alarm.

A few minutes later, T. called again.  ”Honey, come check out this cute baby mouse.”

But it was a baby rat, hunched up in the grass.  It was variegated white and brown, and plump with glossy fur.  I started to get a bad feeling. 

“Give me that shovel,” I said.  I dug furiously into the compost heap and they came streaming out– three, four, five, no nearly a dozen rats, nesting in our family compost, growing fat and sleek on a daily diet of leftover YoBaby’s, organic Bunny Noodles and buttery pancakes.

We had vermin breeding in our compost pile.  So much for organic gardening… What kind of bacteria were they carrying?  Was the Bubonic plague still around?  This was the same rich fertilizer I’d planned to dig into the vegetable garden and top-dress my flowers.  Not anymore.

The rats were too plump to move very fast.  They half-waddled, half-scurried into the brush under the sugar maple, slow as if in a stupor or a food coma.  I ran and fetched Rascal, our champion huntress, and tossed her in their general direction.  Within minutes she had a butter-fed baby rat out on the grass half-eaten.  Good Kitty.

The next morning, an adult rat corpse turned up in our living room.  Then T. used a shovel to finish off another one who’d returned to its old nest looking for food.  But the rest of them are still out there.  I considered making a basic rat-trap with a bucket of water, a stick, and a beer can spread with peanut butter spread suspended in the middle, but I never did it.  

So don’t idealize Vermont.  We’ve got ringworm, deer ticks, and rat-nests in the compost (or at least this family does)

Where will we dump our leftover slop now?  We need pigs.

Tags:   gardening · rats2 Comments