Farmer Boy

This year, my wife made a little garden in the backyard. Learning from last year's mistakes, when all our tomatoes were eaten by critters, she put netting and fencing around the garden this year. It looks like a battlefield from WWI.

The thing is, somehow the critters still got in there and ate most of the tomatoes. I was out there yesterday surveying the situation and it looked bleak.

It really gave me a sense of what it was like to be alive back in the days when people grew their own food and their lives depended on it. I can go to the Village Market and buy more tomatoes, but what if I lived 400 years ago, and the fact that the birds and squirrels ate my food meant that I was going to go hungry that week or month?

Plus in typical fashion, I got a little angry - how is it that I, a college graduate, seem to be outsmarted by squirrels and birds? How the heck did they get through the nets and fences?