Bernard isn’t dead, to my knowledge, because I don’t think many things could take down that monster of a groundhog. I’ve obviously used the term Beefcake Bernie in a variety of posts for 2020, but that’s kind of because, he was the bane of my existence in 2019. A monster unleashed on my garden, forged in the fires of Mordor, and trained by George Foreman. Bernie was a true nemesis and pushed me to my breaking point.
But since this year is a garbage fire, I figured I would share a heart warming story of how I didn’t murder the fucker but eventually triumphed. Obviously, if I wanted to, I could have killed Bernie; to do so, I would have needed the Infinity Gauntlet, all the Infinity Stones, and the will to wipe out half of you, but eventually I would have gotten him. Now, since I don’t want to kill 50% of the people on the planet, I went a different route – trapping and relocating.
Before we get into the End Game, I want to give you a little taste of Bernie’s appetite. Beefcake started his life out as a tiny little groundhog. My backyard is fully enclosed, no gate, nothing, just a tall wooden fence, and in that fence there are some gaps that I’ve never seen anything slipped through. My friend however, in 2019, was out back reading and noticed that a baby groundhog is the perfect size to get into the garden.
They’re adorable.
But they’re assholes. Beefcake Bernie made his debut as a cute little nugget who came upon the Garden of Eden by chance. I had 60 plants, all heirlooms, and he loved them.
At first, I wasn’t worried. He eventually would grow to big to fit through the fence. My only hope was that this growth spurt would happen when he was on the other side of the fence. I lost a couple of peppers, a whole tomato plant that Bernie knocked over trying to get to a fruit, but then his reign of terror ended. With relative peace in my homestead, I went back to tending to my young plants. [For more on Bernard, click “Read More”]
Now, whenever a squirrel eats a tomato they always leave a giant chunk behind. So you can find the evidence that something ate your food. This is because they are consuming tomatoes for water not for sustenance. It’s a good barometer, a canary in the coal mine, a reminder that you need to take action because food is being tampered with.
When a groundhog eats your food, it’s different. They’re goal is clear, get big, get strong, kill the human, so there is no evidence. They gobble it all up. If you’re paying close attention, you’ll find a super turd in the yard and you’ll lie to yourself: that’s a cat turd. It isn’t, it’s Bernie’s fuck you.
Now, for the rest of the season, I notice no food is ripening. Since it is 2019, I am still going into the office regularly and I just assume my plants are growing to the right size in order to produce their fruit. There is no evidence of consumption, just a lack of production. So I wait, and wait, and wait. Nothing.
It wasn’t until I grabbed a piece of shit, by mistake, that I realized I had a problem. I had been in the back of my yard and I noticed there was a hole and a bunch of flies. So I went to move a stone over the hole… but the rock was slick and hard to hold. When I looked at my hands, I saw the schmeer of shit. This opened up a war.
That battles were fought with sticks and stones. I covered his hole, he dug a new one. I rammed all of the branches in my yard into his hole, he dug his bigger. I slammed stick and covered the hole, he dug another one. Like a game of wack-a-mole, I couldn’t win. Tomatoes would get close, but right before they hit the golden point, Bernie would smell em and come trouncing into the yard.
My last attempt of the season was to create an underground barrier. I got stakes and hammered them into place. I thought it was done, but he tore through that shit too. I was done, I resigned myself to the season being over.
Now realize, during the entire summer of 2019, I had never seen the beast. Until he visited when I was working on a novel in my office. From my vantage point, I saw this big brown blur fly into the garden. I didn’t even think, I dove through the door (figuratively) and was standing shirtless and wild-eyed in the backyard. I went straight for the giant rat.
Now, most of you would assume you wouldn’t be able to get close to a groundhog. That they would assume you are a predator and run. Due to newer involvement with groundhogs, this is a normal reaction I’ve seen, but in 2019 Bernie wasn’t a normal groundhog.
Fed fat on a garden that could sustain an adult human for months on months, he was big and he wasn’t going to have any of my shit. He scuttled toward his hole, a meandering halfhearted flee. Then he stopped and so did I. He went to his hinds and stood up. His arms assumed a solid guard, and I swear his feet shuffled like a boxer. This was his garden and he was right.
That day I named him Beefcake Bernie, and realized if I wanted my garden back, I would have to re-evaluate my willingness to kill a critter.
Luckily, it never came to blows because I had learned more about him than he learned about me. His desire for tomatoes was his undoing and it took me 2 hours to trap him in 2020. Once in the cage, I relocated him to a local forest. Where he ran, turned, stared into my soul, then jumped off a cliff, doing a flip, and landing in the river. After a quick swim, he posted up in the sun and never broke eye contact. I am surprised I haven’t woken up to his tiny paws around my throat.
Nonetheless, once he was gone I set to the task of re-enforcing the parameter so a new groundhog wouldn’t take his den and tunnel network. I couldn’t take another year of a groundhog beefing up on my stash, so I quickly buried the tunnel network in 200 pounds of stone, all new stakes, and concrete planters on top of the stones. It cost me days and money, but in the end, I was successful and I lost zero produce to any animal.
Moral of the story… uh… life finds a way?