Sam the Stealer

Our garden, this year, has done pretty well, I think, for how hot it has been, and the lack of watering on my part.  You see, when I plant my garden, I give my plants a talking too, and I tell them that I am busy and won't have tons of time to devote to them.  They will get watered in the morning with the sprinkler system and then I will try my best to come out once during the hot, hot day and pull some weeds, train them up trellises, and water them, but that I have 2 busy kids to look after and they might not get as much love as they should.  So despite their neglect, we have had a pretty good year.  However, we have had a few things go missing this year.  Our tomato plants grew really well with lots of fruit and for a couple weeks we were getting quite a few tomatoes off of them everyday, then all the sudden the ones that I saw orange the day before weren't there when I went out to pick them.  I blamed Royal.  He denied it.  I was still quite skeptical.  Then one day when we came home from church, there was a vine up on the porch, a cantaloupe vine.  We had like 5 cantaloupes growing and ripening out in the garden.  When I went out to check on them, they were all missing, and then when I went out in the yard to pick up all the dog poo,  every pile looked like a homemade pinecone bird feeder, full of cantaloupe seeds.  Sam had been sneaking into our garden and eating all our cantaloupes, and also eating only our red tomatoes.  You see last year, Royal and I tried out a couple topsy turvy's, so the tomatoes were much more in Sam's reach, and he ate all the green ones as soon as they were big enough to pluck off.  We thought we got smarter this year and planted our tomatoes in our garden with a fence all around it.  Sam, I've decided is like Houdini, and can get into and out of whatever he wants.  I swear he can fit through a 2 inch opening, because I guess Sam got smarter this year too and waits until the fruit is just barely ripe enough and then somehow gets into the garden and eats the fruit right before we would pick it.   I found our last ripening cantaloupe, and Jayden's one and only growing pumpkin, and set them up on the top rung of the trellis and hid them behind leaves.  Sadly, a few days ago, Sam managed to get into the garden and would of had to jump, but obviously he was desperate, and pulled them both down and devoured them.  All we found were scattered pieces of orange pumpkin all over the yard.  Jayden was furious and demanded we take Sam back to the Humane Society.  :)  I've decided next year to build a taller and stronger fence, and for now, I've given into Sam's love of fruit and feed him the end pieces of our watermelons.

And before you go thinking how healthy of an eater Sam is, in my adventures around the yard picking up Sam's piles of poo, I've also found evidence that Sam is eating Royal's ear plugs.  Bright, neon, green ear plugs.  Yummy.