See, the thing is that I suddenly got thrust into the position of Chief High Muckety Muck for the local master gardeners' demonstration garden. The MGs had a spring garden fair the last day of March and that event included a plant sale, which is the only fund raising event that was planned for this year. So it was a big deal. Part of that deal was to get the demonstration garden in good shape so that the folks attending the fair would enjoy strolling through it and asking questions of the Master Gardeners. So I've been putting in a lot of time getting ready for the fair over the last three months and in March that time went up exponentially. The fair went off pretty well, though, and the garden looks good, so now I can take a breather and get on with my life. Which is why I'm kicking back with a True Blond and writing this blog entry.
The only glitch in the garden fair, at least from my perspective, happened while I was taking a break and grabbing a bite to eat with Ellie. I had just gulped down a chopped beef sandwich from the local 4-H kids and was working my way through a chocolate chip cookie when one of the veggie garden folks came in and asked me if I had brought any tools with me. I told him that I had a trowel and some pruners in my truck if he needed them but he said that he didn't think they would work and he was looking for a hoe. I asked him what he needed it for and he told me that there was a snake in the herb garden. I decided that I had better head out there to see what we had. The veggie crew guy, who happens to be a retired chaplain with a biblical name that I'll just call Peter, grabbed a cultivating hoe from the MG store and followed me out.
When we got to the herb garden I could see right away that we had a problem because, instead of the garter snake that I expected to see, there was about a three-foot Western Diamond Back rattler coiled up on the rosemary bush. People were all crowded around with their cell phones out trying to see how close they could get to take a picture and everyone had an opinion about what to do, most of which boiled down either to killing it humanely (however that might be; lethal injection, maybe? I don't know) or just to “let it be because it isn't hurting anyone” (not right now maybe, but a diamond back packs enough venom to kill a child and make a grown man lose a leg, and judging by the buzz that came from him now and then, he wasn't feeling too friendly).
So I told Peter to extend the extendable cultivating hoe he had and we'd try to dispatch the rattler. When he said “It is extended”, I knew we were in trouble. A rattlesnake can strike out as far as half it's body length. I estimated that that meant that the one we had could reach out about 18 inches, which isn't real far, but they can move very fast so he could get to us and strike before we got a chance to deliver the coup de gras. It looked to me as though the old saw about discretion being the better part of valor applied here. So I asked Peter to keep an eye on the serpent while I went inside the ag office and called Animal Control.
It turns out that Animal Control doesn't work on Saturdays, even in cases where there is a lethal snake wandering around among two or three hundred mostly recent arrivals from outside central Texas, of which about half were kids who didn't know any better than to stay away from a rattler and the other half were adults with phone cameras who were just as snake savvy. So I finally got dispatch to send out a deputy to take care of the problem. She asked that someone wait out by the road to show the deputy where the snake was and I told her I would do that.
After asking Peter to keep an eye on the snake I walked up to the road to wait for the posse. I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Eventually Ellie found me there and told me that she would wait for the policia while I went back to the herb garden to help Peter wrangle the rattler.
Eventually not one, but three, cops showed up. Of course by this time the snake was nowhere to be seen. So we used some looong bamboo poles to lift up the bushes under which it could hide, with the deputies standing by ready to dispatch the critter as soon as it showed its triangular head. After five or ten minutes of this there was no sign of the rattler. So we started jamming the poles into the sage and other shrubs to see if we could make the darn thing mad enough to betray its location. No luck. The #$%^&* varmint was way too smart for that.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, we gave up and just used the bamboo poles to make sort of a border around the bed and posted a couple “Keep Out” signs. For the rest of the afternoon I was pretty nervous because I was sure the snake had gotten out of the herb garden and someone would step on it and get bit. I guess it must have gone to ground, though, because there was no sign of it for the rest of the day.
That was my big day and the culmination of an intense month of gardening. Now it's over and I'm back. So watch this space.
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