Garden of Weeden: My Garden Has More Freeloaders Than a Church Potluck

Every gardener starts the season with noble intentions. Fresh soil. New mulch. Optimism purchased at the garden center for roughly $6.99 per annual. You plant. You water. You nurture. You say encouraging things to tomato seedlings like a Little League parent who’s watched one too many motivational videos.

And then…the freeloaders show up. Uninvited. Underqualified. Acting like they own the joint. At this point, my garden hosts more opportunists than a church potluck after somebody announces there’s fried chicken in the fellowship hall.

First: the squirrels. Squirrels are not wildlife. Squirrels are organized crime with fluffy tails. These little racketeers patrol the fence line like tiny botanical cartel bosses. And they don’t even vandalize with purpose. A squirrel will bite a tomato, reject it, sample a cucumber, insult a sunflower, then bury an acorn in your newly planted container just to send a message: maximum chaos and minimum nutritional commitment. I’m fully convinced they hold strategy meetings after dark. “Frank, you distract him near the hydrangeas. Carl, hit the peppers.”

Then there are the rabbits. Ah, yes… nature’s adorable domestic terrorists. Rabbits survive almost entirely on branding. Long ears. Soft fur. Storybook charm. Remove the Disney soundtrack, and they’re really just tiny landscaping vandals with excellent public relations. A rabbit doesn’t devour your garden. A rabbit samples it, just enough damage to destabilize you emotionally.

One bite from every marigold. Half a zinnia. The tops clipped off green bean seedlings you’ve babied for six weeks under grow lights in your kitchen like some sort of suburban neonatal unit. They don’t destroy gardens. They file nuisance complaints against them.

Birds, meanwhile, are more complicated. Birds are selective allies. Some are heroes. Pollinators? Welcome. Insect hunters? Pull up a chair. Birds have the reliability of committee volunteers: incredibly helpful… until they aren’t. They’ll spend the morning eating harmful bugs and the afternoon excavating your mulch like caffeinated archaeologists. And somewhere among them is that one bird whose sole ministry seems to be waiting for your blueberries to ripen just right. Perfectly ripe.

Honestly, that level of timing belongs in school administration. Every garden eventually encounters The One, the pest villain who enters the story with unreasonable confidence.

Ours last year was the tomato hornworm. If you’ve never met one, imagine a cucumber with anger issues. This thing appeared overnight, looking like it had already filed residency paperwork. No hesitation. No shame. Just stretched across my tomato plant like it had been paying HOA dues since Y2K.

One day: healthy tomato plant. Next morning: stems, regret, and a giant green monster chewing through my summer plans. I stared at that hornworm the same way church finance committees stare at an unapproved budget line item. “How long have you been here?”

Gardening, I’m discovering, has less to do with cultivation than diplomacy. You negotiate. You compromise. You install fencing that wildlife interprets as decorative architecture. You research “natural deterrents” that pests ignore with astonishing confidence.

Apparently, garlic spray works. For about 10 minutes. After that, the rabbits resume operations like nothing happened. Maybe this is where gardening and ministry overlap in slightly uncomfortable ways. Because every garden has stakeholders. Visible ones. Invisible ones. Helpful ones. Then there are those mysterious participants who contribute absolutely nothing yet somehow maintain strong opinions about everything.

You know the type. “Just a concern…” Garden pests and committees share a surprising number of leadership traits. They arrive unannounced, consume resources, resist solutions, and seem strangely energized by your carefully constructed plans. “Have you considered moving the tomatoes?” No, Karen, but I have considered witness protection.

Still, here’s the irritating truth every gardener eventually learns: the freeloaders come with the territory. Healthy gardens attract life. Messy, inconvenient, unpredictable life.

The Birds and the Bees. Their Bug friends. Squirrels are conducting unauthorized produce audits. The occasional hornworm dispatched directly from the underworld.

You can wage war against all of it, or you can accept that gardening was never really about control. It’s about participation; tending something alive enough to attract attention, even unwanted attention. Today, alone, I had two different sets of neighbors stop by and say, " Your garden looks awesome. I soaked in the accolades while thinking, " Looks can be deceiving, friends!

Just to be clear, if another squirrel steals my nearly ripe tomato, my participation may briefly include a strongly worded theological reflection. I have a plastic vessel full of holy water and began practicing the words, “begone Satan”. I did ask Fr. Louis to bless the garden while he visited earlier this month; I believed he giggled, but he definitely did not take me seriously!

The Garden of Weeden: where the weeds are persistent, the wildlife is unionized, and the gardener is one rabbit incident away from installing medieval fortifications.