THINK GLOBALLY EAT LOCALLY

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Fellow Gardeners: Just thought you'd like to know that I haven't harvested a ripe tomato yet. The rats have gotten them all. Roger came, announced that there were no rat burrows on either my property or in the community garden, so he couldn't put poison down the den. He said he would put out bait stations, but then he said, "Joan, vegetables and fruits are rats' favorite food. They're going to stand here. " He looked back and forth between the bait station and the tomatoes. "And they're going to say `Chicken or sirloin? Chicken or sirloin?'and they're going to choose sirloin."

So if you find chomped tomatoes, don't, DON'T throw them on the ground, but remove them to the compost pails. Pick up and compost all dropped tomatoes. Surround your plants with netting if you can. Stake them high; get a little rat doll and stick pins in it, and hope that Roger's bait is more attractive than he thinks!

And if you ever wonder why ratswill outlast us on the planet, just remember they don't contribute to globalwarming by driving to the store in ahumvee, and they love fruits and vegetables.

-Cheers, Joan

Some of this was probably hysterically bad advice, since if the tomatoes were left ly ing around the rats might have finished off the ones they had already started instead of chomping into fresh ones every night.

The rat crisis ended with a flood. Six and a half inches of rain in a few hours put my entire yard underwater. This killed off the tomato plants and a number of other weather-sensitive crops. Although the sweet potatoes - a mainstay of my winter diet - looked fine, I learned when I dug them later in the year that the water had cracked them open and a third of the crop had rotted, leaving the others looking like true Frankenfoods.

This was not the first time I had lost a crop to the weather. Two years earlier we had the wettest year in history, and I lost two-thirds of the onion crop (100 pounds the year before) and at least a third of the potatoes. I found myself deeply depressed about the loss of the crops. What was bothering me? I could buy potatoes and onions when I needed them. Then it dawned on me: I was suffering sympathetic angst.

It really didn't matter if my crops failed. I have a market within walking distance and can afford even their high prices. But the same could not be said for my fellow farmers, the ones who feed you and provide for me when my own crops fail. They have no divine dispensation that protects their crops from the devastation mine experienced. If I was having trouble salvaging drowned onions that year, the Upstate onion growers surely would be sharing my problem - and they were. That year's crop was a disaster. As for the potato farmers, a close cousin of the potato blight organism that set off the 19th-century Irish famine had turned up in the Northeast a year or two earlier; the wet weather that damaged my potatoes encouraged the blight to spread.

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