July 2006


The corn is finally ready to eat. I tried some a few days back and ,my word, they were so sweet and delicious. I mean candy sweet, it made candy corn seem like a healthy alternative. I have found that fresh raw corn is the first thing that is really an improvement over the grocery store. Sugar snap peas, zuchinni, and green beans are all well and good, but they are not significantly different from the stuff you can buy. But the corn is night and day. Also corn has the advantage of being slightly harder to steal than a tomato and so far I have lost none of them. In general I think the vegetable thiefs are hardly hardened criminals and cannot rationalize tearing out the cob from the plant. While tomatoes are so easy to take it is equivalent to picking up a quarter off the ground. I have devised a simple equation to express the chances of a garden item to be stolen. (Chance of Theft) = TED, where T is the toughness of the thief, E is the ease of the item to stolen, D is the desirability of the item.

They stole my tomato. I usually try to prevent theft in the garden by growing things that people don’t like or grow quickly so if one is stolen then it is no big loss. But tomatoes are problematic their bright red color just yells out “steal me!!”. Unfortuantely there are not too many good strategies for keeping people out.

Update

More tomatoes stolen. I just added a sign to remind people that someone actually owns the plot and it did not just magically spring from the ground for all to take.