June 6 - June 10 Harvesting Strawberries

Even two sets of netting can’t keep out whatever is eating the strawberries.  Can it be the thrashers I see constantly back there who are getting underneath and wastefully picking at both ripe and unripe berries, then leaving the rest of it to rot?  I don’t think slugs could pull them off their stems like that.  The other afternoon a chipmunk stood atop the cinder blocks of the melon bed eyeing me with some concern.  When I got closer he slipped between the blocks, but as soon as I turned my head he reappeared.  Was he, with his air of owning the place, the culprit?  I have an idea for next year of building a net covered box that I can lay over the berries which would keep out birds but be no barrier to something burrowing up from underneath.  Meanwhile I have learned to collect the berries as soon as they begin to show color and let them finish ripening inside.  I don’t mind sharing, but I hate the waste.
2011-Can it be possible to live in paradise and not be happy? It may possibly be the most beautiful morning in the history of the world; a soft sun shining, the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses, robins gathering worms for nestlings, bunny hopping through the grass, pleated woodpecker digging in the old apple tree’s bark. Is it paradise for the worm? Is it wiggling in ecstasy in the robin’s beak? And what a year for ticks-I’ve never in 25 years here seen anything like it. Every day I pull a dozen wood ticks off, find them clustering on the wood trim around the doors, crawling on the deck chairs. This morning, still in bed, I pulled one off my scalp a piece of skin between its mandibles. I dispatched him like the rest-sliced in half between my fingernails-but it bothers me. 
Can you practice ahimsa but leave some creatures out? I think it must be universal and that is hard. Meanwhile ants are crawling all over the kitchen counters-am I Saint Francis? Is my joy there? Because, even here in paradise I am not feeling it.
Meanwhile Massey Energy has changed its name thinking that will change its essence though it continues to eat the mountains of West Virginia, spitting out money for its corporate heads and investors and the corpses of its victims.
2013- Finally worked out the strawberries. Better netting is keeping the birds out and slugs have been minimal this year. If it keeps raining I suppose that will change. But it is interesting that in twenty years of gardening in the same spot where slugs have always been a problem to some extent, last year for the first time I noticed snails. This year there is a great increase in snails. Could that affect the slug population? I much prefer snails because they seem to do much less damage. And then there’s always escargot.