There’s nothing like a salad fresh from the garden. A bowl of mixed greens, spiced with herbs and perhaps an edible flower blossom or two, is one of the great pleasures of summer on St. Peters Church Road, the perfect accompaniment to a pizza baked in the mud oven out back.

Lettuce has done especially well for us since we built the raised cedar beds and adopted the “square foot garden” approach, which involves supercharged soil made of compost and peat moss, with a healthy dose of vermiculite added to promote drainage.

In past years, despite an utter lack of fence, netting, or chicken wire, the garden has been miraculously unmolested by any of the likely suspects, including the abundant rabbits, deer, and groundhogs who roam our property day and night, eyeing us suspiciously as they forage, as if we, and not they, were the interlopers.

Actually, there was one kind of green – chard – which seemed to exert an irresistible attraction to nighttime nibblers. Mornings would find the chard munched down to a few red stems, while the green-leafed delicacies that pressed in from all sides would be strangely ignored.

Fine, we thought. Chard will be our sacrifice to the local wildlife. Chard’s kind of bitter, anyway. If they must sink their little teeth into something, let them have this brightly colored descendant of the sea beet. There’s plenty for everyone. Let them eat chard!

Too cavalier? Perhaps. But it seemed to be working. Bribing the local fauna with a humble member of the beet family was just a cost of doing business.

We should have known better. If there’s one certainty about the protection racket, it’s that the payments will only go up.

Which brings us to this year. The rainy spring delayed our planting, but when we finally got the garden in, the cool, wet weather provided ideal growing conditions for succulent green and red leaf lettuce.

Last week, the mud oven was blazing; the pizza dough was rising; the salad bowl yawned in anticipation…

But where were the greens?

Gone! Eaten! No, not just eaten. Stolen!

And, in one of those rare cases where the criminal is caught in flagrante delicto, in practically the same moment we noticed that not just the chard, but all of the salad greens, had been ravaged, there was a stirring in the tall grass in the culvert and a flash of brown fur as a guilty-looking groundhog made a run for it, dashing for cover in the hedge by the black walnut tree.

Outrage surged in my veins. That filthy creature had eaten my salad! Lettuce wasn’t part of the deal. This went way beyond chard. Five famous words rang in my ears: This aggression will not stand.

It was time to liberate the ammo from its hiding place on top of the pantry cabinet and dust off the Browning.

This was war.

A quick analysis of the field of fire was not promising. There were obstructions on all sides: the tin roof of the oven shed; the stonework of the old hand-dug well; and, at the edge of the grass that provided such good cover for groundhog infiltration, a big blue kayak that lay drying on the hillside.

I did have a few advantages: an elevated shooting platform, also known as the deck behind the kitchen. A tall cocktail table, perfect for an elbow rest. A fine telescopic sight.

Early the next morning, in the pale blue light that lures groundhogs from their evil labyrinths into dew-moistened fields, I was in position , locked and loaded, elbow steadied on the cocktail table. I called to mind sniper scenes from movies. Breathe, I told myself. Relax.

My quarry rustled in the field grass, intent on some free-range appetizer or other, no doubt sharpening his appetite for more cultivated pleasures to come.

The house was dark. Brooke the basset hound was doing her job, which involved snoring quietly on the porch, oblivious to the lethal drama unfolding just a few feet away.

The invader was in my cross-hairs. I took a shallow breath and held it. I applied steady pressure to the trigger.

BOOM!

I secured the rifle and tore off my earmuffs. I ran into the house, squeezed my bare feet into my mucking boots, then clumped off to examine the kill.

This was maybe a thirty yard shot, certainly in the wheelhouse of even an inexperienced shooter like me.

But where was the corpse?

Shana came out onto the deck. “Did you get it?” she shouted.

I shook my head. And that’s when I noticed an interesting new hole in the Trex railing.

The groundhog had gotten away, but I’d definitely given the handrail something to chew on.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 09 June 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com