FAKE SNAKE FIASCO

Last week, you remember, I posted about my fake snake project, the next ramp-up in my ongoing efforts on behalf of humanity to keep the monkeys away from my onions. The original idea was that the jibbering beasts would take one look at my expertly snakish arrangement and run screaming onionlessly for the hills. Well today, the results are in. Talk about tenterhooks!

According to the data, you can mothball your tenterhooks, folks. Once more the monkeys turned out to be smarter than this particular so-called homo sapiens gave them credit for. They didn't exactly point at my fake snakes and laugh, or anything like that, they didn't hold their bellies and roll on the ground or slap their thighs while gasping for air at sight of the so-called realistic serpentry, like I probably would have if the shoe was off the other foot and these were monkey onions spread out before me.

However, it's not as though the hairy marauders were gracious and forebore; to monkeys, graciousness and forebearance are just a couple of the many incredible ways in which humans simply throw time right out the window, even when there are onions at hand! However, the fake snake incident will no doubt be featured on the local simian news, in addition to serving as a standup comedy theme in hot monkey night clubs and on popular hairy late shows.

According to my detailed onion forensics, the monkeys were not hindered in the slightest by my slinky arrangement; the snakes were left mockingly in situ atop my onion nets, right where the monkeys could smirk at them while munching pawfuls of you know what. Monkeys have their ways of giving humans the old elbow.

Thus I have been driven to the next extremity (is there no end to extremities?), upon which I will report as it wraps me in its folds. Needless to day it will be another acute arc on the learning curve.

Be sure to keep your tenterhooks handy.

TWO SNAKES SHOULD BE PLENTY

You could say we have a rather eccentric household, what with occasions like the white horse event, the instance of the flying frog, or any number of other accounts buried in these steadily lengthening chronicles that I don't really feel like searching for and linking to so as to emphasize my point beyond refutation, but I suppose now that I at least have two snakes out on the onions and potatoes, that should be enough. Actually the snakes are atop the nets, where unfortunately they're likely to surprise any neighbors or hikers who happen to be strolling by and see a long yellow snake with brown stripes and a long orange snake with black-and-white rings, but what can you do.

I believe these snakes are from somewhere in South America, though I can't swear to that, it didn't occur to me to remember what it said on the packaging since I didn't expect to be writing about the snakes here, but with gardening you never really know, do you. Anyway, monkeys can't read - yet - and South America means nothing to them, as far as I can tell.

I'd been on the lookout for a good rubber snake ever since I saw an article on British gardening that mentioned just dropping a realistic rubber serpent somewhere in your garden to keep cats away, and I thought whoa why not monkeys, they are terrified of snakes and I'll try anything that simple, especially if it terrifies monkeys. But you know how it is, the minute you start looking, there's not a rubber snake within a thousand miles.

As far as I could tell, there were no rubber snakes at all on this side of the Pacific, at least that cost pretty close to zero, my preferred price. Then a surprising number of years later, rubber snakewise, I found some good ones in a 100 yen store and bought them all, then Echo found some more in another store, and before we knew it we were up to our ankles in rubber snakes. When it rains it pours. And they work, too; at least they did the job on a lady acquaintance of ours, who wouldn't even come near our doorway again after she'd seen one of the twins in the living room playing with a long orange snake, even though we assured the gasping lady it was made of rubber. (For some reason the kids are non-terrified; in fact they love our rubber snakes like they were pets.)

So when the season came round the other day I put two of the snakes out. I only put out two because I can't find the others, I suspect the girls hid them here and there for our guests or wandering neighbors to find. Anyway, if the snakes work as well on the monkeys, two will be plenty.

Now if only I can stay awake until the monkeys come.

A PUZZLING LACK OF RUBBER SNAKES

I’ve given up on growing slow-swelling onions, at least until (if ever) I move or build my mountain garden stalag, but some kind of madness comes over me each Spring and I cannot help myself: I plant tomatoes, the first garden plant I grew when I was a kid. For me, there is no kitchen garden without tomatoes, even if I don't get any of them. According to my careful statistical calculations, there's a reasonable (but not necessary) possibility that I'll get to the tomatoes before the monkeys do; it happens sometimes, the same way people find large gold nuggets sometimes, as earlier this Spring with my mushrooms.

Tomatoes grow fast and abundantly, and even though there's a good chance I'll get some of them, maybe even most of them, to better my odds I surrounded the tomato plants with takanotsume (hawk's talon) plants, the small but prolific hot Japanese red pepper, just to see if their flaming presence had any deterrent effect on the red-faced monkey tomato thieves.

Another trick I think would work is to put one or two brightly realistic rubber snakes among the tomato plants, since monkeys go bats at the sight of snakes (love to be on hand to see the effect of that!), but for some interesting reason, realistic rubber snakes are not easy to come by in Japan, where it would appear they could be most beneficial. This brings to mind Japan's serious lack of cherry pie. Now that I think of it, I have never seen a realistic rubber snake in Japan. Rubber snakes of whatever kind have never played any noticeable part in Japanese society that I can recall, as they do in the West, from the toy and practical joke level to serious realistic snake collecting. I must investigate this, not only for the cultural aspect, but more importantly for the sake of access to the tomatoes of tomorrow.