| If you read this blog, you probably know a little about my garden. I haven't written much about it recently, but it takes up most of my yard, and we attempt to grow as much of our food as we can. Here's a brief photo tour before I tell you what happened today:
Strawberries with calendula and borage
Onions, beets, beans, favas, daikons, and a few lettuce and chard plants.
Tomatoes, oregano, and chard
Peppers, cucumbers, and eggplants that we just planted, with a straw mulch
Potatoes, with a coffee chaff mulch from a local organic roaster
The compost bin, right on the fence the borders the neighbor's yard
This story probably starts a few weeks ago, when a new neighbor moved into the duplex next door. A man I liked a lot had recently moved out. After the fact, I found out that he had gotten in a fight with the man living in the other home in the duplex, and that man had gone to jail. His wife (Sarah?) still lives there. She has chihuahuas that yap all day and all night and she does all of those things that chihuahua owners do, like carry them everywhere in a bag and dress them up in silly clothes. She even has a T-shirt with a photo of her and the chihuahua on it. Sarah seems pretty nice.
After the other man moved out, the new neighbor moved in. Sarah's brother, I think. I think his name is Wayne.
Yesterday, I went outside and he had a dead snake on a piece of cardboard that he wanted to show me. Then he grabbed a dead mouse or rat by its tail and held it up to show me. Uh-oh. If he's using chemicals to kill pests, we've got trouble. My cats could eat the mice that ate the poison, or the bugs that ate the poison, or the birds that ate the bugs that ate the... you get the picture. I asked if he killed it. "Mumble mumble," was the reply, which I assumed meant yes. I asked how. I couldn't understand the answer.
I asked if he used poison to kill it. He mumbled something that I thought meant no. I warned him what might happen if he used a pesticide, that it could harm my cats.
Today, I woke up and went outside to check on the garden. I saw these blue pellets on the fence next to the compost. Then I went to a farm where I had to be at an event I was running late for.
Blue pellets
While at the farm, I got a call from my roommate. The neighbor's landlord was threatening us. She was angry that her tenants had complained about rats and snakes and she thought it came from our compost. She was going to complain to the city about us. Upset, I left the farm. As I drove home, I realized what the blue pellets were. Rodenticide. Rat poison.
At home, I found more blue pellets in the compost bin itself. If we hadn't found it there, it could have gone into our garden via compost and, if the plants took it up, it could have poisoned us!!!! Nobody asked our permission to put poison in our compost. Nobody even told us they had done this. The dog likes foraging in the compost when he can get into it (which we try to prevent). Or a rat could have eaten it and then my cat could have gotten the rat. Any one of us could have been harmed.
Blue pellets in compost
I asked my neighbors about it. It was the landlord, they said. When the landlord spoke to my roommate before, she was apparently pretty snotty, and she refused to give her phone number then. I'm furious. |
