For a week in early June our garden is in full flight of voluptuous poppies, stately flag-waving irises and rose buds bursting to burst. The hawthorn trees are shades of fuchsia and Dogwood flowers are soft ivory with tinges of pink and olive. It’s very pretty. A garden that passersby pause to appreciate.

Let me say right off the top, it has NOTHING to do with me. Mr. When-I’m-64 knows a thing or two about flowers. Me, I know forks.

Anyway, I was telling our friend Colin – a real life gardener who sometimes saves our garden from me – about my horticultural roots on the Cowichan River and my recollection of visiting friends on the opposite river bank (this was a happy childhood of summers spent swimming between friends) and viewing our house in midwinter. There was snow, lots of it, and from my cross-the-river vantage point I could see our sundeck was straining under the weight. Still, in sunny optimism, poking through all that January white were the yellow heads of plastic daffodil bouquets my mother had stuck in pots months before.

Just this past week Mr WI64 and I came home from a trip and there near the front walk was this:

And in a nearby flowerbed (designated mine, God knows why.) these:

“You must’ve told Colin about your gardening genes,“ he said. Unlike me, he didn’t have to do a touch test to verify whether or not they were real.

I am successful at growing one thing. Garlic demands nothing of me, only that I stick it in the raised bed in the backyard in October and harvest it in July. That’s pretty much it and because it tolerates my neglect, I grow quite a lot of it.

Lately, just as we’re heading to bed, the motion detector light in the back yard snaps on. It doesn’t illuminate any critters that I can see, but I’m pretty sure if it’s not a raccoon, it’s a neighbourhood cat going for a pre-bed pee in my veggie patch where squash and a bit of chard I’ve planted near the garlic need a fighting chance to survive.

In my one shining moment of gardening inspiration, I headed to the dollar store to buy up its stock of plastic forks.

Herewith, my fork fortress to deter intruders from peeing in my patch:

So far, it seems to be working.

Should my garden produce only garlic this year, I think we can pretty much narrow down the cause.