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Protectors of the vegetable garden

A dirty, time-wasting way of spending my Saturday! That was how I felt about my first gardening experience when I was ten years old. My father was a slave driver because he did not give us a choice on a Saturday morning. That, at least, was how my younger brother and I felt.

Thirty years later I stopped smoking and had to do something to occupy my mind. My Dad was living close by and I asked him about a vegetable garden. He gave me advice and I soon discovered the pleasure of watching my own plants grow! Wow! The adrenalin started pumping and I could not wait to get home from work and tend to my garden. I started out on a small piece of soil but as I discovered more vegetable seeds, I planted more. It looked like a fairy garden with the pumpkin stalks running over the potatoes, through the tomatoes and underneath the corn.

The seedlings that I liked best, were the green peppers. They took long to start growing, but when they were 6 inches tall, my garden really looked like a magic garden with just about every kind of vegetable that you can imagine.

To avoid the mistakes my father made, I took my two young sons and helped them to make their own little gardens within my garden. They eagerly planted their seeds, watched with astonishment the little green heads appearing through the soil one morning and eventually let me take out the weeds! I did not pursue them and they did not mind their gardens anymore because there was a new thing to play with.

The "new" thing was my white bull-terrier with the black patch over one eye. He was called Rambo and used to be their playmate. Rambo, with a chain and leash around his neck, would pull them on their skate- boards until all three of them were exhausted.

One day I noticed that Rambo had a funny brown mark on his back. By closer inspection I discovered that it was sand. Somehow something sticky ended up on his back. I presumed that he had rolled onto a sticky substance. Luckily it did not smell bad.

The next day I caught my sons standing over Rambo. Each one had an open slice of bread in his hand and held it sideways over the dog. When I came closer, I saw that honey was dripping from the slices of bread onto Rambo's back and one had a handful of sand which he was slowly pouring onto his back! The secret was out! The boys were reprimanded and promised not to do it again.

The garden was within an enclosure with a six feet wooden fench surrounding it. Nothing could get into our garden except the

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