Snowballs in H***

Interesting plant in the photo above, no? Go ahead, take a guess and identify this common (rare in my garden) flower.

Those rare, fringy, skinny plants are ta-daa...marigolds. They are marigolds on a diet. You may have never seen skinny marigolds .

When beginning my garden this year, actually re-beginning after the building of the deer fence, I read somewhere that planting marigolds around roses will help to keep insect pests away. It appears that insects do not like marigolds. Actually I am not a big fan of marigolds myself. I know, I know. We are supposed to like all of nature's bounty and marigolds have their place in this world. I would put them way in the back of the flower garden and in the shade. Their flower is nice, but they have no fragrance and they have no drama for me, common since my childhood.

Anyway, I am all about biological controls and selected the "snowball" marigolds to stand as sentries around the delicate rose bushes. I bought a packet of seeds, planted them in the seed tray and nurtured them way back in early April. Most of them germinated. They are like cockroaches in that they are hearty and healthy. I then planted them carefully and symmetrically in front of and around my roses. Weeks of work and they were beginning to make a nice little hedge. They loved the soil and the limited sun and began to grow like weeds. I had done the germinating and planting in two week periods and the first group was ready to bloom. Lovely snow white blossoms even though they grow mostly in the shade. (I somehow did not grasp the true shade of these 30 foot trees on the side of my yard until this summer when I began serious work on flower beds.)

The second group of marigolds was planted two weeks later in the sunnier bed. They took to that bed like weeds, again. Then one morning I went out and saw what you see above. What the? What on earth eats marigolds? It had ignored my cone flowers, my roses, my statice...not my sunflowers, but everything eats my sunflowers.

Thus began the detective work. Fortunately I am a dyslexic sleeper and sometimes wake up at 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM and sometimes I even sleep in and get up at 7:00 AM. Each morning I saw nothing in the vicinity of my marigolds. The only active animal was a little rabbit eating the clover in my lawn...the same one I chased around the yard last week. I would let him sit there and munch away as he did a real job on the clover.

I had sprayed the marigolds with hot pepper oil and cut with vinegar and water but, what will come as no surprise to the avid gardener, one morning I saw bunny enjoying his salad of marigold leaves and his dessert of marigold flowers following the clover appetizer. He was mowing through the plants like it was his last supper, as maybe it should be, because I think we are moving him to new fields tomorrow.