A Cat and Mouse Game

What is a farm without cats to catch  mice?

Once we stared raising animals, which meant storing grain,  I quickly changed my perception of the  little creatures. I no longer cringed at the thought of our cats hunting them down and slaughtering them. 

Mice eat grain.

Mice make nests and shred grain bags.

Mice droppings are messy, their urine stinks and no self-respecting farm animal will eat contaminated grain

Almost daily, a couple of field mice would fall into the grain bins. Michael would scoop them up in a pail, call the cats, the dump the bucket. This was the highlight of the day for our cats; there is nothing they enjoy more than having their prey handed to them so they can play with their dinner.

Often the cats left gruesome mice offerings in thanksgiving right on our doorstep, eliciting screams from our little girls.

Michael, my husband is a dog sort of man but there was one tom cat we owned who was a real man’s cat.  That old barn cat followed Michael around the barnyard and in and out of the barns almost like a faithful dog.

“Where was our dog”, you ask?

Oh, he was sleeping on the porch with one eye open watching this interloper in action.

Mickey, the tom cat, often perched on the top of a fence post while Michael fed the calf, horse and pigs. One day the curious calf stuck out his thick, rough tongue and licked Mickey so throughly that  the cat was lifted right up into the air, standing up on his back legs. Then Mickey calmly shook off excess saliva and sat back down,  balancing on the narrow post.

My husband’s admiration for the tough old tom cat increased ten fold; he proudly relates this story as an example of a real, man’s sort of cat who was the opposite of the pampered house cats that our little girls lavished affection on.

There Is More Than One Way To Win A War

This post describes the war my family has waged against vegetable lovers such as muskrats,groundhogs, rabbits, raccoons and deer, bears and mice.

The      Our garden enemies  are sneaky and tenacious; focused on a single goal- to eat and store as much of our fresh produce as possible. Sometimes they will climb inconceivable obstacles to reach our garden.

For For example, one year our carrots were disappearing at an alarming rate. Every morning there were a few neat, long holes left in the clay soil where our carrots had been. They were disappearing without a trace. Finally we began to notice that there was a long worn down pathway from our back vegetable patch, over the front yard, across the road, through the neighbour’s property, down the hill and right to the bank of the creek. This long trail was becoming more trampled down each night. My husband and elderly neighbour finally solved the mystery.

 The creek had flooded a few weeks before and probably washed out the resident muskrat's buried winter supplies.

This particular muskrat was replenishing his storehouse with our carrots. We decided to share SOME of them with him. Since he was intent on stealing the entire crop, we quickly pulled almost all the carrots, even though they would have stayed fresher in the ground. The muskrats were never as desperate again and therefore never as much of a problem again but the groundhogs were constant pests

Groundhogs are voracious eaters for their size. They can devour an entire zucchini plant, vines, leaves and vegetables before we can get out of bed.( The operative word in their name is 'hog'.) Our war plan was to assign the early risers to patrol duty, making as little noise as possible.


The kids made a real game out of this spying mission. They would tip -toe through the house, peer out the windows , tip- toe back to shake Michael awake, while one of the older kids would silently raise one of the windows and prop it open in preparation for Dad's gun.


 (Wild pest lovers, read no further, please!!!) Michael shot thirty-one FAT groundhogs one year. After a fifteen year battle, the groundhog population seemed to decline. A trapper told us that a fisher (a fierce predator) had move in across the road and now we hardly ever see a groundhog.

expect our Our wonderful guard dog managed to keep the next group of veggie lovers away- raccoons and deer. Although deer can usually snack on apples at night from the apple trees that are at the far end of our acreage without alerting the dog, the raccoons can't resist corn near the house.

 Raccoons are not subtle.  They rip and tear their way through a patch of corn, bringing six foot corn stalks down. They make a terrible sound as well, a cross between a cat screeching and a baby crying. Needless to say, this racket wakes up our dog , who in turn wakes up the entire household while he is still inside AND while he is outside because he is acting like a tough guard dog.

A couple of years ago, black bears were a problem. When one such bear found our sweet corn, he was so happy, he rolled around, flattening a huge area before he settled down to eat the prized corncobs. I don't have to tell you that we left that massive vegetable lover alone. The dumb dog could smell the bear while he was in the house and he wouldn't stop barking but he did not have a clue what he would be facing if we had let him out.

Needless to say we loved our dog more than the corn, so he stayed inside

. In   In contrast to the huge black bear, mice and chipmunks might be little but a little nibble out of a tomato or a strawberry will rot the whole fruit.

Our cats do their best to keep the mice population down but the half rotted vegetables taste like fine dining to the pigs so at least all the spoiled food doesn't go to waste.

We finally realized that the secret to the war of the vegetables is to plant almost twice as many vegetables as we need.

We plant 75 foot rows of veggies-
Some for us
Some for the vegetable lovers

ome for our farm animals (who also like weeds, thank God)  

Some to either barter with or give away to our generous friends and relatives.

There is more than one way to win a war.