The Germans & The Mole

I awoke this morning to the sounds of 'Got It'

' Got what ' I said curiously.
 'The Mole' hubby said. He was referring to the mole that had been furrowing away in the garden, chewing the roots of the vegetables, completely ruining the crop. I looked outside, to see him happily shaking the garden fork in the air in triumph. Shouting 'No more Mario Mole', MMm well for now I thought, thinking it was a sure thing that Mario would have siblings perhaps a whole family tree would be there somewhere. Still I did not want to spoil hubby’s thunder, so I kept quiet.

For weeks now, he had tried everything to catch the annoying thing. He had tried smoking him out; he had borrowed a professional looking sound vibrator from my next-door neighbour, who being German had a garage full of all gardening mod cons. He blocked all the mole holes up with paper. Almost everything, it is nice to know that his dedication, paid off in the end, still I think it is only a temporary triumph, and this will be an ongoing adventure for him, but for now it is a gardening victory.

Our next-door neighbour’s garden is perfect. Which is only what we have come to expect from the German people, they seem so dedicated to any task they do. They are so efficient and precise. Unlike us they do not walk around their garden in sawn off jeans and flip-flops; they wear green garden overalls, and knee protectors. They wear goggles when clipping their trees, facemasks when spraying their crops, and jockstraps when weeding. They have all their gardening equipment, up on shelves, which looks like something from the VW factory, unlike ourselves, which is more of a whereabouts in the garden did I leave that rake?

We have to laugh though, every time we do something in the garden, or in the house, my neighbours peer over the garden fence, not knowing that we can see them. They pretend to water the plants or they will use their rotavator that they call Bobby, and if all that fails, they will pop round, with a bowl of sauerkraut to ask what we are doing, they do not miss a thing. Still they are good neighbours and lovely people.

This year has been a particularly bad one on the snail front. They are everywhere, munching their way through the trees, the plants, hauling their hunch-backed little bodies, up my freshly painted walls, over my neighbour’s fence happily eating their way round there garden also. It seems hubby and I am singularly responsible for the snail epidemic in Southern Spain, because we refuse to use pesticide or weed killer, well sorry but that is just too bad. We plan to stay organic, so unfortunately, for now we will have to keep picking them off the plants, unless someone out there has a better solution.