Green-thinking masked bandits

So I have raccoon that are frequenting the tree outside my bathroom window.  It had previously been only a single one with a long slender noise, beady eyes and a desire to massacre the local bug population.  I don't blame it at all.  Or, her rather.  For she seems to have given birth this last spring and has a little one still tagging along.  Two nights ago there were supposedly two little tag-alongs, but I didn't see them.  For certain there is one that mom is still dragging around with her.

I probably would have missed them entirely had they not made a ruckus and roused the local canine population (my dogs), who proceeded to bark back at the screeching.  Anyway, mom and kid (kit?) hung out and climbed the tree for a while before running off to wherever they make their bed.  I'm just happy they don't use our yard for their latrine.  I've not smelled it, but by all accounts it can be rather obnoxious to the olfactory sense.  I think I'll keep to watching through the window for the time being.  I suppose for some people this isn't really that odd of a story.  Having local wildlife running through their yard and making a tiff.  I'm much more used to the local coed population making noise pollution in the early hours of the morning after the bars close though.  For I live in the city, and not anywhere near the country regions.

It made me think though about adaptation.  The natural habitat for raccoon is not exactly the backyards in the middle of a city.  Maybe if a city contains a very large park they could find some solace there, but I'm not used to sharing the concrete jungle (aside from suburbanites that like to create traffic 'situations').  At least not sharing it with other species (see previous parenthetical).

Indeed I've been thinking quite a bit lately on how we use the space we have.  Most of us don't share it very well.  Sure, may have little gardens in the backyard, but even just on a cursory look through my neighborhood on walks with the dogs there are very few gardens in backyards that we can see when walking down the alleys.  It may be poor statistical methodology, but I would imagine we as a society don't do much more gardening than mowing the lawn.

Photo By: Robert Goodwin

This is saddening.  I know with a clock-time society and the increasing disparity in wage structures that many people just don't have the time to commit to gardening, even at a base level.  But just think about how many vegetables could be grown, how much we could offset our own carbon emissions by just growing squash in a patch in the yard.  Or maybe something that takes up less space.  How about a 16 square foot potato garden (just a 4x4 square).  Over the summer you can build it vertically and have enough potatoes to make a lot of potato salad.  Or maybe some cucumbers and then make pickles.  Or some self-contained watering tomato plants.  I mean really, there is a lot of innovation of the square foot gardening variety and even a cursory search can give you days and days of reading material.

It's something I would like to try, and hopefully I can convince the association that the sunny part of the backyard could use a good dig up and garden transition.  Not for this year, but perhaps for next.  Until then I have to figure out what to put in the planters on my porch.  I wonder if 2 months is long enough to grow anything with shortening days of sun.  Probably not, but I'm not done searching yet and let's hope the squirrels keep out of the pots if I do.  The masked bandits I might consider sharing with yet.