“I’m going to have to go Mr McGregor on the rabbits that took out my beets,” a gardener friend recently told me. (In the UP, it is probably more like Elmer Fudd, but I digress.) When I asked him if he’s having hossenfeffer for dinner, he said he made a pact with his daughter; he can shoot them, but not eat them.

It seems more than ironic how these little critters can drive a normally peaceful person to violence. But, when you wake up to discover an entire bed of carrots gone, carrots that were there before you went to bed, it makes you do crazy things.

This week’s farmers market was rife with stories of bunnies meeting their inevitable end for getting too comfortable near a protective gardener’s crops. Dogs usually take care of the problem, but sometimes you gotta get out the gun.

While we were sitting around, sipping coffee, talking gardening and waiting for customers to show up at our farmers’ market, Steve got all excited about a woodchuck that’s been wreaking havoc in his garden. “I thought I had a rodent problem, so I put out traps and nothing,” he said. “One afternoon, Sandy was out in the flower beds and started screaming, ahh, ahh, ahh, and, sure enough, a woodchuck went cruising across the yard. I saw it run toward the tall grass at the bottom of a tree, so I followed it there and I was poking around it the grass with my gun — and the little sucker was up in the tree! He came flying down the tree, right past me and started running for cover. So I unleashed on the little guy. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!” Steve had his back elbow cocked and his front arm out as if holding an invisible .22.

“Did you get him?” Someone finally asked.

“I did!” he said proudly. That’s some pretty impressive sharp shooting, nailing a woodchuck on the hoof.

The hubby then shared a story of his recent varmint encounter. He went out for his morning garden stroll and found a big ol’ porcupine by the compost, asleep. (Probably feeling like a nap after munching his way through the garden.) The little bugger was pretty groggy, so Rick waited until the prickly sucker looked away and gave it a whack with a shovel. No sharp shooting required, but getting that close to a porcupine has its own risks.

Finally, Robert chimed in. At 80, Robert’s got decades more gardening (and varmint) experience than any of the seasoned gardeners in our farmer’s market group. And he’s quite a character in his white knee socks sagging down his pale white legs and jean shorts held up by wide red suspenders.

“Well, I’m out on the tractor and see a groundhog out there in the field. I’ll point my tractor toward it, ya know, but it always beats me to the hole. So, I was out walking in the field and I spotted a groundhog and we saw each other and it was a race to see who could get to the hole first. Well, I’ve never been a very fast runner, but I beat that groundhog to the hole and, when we met up I gave him a good kick. Well, that sent him flying. Knocked him out pretty good.”

I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details.

Who knew gardening could be such a blood bath.