Even the best laid plans are no match for mother nature. (As it is in life, so it goes in the garden.)

Each spring, as we get ready to migrate back to the UP, I get excited about returning to cold frames full of fresh lettuce and spinach. We plant it in the fall, it goes dormant over winter, and voila! When we return in the spring, we are greeted with an abundance of fresh greens. Fresh greens, not that manky store-bought crap. But . . .

Not this year!

The first thing I did when my feet hit the Eden of Garden grounds was go to the cold frames to see my beautiful greens. And they were GONE! Like, without a trace. Not a single spec of green. Not even a sign that anything was ever planted there. Not even signs of the rows we hoed. Very mysterious indeed.

The obvious question here is WTF?!?!?!? The greens were totally encased in the cold frame so nothing “big” could have gotten in. But it hardly seems possible that bugs could have taken out all that lettuce. That was a shit ton of lettuce and spinach. Did it shrivel up an die?

When I cried to the Boss, he wasn’t so sympathetic and pretty much blew me off — he had more important things to focus on. So I was left to grieve my greens and investigate the disappearance on my own.

Until . . . .

The Boss went to uncover our wintered-over, cold-kissed carrots and found them missing! Hundreds and hundreds of carrots gone, with just a few tiny, but tasty, baby carrots left behind.

“What a tease!” he complained. You can bet that kicked him into detective mode. What ate the carrots?

Whatever it is was very well fed and is probably very large judging from all the veggies it ate. (I half expected a large orange rabbit to hop out of the woods to defend its carrot stash.)

Now the Boss was the one that was sad. All those beautiful carrots he had been dreaming about, gone. He admitted he finally understood how I felt about the missing greens. Perspective, Buddy!

Now, finally on the same page, we can work together as an investigative team to uncover the mystery of the missing veggies. Which is, quite honestly, a mystery we may never solve. That is how gardening goes. You plant your shit, animals and bugs eat it too, so you gotta plant enough for everyone. Sometimes those buggers will get the best of our garden and we just  have to suck it up and let the mystery be.

EPILOGUE: We were moving the cold frames off the empty garden bed that should have been our greens and a tiny something, mouse?, vole? some kind of rodent, scampered out of the bed. The little shit! Now the Boss is contemplating mouse traps in the cold frames. Hmmmmm.