Strawberry Fields...for Emerson

This story has two parts - my goats, and my husband. Somehow they will merge into one explanation of why, for many goat-owners (as well as musical spellers), "Life is pandemonium." (It's fine if you don't get the reference. Go see "The Putnam County Spelling Bee" if you ever have a chance.)

First, the goats. Finicky to a fault, they do have favorites. Along with orange peels and sunflower seeds, they eagerly devour thorny wild roses, cabbage and kale leaves, poison ivy...and strawberry plants. Oddly, they disdain fresh strawberries, but find the leaves a succulent delicacy, a fact I discovered last summer when they once got loose in the garden.

Now, the husband. Master Gardener, Grower-of-Award-Winning-Produce, Weeder Extraordinaire. This is the man who measures out the green bean rows with a chalk line, who sees each weed as a personal affront, who as a small child apparently had to work in his family's garden ten hours each morning before he could swim in the neighbor's pond after lunch. (Yes, he is descended from those same great-grandparents who had to walk twenty miles barefoot to school in the winter, uphill each way.) His garden is flawlessly organized, immaculately maintained, and generously fertilized (this year with six truckloads of horse and cow manure, carefully measured and blended). Tended with meticulous care, the plants flourish - gorgeous tomatoes, squash, kohlrabi, beets - all but the strawberries, which inexplicably yield only a paltry few small berries. My husband, frustrated by their rambling nature, ferociously digs them up every year and replants them in straight rows, to no avail.

Now, the goats. Every morning I walk them from their shed by our house to a fenced weedy field to graze for the day. Creatures of habit, they always follow the same trail - past the wooden bench, avoid the scary tire swing, stop to pee. Jump on the low stone wall and walk to the end, run to the field, get a treat. Same routine, same path, every day. In the afternoon, reverse direction.

Now the husband. A few weeks ago, I saw him pushing a wheelbarrow from the garden up the hill toward the low stone wall (yes, where the goats walk every day, twice). He informed me that he was replanting all the strawberries along the stones, directly along the route I have worked so hard to train the goats to follow. His reply to my obvious question?

"Well, you'll just have to train them not to eat the plants, won't you?"

Yeah, and maybe I'll keep a bowl of dark chocolates on the coffee table and see how many times I can walk past them. Good luck with that...Elliot is actually rather distractable (kinder than calling him stupid), but wily Emerson discovered the plants right away and now makes a nasty game of trying to knock me over to leap into the berry patch whenever we go by. I'm not sure what's worse - the devastation to the plants or my bruises.

So if anyone has extra strawberries this year, I'll trade for fifty pounds of jalapeno peppers, or a twenty pound squash...or two very obedient goats  (hey, I always try!)