If you live in Ottawa you know it’s been a pretty long and hot summer. To that effect, I’ve been dutifully filling up our two bird baths with fresh water. I also added something new to the mix. Well, new-ish. I had this on the go last summer and thought I’d revisit the idea for our garden again.
I made a water dish for butterflies and bees:
But let’s be real here, all kinds of other bugs are invited as well. (We don’t discriminate!)
This bug-friendly water dish was a dinner plate in a former life, and a rather shallow one at that. I added marbles to improve access to the water, although when I think about it I have to confess they are really just for show because bugs don’t need to step on pretty marbles in order to fill their little mouthparts with water.
I did my best to keep it full all summer. I also kept an eye on it to make sure it wasn’t being used as a decorative mosquito nursery.
Having a bug watering dish is a pretty low-maintenance garden chore, as far as things go. I just sprinkle a bit of water into it while I’m watering the garden. That’s it.
So I was watering this dinner plate every other day and although I don’t know exactly how many marbles I had incorporated into this display, I knew that the plate was at least half full of marbles. Let’s say, for the argument’s sake, there may have been 40 marbles. So you can imagine my surprise when I looked down one day to see there was only ONE single marble remaining on the plate.
Not only was there only one marble left out of an estimated 40, it was one of the two largest marbles in the bunch.
I decided to do some detective work in order to get to the bottom of this. (What can I say, I’ve been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes.) First, I questioned the suspects my children. They probably thought I was crazy – and maybe I was – asking my teenage daughters if they did something with my marbles. I asked one kid, nada. It wasn’t her. She left for school. I asked the other kid about 10 minutes later and just as I was about to point out the lone marble on the dish I realized that it, too, was GONE.
I searched the immediate area. There were no marbles on the patio, none in the flower bed. They had evidently disappeared into thin air.
I racked my brain to think who could have possibly stolen my marbles. A crow? A squirrel? Something else? I couldn’t imagine a crow picking up that big glass (and presumably, slippery) marble in its beak.
I scrounged up three more marbles from elsewhere and dropped them on the plate. I was determined to catch the culprit. Alas, I have a job, so I could not monitor the yard as closely as I would have liked. The other marbles disappeared soon enough.
Fast forward to today. I went out there again to undertake a closer investigation of the area. That’s when I discovered this:
Let me walk you through this.
“A” is the dinner plate. “B” is one of the three LURE marbles I put in the plate after the 40 had disappeared. As you can see, it’s partially buried under a plant. “C” is a chipmunk hole underneath a strawberry plant.
So what do you think? Who’s got my marbles?
