Sounds like the title of a Manga story doesn’t it? Let me introduce you first to Catzilla…
Most of you know her already as Cherry, my Berliner rescue cat, adopted in April 2018. What was handed over to me as a depressed and maladjusted cat has evolved into a completely self-assured, affectionate and determined little kitty with her 12 years (going on 13).
Every blessed day that I hug her I can’t help thinking that she looks exactly like Toothless the Dragon from the movie How To Train Your Dragon.
Like Toothless, she loves being outdoors and hanging around the pots or lounging around in the sun, I suppose making up for all the lost time she spent in the dark and neglected home she came from and later on the shelter. This is a little smartypants of a feline though. She is a jumper and a sneaky creature who manages to find a loophole in everything. If Champagne was a dasher and socialite, Cherry is an introvert jumper, a demoted accountant in another life who failed at balancing the books because she just found all the loopholes. She has escaped several times and pottered over to the neighbours, and will take her sweet time coming home. I finally sewed up the holes in the net and blocked the gaps in the railing that I caught her squeezing through. Needless to say, she is very annoyed with me.
If she is not sleeping on a warm blanket indoors, rest assured that on the weekends when I am home Cherry can be found among my pots or more precisely, in them. Her favourite is the bell pepper patch, and at some point I had to decide what was more important, my cat’s serenity or the health of my plants. I chose the cat and left the plants up to fate, ending up with tilted, lopsided bell pepper plants, those that got pushed aside when Cherry squashed herself among them, and naturally she killed half the patch.
Mother Nature is resilient and this is something that should never be underestimated. Even though I didn’t have great hopes for them, I continued watering the plants over the summer and into the Fall, as Cherry continued to sleep among them – they just grew out of her way. Lo and behold, while trimming back the plants for winter this morning, guess what I harvested?
Yes! My first crop of bell peppers! To be honest I had no clue which ones were coming up. I distinctly remember planting two varieties, the traditional bell-shaped ones and these elongated ones. Well, now I know which ones Catzilla demolished.
FrogDiva Thoughts 