I caught a raccoon almost literally red-handed the other day. The night before, it (and presumably the comrades in its pack, technically known as a “gaze” of raccoons, because sure why not) had assaulted my garden, digging holes willy-nilly and uprooting seedlings I’d just put in the ground. In my three years of gardening, I’ve never actually seen the critters I’ve been at war with, on account of their nighttime raids. I’ve only found their aftermath. But now I had solid evidence: A muddy paw print on a watering can the invaders had tipped over to get a drink.
You might wonder, then, why in his new Netflix docuseries, This Is a Gardening Show, Zach Galifianakis gushes about the joys of adding water and nutrients to a plot of land, hoping something actually grows, and then further hoping that it doesn’t get uprooted by omnivorous nocturnal bandits. “I honestly think for human beings and for the world itself, the only future is agrarian,” says Galifianakis, himself a gardener, in an episode about composting. “We should all know how to garden. It’s a better hobby than jetskiing.”
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