Gardening as a Board Game?

Scenario: you have some of the finest soil in the country (30 feet of loam with silt, an old flood plain now spared from flooding by a somewhat compromised levee and decades of illegal water diversion), though the soil contains almost no organic matter (something you can remedy by getting truckloads of horse manure and bedding from the horse barn across the road and working it in; the compost pile you tend assiduously is never, ever enough). Your climate is extreme Mediterranean. The landlord has said you can use a triangular plot with 12+ hours of sun exposure but that is overrun with weeds and ancient grape vines put in maybe 30 years ago which now host a strapping colony of ground squirrels (the landlord’s only request is that you put in a large assortment of sweet curcubits, such as melons, muskmelons, and watermelons, all of which require copious space). Other creatures willing to eat everything you put in the ground are pocket gophers, jackrabbits, cottontails, introduced wild turkeys and the usual earwigs and slugs after a wet spring (we haven’t technically had a wet spring but the timing of our two big rains has conspired to produce a bumper crop), aphids and other beauties like the tomato hornworm, plus Zonotrichia sparrows in winter.

You are given 100 yards of chicken wire, 12 T poles, assorted seeds which, if they bear fruit, will include ratatouille fixings and then some, an inflatable snake to deter birds (ha!), and a copy of Sunset Western Garden. Toxic chemicals are forbidden (don’t look at what they’re putting on the adjacent alfalfa field), but you can use cayenne, garlic, fish oil, and any concoctions made from them, if it makes you feel better. You are to observe the time-honored principles of not planting the same vegetable in the same spot for at least three years.

Your challenge is to get as much as you can to a) germinate (1 point per plant), b) get more than two sets of leaves before it gets eaten by insects and molluscs (2 points), c) encourage pest predators (in this case coyotes, ladybirds, etc.) (3 points per creature eaten, except for aphids, which are 3 points per 1,000), d) flower (4 points per plant), set fruit (5 points), and e) make it into your kitchen after it ripens but before it gets eaten by some creature (remember, ground squirrels can smell exactly when a cherry tomato is at peak; you can’t). You lose points for rotting stems and fruit, infestations of toxic weeds, insufficient or too much watering, and every zucchini that grows over 6” long.

You win the game when you have successfully cooked a ratatouille for eight people in the solar cooker (which will take at least three rounds).