When we got home from Maine last week, my husband looked out the window and said, "Rats!"

"What's the matter," I asked.

"Rats," he said. "We've got rats" And we did, 2 brown ones underneath the bird feeder on the terrace. Heck, I've never even seen a rat before, except in cartoons. Having rats about the place changes one's attitude about just about everything. It's not nice, like having impetigo, or something else nasty that you don't want the neighbors to know about.

I guess the rats have been here for some time, but I thought the holes in the compost pile and under my favorite rhododendron were from chipmunks or jumbo sized voles. The fact that one rat was large and one was small means that there are at least 2 generations of them. They must have felt brave enough to come to the feeder in broad daylight because nobody was here for several days.

For all I know, having rats is no worse than having skunks, which we have under the shed, or voles or chipmunks, which are longtime residents here. Then I remembered collective nouns such as, "a herd of cows, or a covey of quails or, yikes, a plague of rats." The rats had to go.

So we considered all the ways to get rid of them. The farm catalog we get has all sorts of devilish devices to electrocute them, trap them in glue, catch them live (God knows why) and also assorted rat baits, which can be problematic, to say the least. We ended up with bait from Agway. The directions say to put the bait in the rats' holes and to check every day to see if it has been eaten. for at least 10 days. They must like it a lot, because we are on our third box of it. This is the 6th day, and they are a eating a bit less. I have new plants purchased on vacation to get in the ground, but there's no way I'm digging compost out of the pile...

On a happier note, my friend Carol Pruitt got many of the plants in her beautiful Preston garden from the Farmer's Daughter in on Rt. 138 in Wakefield, Rhode Island, just past U.R.I. We went there last Sunday and it was wonderful. Best of all, they had wooden rain barrels! They are from the Jack Daniels Distillery in Tennessee, which, being from Kentucky, isn't as good as a bourbon barrel, but it's pretty good. We (and we know who "we" is) still have to cut the top out and position it on a flat stone surface and shorten the rain leader, but it looks fabulous anyway just sitting on the terrace. It was 25% off $120.00, whatever that comes out to. No shipping costs either and no charge for the nice whiskey smell. You can check out The Farmer's Daughter at thefarmersdaughterrri.com.