Opinion | Moneky Business

It always pays to be forward thinking and not leave things to the last minute. Like assuming I only needed to put the finishing touches on the cage protecting my five mealie plants from monkeys when the ears came close to becoming ripe. Not when they were still little finger-like stumps hardly standing out against the green stalk.

When I finally got around to it, most of the nascent mealie cobs were gone. Present was a sign of broken vegetation. “How could this have happened so soon?” I asked myself and then glanced up at the roof when some movement caught my eye.

Monkey business! But with more than just mischievousness. Downright malice.

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A sub-adult monkey sat holding this embryonic mealie is such a way that it appeared to lengthen its middle finger, pointing directly at me. I hastily patched up my monkey-proof mealie cage for the sake of the few remaining cobs but, low and behold, I caught a monkey inside it having craftily made his way through what I thought had become a monkey-tight structure. And he wiggled his way out again with a stringy end of a cob hanging from his mouth.

Again, a “stuff you” attitude. I was pleased to see that Jane Griffiths — Pietermaritzburg born and bred — who almost annually produces a book on food gardening, features a mango-munching monkey in the section titled “larger pests” in her latest publication Jane’s Delicious Natural Solutions for Pest and Diseases “Monkeys and baboons can destroy vegetables in minutes … A long-term solution is to grow vegetables inside a secure cage,” she writes. My not-good-enough cage put me on the back foot when it came to seeking a balanced relationship with monkeys whose place is on the other side of the chicken wire. The book is divided into five main chapters: Prevention; Solutions; Host plants; Pests and Diseases, with four indexes for easy navigation.

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