Rudi Hempe, a University of Rhode Island master gardener who volunteers at the university’s farm in South Kingstown, points out one of the many woodchuck holes dotting the property.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig Kris Craig

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — A few years ago, a sunny afternoon like this would find Rudi Hempe perched on the roof of his tool shed in Narragansett, a 5mm varmint rifle cradled in his lap and his eyes scanning his tended rows of beans and broccoli for summer marauders.

Today he is walking another battlefield — the 70 acres of the University of Rhode Island’s East Farm — remembering those glory days of weeding his home garden of woodchucks, when desperate times demanded ... good aim.

“You could set your watch by them,” he says down in the apple orchard, where several of the portly diggers have created homesteads reminiscent of artillery craters. “They came out around 3, 3:30 every afternoon.”

It is 3:45 p.m. as he speaks. As if to make his point, one of the industrious rodents stands up on his hind legs about 60 yards away, stares at the intruders, then bolts for the tree line; a flash of chestnut brown streaking low across the green landscape. Hempe, 67, one of the head volunteer gardeners on the farm, turns away, as if in defeat.

Hempe and the other volunteers who work the farm, which grows truckloads of produce every year for local food banks, have tried fencing out the woodchucks. They’ve lobbed poisonous smoke bombs down the chucks’ holes. They’ve spread predator urine to keep them at bay and trapped them live, though state law prohibits relocation of animals that can carry rabies.

One URI professor has apparently studied how long it takes to drown a woodchuck, and Hempe admits to pricing out the “Rodenator,” one of the more innovative and explosive methods of eradication on the market today, and one that is changing the life of one Idaho entrepreneur (more on him later).

But short of hiring a marksman for the farm — unlikely, Hempe says — there’s little left to do but accept the inevitable.

“They’re part of the garden. We just try to minimize their impact.”

AT NO OTHER time than summer do the paths of man and nature so often intersect.

Some of our interactions are wondrous. Some of them are nightmarish.

We watch ospreys dive on fish from our beach blankets and share a morning with the mother fox loping through our suburban backyard. We also scream at the milk snake curled on the patio and call in Critter Control for the raccoon in the chimney and the bat swooping over the bed.

For the backyard gardener, run-ins with marmota monax — one of which can reduce a row of young green beans to inch stubs in little time — can break your heart and provoke thoughts of vigilante justice.

Charlie Brown, a wildlife biologist with the Department of Environmental Management, says of woodchucks:

“It’s hard to find good things to say about them, except they are part of the food cycle.”

Coyotes, foxes and even hawks like to eat them.

“They are probably one of the least-studied animals,” Brown says. “Most of the interest in them is how to get rid of them.”

WOODCHUCKS, also known as groundhogs, are one of the largest members of the squirrel family. They can grow 2 feet long and weigh as much as 14 pounds. They are subterranean architects, living in burrow systems that can extend 50 feet, offering a separate bathroom chamber and at least one backdoor for escape.

Like any squirrel, woodchucks are also great climbers. Paul Curtis, of the cooperative extension program at Cornell University, says he’s seen woodchucks as high up as 20 feet in the branches of apple and cherry trees on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus.

Woodchucks, which range across the eastern United States and much of Canada, are also one of the few true hibernators. They spend winters asleep underground, where their heart rate slows to 4 beats a minute, from 80, and their body temperature drops as low as 38 degrees, from 98 degrees.

They awake in March in time to mate. A female woodchuck will usually have a litter of between two to six in April or early May. And then it’s back to the garden.

Brown, of the DEM, says, “There are probably more woodchucks now than there ever have been,” thanks to agriculture.

Why eat meadow grass when you can dine on snap peas?

ED MEYER is 36 and the mayor of Midvale, Idaho, population 175.

Meyer grew up on a large cattle ranch 20 miles east of Midvale where the family had a “terrible problem” with pocket gophers, a small cousin of the woodchuck.

Not only did the gophers create holes that the cattle could step in, but their burrow entrances left mounds of earth and rock in the hay fields.

“You’d end up breaking teeth on the [haying] equipment and you’d get dirt in the hay, which would reduce the price you got.”

Meyer was a nursing student, planning on attending medical school when, in the spring of 2003, “out of frustration, anger and a few beers,” he and some of his buddies had an idea:

“Let’s just blow those suckers up!”

The boys lugged a welder’s acetylene tank to a burrow, pumped in some gas and then slung a spark plug on a wire down into the hole.

“We made one heck of a bang and it blew dirt everywhere and we all laughed, but it worked,” says Meyer.

It worked so well, Meyer started thinking about how he could make the system safe to sell. Before long he had abandoned his nursing career.

He and his partners made a half-dozen prototypes, fueled this time with oxygen and a tank of propane from an ordinary outdoor grill and set off for the world’s largest agriculture exposition in Tulare, Calif.

“We sold all those and got prepaid orders for 20 more,” he says.

He calls his $1,890 creation the “Rodenator.” The targeted explosion of gas sends a 10,000-pounds-per-square-inch concussion through the burrow. The shock wave kills any rodents “instantly” and collapses their den, Meyer says. Problem solved.

Meyer Industries, now with eight employees, has sold 15,000 Rodenators throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Europe. In March, Meyer was named Idaho small-business exporter of the year

For Meyer, woodchucks and their furry cousins have improved his lot in life.

“For us they are really good things, and you know what’s even better? They keep on breeding!”

RUDI HEMPE would love one of those Rodenators.

In 2005, East Farm produced almost 3,000 pounds of vegetables and fruit, which were trucked off for those in need. Then last year, the woodchucks arrived.

By the end of the growing season, Hempe had seen a dramatic reduction coming out of the fields: 957 pounds of produce.

As Hempe walks out of the apple orchard and up toward one of the farm’s greenhouses, the retired newspaperman thinks long before answering the question: Doesn’t he hold just a bit of respect for his indomitable garden adversary?

Finally, he says, “I think they are probably one of the most useless animals on the face of the earth.”

Perhaps such hard feelings come from the brazen disrespect the woodchuck shows him.

For as he walks by the old farmhouse that now serves as the “Master Gardener Field House” — the place where Hempe shares his knowledge of growing things — a brown head with whiskers and a blunt snout pokes out of a hole beside the foundation: a woodchuck.

tmooney@projo.com