you weep as we reap

Days before he was going to harvest his plot of potatoes at the Longview Community Garden, Fred Hanson discovered thieves had beaten him to it.
At least half of his 200 potato plants — German buttterballs, Yukon golds, yellow finns — had been ripped from the ground, stripped of their tubers and tossed in a heap, said Hanson, a teacher at St. Helens Elementary School who shares his produce with family, friends, elderly neighbors and the needy.
"It's maddening to work hard for many months, and then people just take things," he said Thursday.
His crops aren't the only ones recently targeted at the 3-acre garden on 32nd Avenue, where people have been renting plot space from the city since the 1970s. Other gardeners say not only have more thieves hit the garden this year, they've also been more brazen, stealing in daylight in front of gardeners who can't do much more than yell at them.
While tending her plot recently, Longview resident Bernice Hillebrand saw two young blonde strangers with a young child taking armloads of corn from a nearby garden. When she asked the women what they were doing, they sped off in a small, older green car.