Crashing the party
Sunday June 14th 2015, 10:30 pm
Filed under: Garden,Life,Wildlife

Last year a raccoon climbed my August Pride in the night and broke two thirds right off the top of that little tree, stripping side limbs off too on its way tumbling down. It still didn’t manage to get at the peach inside the fallen clamshell but it knocked the tree straight back to its bare root start. It was awful.

It’s growing back quite nicely. It’s half the height of the Tropic Snow peach and not the pruning job I would have done, that’s for sure, but I will have a better tree for it: there are and will be a lot more limbs closer to the ground because that’s all it had left to grow from and they will be easier to pick.

My middle peach, my Babcock, is the one that’s producing a lot this year. Clamshells, grape Koolaid, cinnamon sprinkling–I’ve been trying them all.

Plus one other thing: a big doubled-over length of bubble wrap tucked gently around its trunk like a shawl. Not taped nor tight; I want the wood to be able to breathe. But I also want mini airbag explosions at the claws and unfamiliar textures for that nocturnal climber who goes mostly by its whiskery sense of touch in the dark.

And it’s worked! One edge of the plastic got shredded at a bit, so I know it tried but it just couldn’t climb it nor over it. Pull at it and it pops back up.

And what really proved my No Trespassing sign had worked was the completely unexpected flash of orange under a cluster of leaves.

All this time and I had not seen that there was a seventh peach–untouched! The scrub jays have started pecking at the Yellow Transparent apples that aren’t enclosed (no Koolaid over there). But wow. An actual unprotected peach growing unseen and undisturbed all this time long enough to gain some coloring and somehow I had missed it. Well, as long as the critters did too, hey!

There’s of course now a clamshell with shipping tape strapped around it. Yellow becoming orange, faint red freckles at the top and a nice pointy bottom for now. Just hang in there a few more weeks…


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Over the weekend, a raccoon ate a giant hole in my most prized possession: my foam pool floaty. I am devastated! Why? Why? Why? Does the raccoon not want me to relax?

Comment by Andrea @ This Knitted Life 06.16.15 @ 7:39 am



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