The acanthus. I’ve had good luck with using the vicious stabby flower stalks as guardians of my tomatoes, going two stalks deep on every side. Two, because last year a raccoon pulled the first one away in the night, got a pawful, there was still another in its way and it never went near again. And two, to make the squirrels decide a leap is not worth the landing. With all the rain this year, some were as much as eight feet long. This is useful. (Just don’t accidentally touch them when you reach in for a tomato.)
So, brilliant me, I thought hey, let’s try threading some of those stalks through the Fuji leaves to defend the plastic clamshells. I so much want to be able to have my grandkids pick their own apples at Grandma’s again.
And it worked. For two days.
Thursday evening I came outside and stopped right there speechless.
I didn’t even know I had that many clamshells. The squirrels had presented me a museum installation of them all over the ground beneath that tree and had named it The Inbox. Still with apples inside (except two that must have bounced just right.) There will be no apples from those fruit spurs next year, either.
All I can figure is, when they couldn’t stand on a branch next to the clamshells to try to pry them open, they simply leaped straight at them until they broke off and fell out of the tree–where they still couldn’t get at them, so they tried the next one. And the next. And the next.
I had two that were wedged in too hard and those were still up there.
Uh, today, not so much. Down too, with one branch inside, one whole branch outside. They even knocked down another I didn’t know I had because the leaves had filled in around it.
There is one, count’em, one, clamshell left in that whole tree. Today.
So… What on earth do you do with a whole lot of way-underripe apples? These were supposed to be picked in September and October.
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Chutney?
Comment by LynnM 07.16.17 @ 1:56 amSo sad! Hubby and I have had to resort to traps for the squirrels. We have caught and relocated 4 so far. They totally decimate the strawberries seeming to know exactly when we would be picking them for breakfast and getting in there just before and nibbling away or in some cases totally stealing them. Since we don’t actually kill them, the grandkids are on board with this solution. I think they like the adventure of taking them out in the wild and releasing them. I suspect they just come back though or are just replaced by others. Oh well – we do try. They also will begin attacking the tomatoes soon – silly beasts they take a bite and decide that it wasn’t what they wanted after all.
Comment by Chris 07.16.17 @ 7:33 amPectin. Underripe apples can be processed into your own handmade pectin. Sounds like you may have more than necessary, though? Maybe cider would work? Ugh, I am sorry. We have a very poor Apple year here due to an invasion of caterpillars early on, they also affected our Nanking cherries.
Comment by joanne 07.16.17 @ 9:11 pmLeave a comment
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