Squirrel plan

(xkcd)

Actually, I'm a little worried that my squirrels are starting to think this about me. "Sure, he gives us peanuts from his pocket, occasionally. But why not chew a hole in him and get all of the peanuts?"

I've been telling them stories about the goose that laid the golden eggs, but I don't think they're getting the point.

My war with the squirrels, pt. 2: defeat

(3.bp.blogspot)

Three years ago, I wrote about my war with the squirrels. Well, the war is over. I've accepted defeat. I've laid down my arms. I'm surrendering, unconditionally.

The end was sudden, and I really didn't see it coming. In fact, I thought I was winning handily. My electric fence around the backyard - similar to a cattle fence, but low-powered - was keeping it almost entirely squirrel-free.

I keep peanuts in my pocket, and my squirrels were so tame they'd come running right up to me,... in the front yard. In the backyard, they knew to keep out. Even when I was out there, they'd just look at me from a distance, pleading with me to come feed them a peanut. Meanwhile, I grew apples, peaches, pears, plums, apricots, cherries, strawberries, raspberries - just all sorts of good stuff.

Of course, I was still at war with the birds, and with the insects, and with disease, but I'd won the war with the squirrels. Until I was stabbed in the back by my own species.

My new neighbors actually called the police to complain about my squirrel fence! Why? I don't know. I'd given them plenty of free fruit last year. And the chainlink fence was mine, not theirs. (They only rent, anyway.)

Note that the electric wires were on my side of the fence. They couldn't have been shocked unless they came into my yard or reached over the fence.

But you've got to live with your neighbors. I didn't want a war with them. So when the policeman came by, I agreed to shut it down. (He clearly thought the whole thing was a waste of time, but they have to take complaints seriously. He said he thought that kind of electric fence wasn't allowed in town, though he wasn't sure.)

(Paws & Claws)

Anyway, it took the first squirrel only two days to discover that the electricity was off. Since then, I've been swamped by them. They've eaten all of my apricots, all of my summer apples, all of my peaches, and one whole tree of Asian pears. Now, they're working on my fall apples and the rest of my pears.

I even found a squirrel in my raspberry patch, eating the raspberries. And one day, I saw a squirrel hanging on my bee shelter, pulling out the cardboard tubes, then pulling the paper liners out of the tubes and chewing up the young bee larvae. I couldn't believe it! (These are solitary bees, not honey bees, so they don't sting. But I can't imagine why tiny bee larvae would even be appealing to a squirrel.)

Note that they've completely wiped out most of my fruit crop weeks - and in some cases, months - before the fruit even got ripe. And I couldn't figure out another solution. Certainly, repellant does nothing.

I can chase them away (although, as I said in my first post, they were so tame it was actually hard to scare them, at first), but even if I could remain in the yard from sunup to sundown, every single day, I still can't be everywhere in the yard at once. (Even when I'm working in the yard, they'll be eating fruit twenty feet away, wherever I can't actually see them from where I'm working.)

I've had people recommend slingshots, pellet guns, paintball guns, and all sorts of things, but they're missing the point. The whole world is dangerous to squirrels. That's just their life. They die in droves simply crossing the street, and even dogs won't keep them out of an area.

If I'm dangerous to them - or appear dangerous - they won't come close to me. But that won't keep them from my fruit trees when I'm not there. The reason the electric wire worked was because it was a physical barrier which was there all the time.

They learned very quickly where the wires were, and when I first set it up, they found ways to avoid them. Every time, I had to discover how they were getting past the fence, then patch it up. After awhile, they couldn't find a way. I'd beaten them.

Sure, new squirrels would still get inside occasionally, because they needed to learn about the biting wires. Each one had to learn for himself, and there are always new squirrels. (As I say, the world is a dangerous place for squirrels. They don't live long, but there are always new squirrels to take their place.)

(Cheezburger)

Well, now that's done. They've won. I'm cutting down my fruit trees, because there's no point in trying to grow anything anymore. Oh, I'll keep my sour cherry tree. I don't think squirrels will eat them. And I'll keep growing raspberries. Despite my experience earlier, squirrels can't be as big a problem with black raspberries as birds.

They do like strawberries, I know. (I used to spread strawberry juice on the electric fence. They got so they wouldn't even take a peanut from me, if I had strawberry juice on my fingers!) But I don't think they can eat enough strawberries to keep me from getting some, too - especially since the bird-netting might make them hesitate.

(No, bird-netting won't stop them. But they panic when they get scared, and they get mad as hell when they can't just run through the bird-netting. When calm, they have no trouble at all getting through it. But they'll tend to remember it as a trap, I think. It won't stop them, but it might slow them down.)

So I might get enough strawberries for myself, just not enough for friends and neighbors, too. (I've always given away most of the fruit I grow, because I've had so much of it.) I'll try it another year, at least.

I don't think they'll eat grapes, either, but I'm not positive about that. I've got new varieties of grapes now - sweet varieties - and if there's no other fruit,... who knows? The thing is, it's a lot of work to put bird-netting on my grapevines. It gets harder every year, as I get older and the vines get bigger.

If I don't put up bird-netting, the birds get all of them. But if I go to all that work and the squirrels still wipe me out,... well, that doesn't sound very appealing. Besides, we've got racoons and opossums around here, and I know they like grapes. (The electric fence probably discouraged them, too.)

So I haven't decided yet. I'll keep the grapevines, but I might not net them this year, just to see what happens. Will the squirrels eat them? Will I get any grapes at all without keeping the birds away? I just don't know.

Everything else - all of my trees - are going. I've started chopping them down already. (Some of this isn't because of the squirrels. I'd already decided that my sweet cherries weren't worth it. They were getting too big to net, so the birds were getting all the fruit that the bugs and fungal diseases hadn't already destroyed.)

My last remaining pluot tree - "Flavor Supreme" - had probably the best tasting fruit I've ever eaten. But there were never enough on the tree to make it worthwhile. This year there were just four fruit on the tree - which is still twice as many as I've ever had before - but the squirrels destroyed them before they got ripe. So it's gone now, but I was probably going to get rid of it, anyway.

(ATS)

Oddly enough, one of the worst things about this has been that I've taught my squirrels to fear me again, since I've been (futilely) chasing them out of the backyard. They were so tame, they'd come running right up to me in the front yard.

And at first, as I noted, I had trouble getting them to run away at all. I'd throw a stick at them, and they'd just sniff at the stick, expecting to find something good to eat. I'd run at them, stomping my feet and yelling, and they'd just look at me in amazement, wondering what in the heck I was doing.

Eventually, I had to poke several of them hard with a stick, just to get them to run. (Even then, they'll only run as far as they have to. You can't bluff them. If you want them to leave, you have to chase them the whole way.)

But now, they won't come up to me on the front porch, either. Well, one squirrel still runs up for peanuts, but even he is warier than he used to be. That's a shame. They're a pain sometimes, but they're still fun to have around.

I mean, sure, we were at war. But we could still be gentlemen about it, right? :)

Now that I've surrendered,... well, we'll just have to see. I'm still going to want to grow tomatoes. And strawberries. And raspberries. So we'll still have skirmishes, I'm sure. I doubt if we'll ever have that understanding between the front yard and the backyard again.

Busy

Sorry about the scarcity of blog posts lately, but I've been busy picking strawberries, cherries, and gooseberries - and then sitting for hours in the evenings watching YouTube videos as I pick through the fruit and get it ready for the freezer.

As usual, I've got a million things to blog about, and I'm still reading and playing computer games, but... something's got to give.

I did pick the last of the strawberries today. (They're really in a mess, so it's going to take me awhile to cut out the bad spots.) But I'm still picking cherries, and I've got more gooseberries to pick, and now the raspberries are ripening, too. (Luckily, raspberries are no trouble at all to freeze, because I don't have to do anything to them first.)

You know, I shouldn't be so far behind, because I had an extra day this week. I went to get a haircut yesterday, and my barber said that she had the appointment scheduled for Friday. I said, "It's not Friday?"

What can I say? I'm retired. It sure felt like Friday. In fact, for the rest of the day, it still seemed like Friday. It was like I'd gained a day, but I went and had lunch, then picked up a book when I got home and... that was it. I spent the rest of the day reading. So much for my extra day, huh?

OK, I've got to get started on those strawberries. I'm not looking forward to it, but it's got to be done. And they'll definitely be welcome this winter.

Don't you just hate summer?

Don't you hate summer, when you can't just sit around and play computer games all day? (And blog.) Or is it just me?

Sorry about the lack of posts here, but... well, I spent most of Sunday afternoon picking strawberries. (The rest of it, I was trying to erect a barrier to keep the squirrels from my apricot trees,... which was a complete waste of time, because there are only about three apricots they haven't already destroyed, at least on my Chinese apricot.)

And yes, I should have done that Saturday, but I had other stuff that just had to be done, so I'd barely started on the strawberries when it started to rain. I continued to pick, for awhile, but it's hard enough crawling around on my hands and knees under the bird-netting without coping with rain, too.

So, anyway, I had nearly every container I owned filled with strawberries by late Sunday afternoon. I gave some to a neighbor, but most weren't in very good shape. (Early in the season, I give them away, because they're really nice, then. By now, they're much smaller and very much bug-eaten, so I keep those for myself.)

I should have picked through them Sunday night, so I could freeze them for the winter. But instead, I played Arma 3. Now, yes, I've been spending a lot of time playing this game, but only at night - and even then, only on Saturday and Sunday. Is that so bad?

Well, I guess it was that time, because by Monday, those strawberries weren't looking too great. But I still couldn't get to them immediately, because my cherries were turning red, and if I want any cherries at all, I have to keep the birds away. So I spent six hours Monday afternoon putting bird-netting on my cherry trees.

After that, I came inside and immediately started on the strawberries - the mostly rotten strawberries, by then. I spent seven hours picking through rotten strawberries, cutting off the least rotten parts of them, and freezing those. (Yum, yum - I'm sure they'll be tasty next winter.) It was 1 AM before I finished!

After a refreshing 5 hours of sleep (I had things to do), I was back outside spraying fungicide. You see, I'd discovered that the sweet cherries - on my one tree, at least - were rotting on the tree. (Maybe that's why they say sweet cherries aren't really suited for Nebraska.) I'm not sure how much good it will do to spray them now, but it can't hurt, right?

I had some errands, so I got cleaned up and left, getting back mid-afternoon,... and I just couldn't face more yard work at that point. I was tired, so I took a nap, then got up and played Distant Worlds: Shadows all night. What can I say? If I were ambitious, I'd still be working for a living. :)

At any rate, I got up and went right to work this morning. I washed a couple of loads of laundry, and while that was going on, I went back out to spray my fruit trees again (a pesticide, this time) - all before breakfast. In fact, I'm just finishing breakfast as I type this.

And now, I have to go pick strawberries again. And the lawn really needs mowing (again!). Plus, I'm behind in thinning my fruit,... and I need to get started with summer pruning sometime, too.

Don't you just hate summer?

Strawberry season

Yeah, folks, I'm still alive. Just busy with strawberries.

And games, of course - Arma 3, Distant World: Shadows, Expeditions: Conquistador. And I read an 850-page book last week, while ferrying Mom around town, but I haven't had time to write a review.

But mostly, I'm swamped with yard work. I picked strawberries today until I ran out of containers to put them in, so now I'm going to watch videos while I pick through them and get them ready for the freezer.

And then back out to pick more strawberries, if I last that long. Plus, with all the rain we've been getting, the lawn needs mowing again. And the squirrels are destroying my apricot crop, so I really should do something about that. And most of my fruit needs thinning,... and spraying.

It's not all going to get done, I'll tell you that. I just got too far behind this summer. As usual. :)

More critter wars

(NOV)

It was 100° F yesterday (pretty much an average day this summer), so of course I worked out in the hot sun for almost eight hours.

I started at 10 AM - early, for me - and finished at 6:30 PM, without even stopping for lunch (although I did take a beer and computer game break for almost an hour).

The problem was that my red grapes were starting to change color, and I knew what would happen then. Indeed, in just the few days since I noticed that - days when I was busy elsewhere, unfortunately - the robins had already eaten about a third of them.

Yes, I've already mentioned my war with the squirrels, but they're my biggest problem, not the only one.

In this case, I'd already netted my early grapes, but I can't completely block off the grapes without netting the entire row. There wasn't much of an opening there - I'd blocked it as best I could - but birds will find any opening at all.

Usually, they'll find a way inside, but no way to get out again. This time, though, the red grapes were near the end of the netting, so they didn't have that problem. And in just a few days, they'd wiped out cluster after cluster of grapes.

So yesterday I extended the netting - not quite to the end of the row, but at least to my gate (that leaves a much smaller opening that's a long way from the grapes that are starting to ripen). I also pruned and netted my little Pink Lady apple tree.

The apples, too, have been pecked to death by birds. And given how wormy they seem to be - for some reason, I just hate to spray, so don't get it done early enough or often enough - it was probably a waste of time, anyway.

But the tree is right next to my grapevines, so I just netted the whole thing. That might make it a little easier to pick grapes when the time comes, too.

But this story is mostly about rabbits. Rabbits don't usually cause me problems, because I've covered my chainlink fence with chickenwire (against the fence, it's pretty much invisible - most people don't even notice it).

I've got hardware cloth on the bottom of the gates, too, so rabbits can't normally get inside. But if they do get inside, they can be almost impossible to get out again. A couple of years ago, I actually chased a young rabbit around my yard until it died of heat stroke.

Well, it turned out yesterday that there was a rabbit nest right alongside the fence where I was working, very close to the gate.

As parched as my lawn is - we haven't had any rain in a long, long time - you wouldn't have thought rabbits could have been hiding anywhere, but it doesn't take much! And they stayed still for a long time, though I must have been stomping around right next to them.

Finally, a baby rabbit jumped out right from under my feet, then two more. Now, I'm always very careful to keep the gate closed, just for that reason. But these rabbits were very small - small enough to squeeze through the chickenwire, with difficulty, if they were highly motivated.

The first one ran to the south and got stuck trying to get through the chickenwire. As I say, it wasn't easy even for them. He started squealing (causing his mother to come running), but by the time I got there, he'd pulled loose and found a better place to get through my fence.

As I ran to get the first baby rabbit, I saw the second one scoot through the fence into my backyard, too. I don't know where the third one went. I just hope he didn't do the same thing.

At any rate, I was able to catch the first bunny and release him in the front yard. I hope his momma will find him there. But I couldn't find the others, not at first.

However, just before I went inside for the day, I thought I'd try something else. I took the hose and sprayed the area along the fence (from the inside), which cause the second bunny to move enough that I could spot him.

Note that this is the area under the grapevines which I had just netted off, so there was a temporary chickenwire fence on both sides. That temporary fence wasn't much of an obstacle for the baby rabbits (there were gaps all along the bottom), but it made things rather difficult for me.

When I tried to grab the bunny - or scare him back through the fence, which was more likely - he got stuck. He'd picked the absolute worst place to try to get through it, and he got so stuck I wasn't sure I'd ever get him out.

Of course, he just squealed and squealed as I worked to get him free, lying on my belly with one hand extended. (Again, his mother came running. I must say that I was impressed. What's a rabbit supposed to do, anyway, against, well,... anything eating her babies? But she got as close as she could.)

After working all day in the heat, I was just exhausted - and dripping with sweat. But eventually I got the bunny free, pushing him through the fence to join his mother.

As I say, I don't know what happened to the third one, but I sure hope he's not still in my yard somewhere. In another few days, they'll be too big to squeeze through the chickenwire, and my backyard is rabbit heaven. I'll never get him out, not until fall, at least.

Like the birds, rabbits will find any opening you leave them. The first few years taught me that! But I've got all the holes plugged up now, I'm sure. But that works both ways. If they can't get in, they can't get out.

Normally, baby rabbits won't leave the nest until they're too big to get through the chickenwire. They won't leave momma that early, certainly. And they'll stay in the nest unless you're right on top of them (or until the lawnmower is right on top of them, which is all too common).

It was just my bad luck - and theirs - that I'd needed to net those grapes then, and not a few days earlier or later. Oh, well, I hope they made it. I don't want to hurt them, I just don't want them inside my fence. There's plenty of room in the front yard for them.

Today, it's suppose to be 105°, and I need to finish netting the last of the grapes. Unfortunately, it's also supposed to be windy today, so that might not be possible. Well, I have plenty of work to do out there.

Any maybe I'll actually pick some grapes today. My earliest grapes are ripe, mostly. And let me tell you, they are worth the effort.

Raspberries

(image from Growing a Green Family)

I'm just swamped here, getting further and further behind on everything. I can't blame it all on fruit-growing, but that's a big part of it.

Right now, my raspberries and cherries are ripe. (My strawberries are almost done, but still require work.) And then there's everything else that needs my attention,... but isn't getting it!

Anyway, I thought I'd post a bit about my raspberries. (I'll leave the cherries for another day.)

My raspberries were planted by the birds. Years ago, a single plant took root at the corner of my garage and the chainlink fence, where the mower couldn't get it. Neglect let it grow big enough for me to recognize as a raspberry plant, so I thought I'd leave it and see what happened.

Well, it grew some absolutely delicious black raspberries! Really, they're just wonderful - sweet and tasty. So I let it spread, and now I have two long rows of raspberry plants.

If I were cooking pies and such, red raspberries might be preferable. But for fresh eating, these can't be beat. And I try to freeze some for the winter, too. Like the rest of the fruits I freeze, they end up on my morning oatmeal.

Black raspberries are tip-rooters. They don't spread from the root. Rather, the canes extend down to the ground in late summer and they root from there. That makes them very easy to train, growing new plants wherever you want them. But they'll spread like wildfire if you let them.

They're also - like strawberries, like grapes - one of the easiest fruits I grow. They don't have to be sprayed at all, and that's really important for me. (For some reason, I just <i>hate</i> spraying. Here on the plains, it's often too windy to spray, and it has to be done early in the day, when I can't seem to get motivated. I end up not spraying nearly often enough - and not nearly early enough, either.)

Black raspberries fruit on last year's canes, which I've fastened to a cable. Meanwhile, new canes grow up. When they get about chest high, I snip the ends off, so they'll branch. (I like them high, so they're easier to pick. But if they're too high, they tend to die on me over the winter.)

When this year's crop is ended, I remove the old canes. That's not easy to do, given the thorns - and the heat and humidity here in the summer. And it's easy to damage the young canes. Some people apparently wait until fall to remove the old canes, but this works better for me.

Once the old canes are gone, I can see what I've got, and I can tie the young canes to the cable. It's a mess by the end of the summer, but I can't imagine what a mess it would be if I left the old canes there, too!*

It's a lot of work, but when it's done, it's done. After that, I pretty much ignore the whole patch, except for snipping off the tops of new growth and tying up any canes that need it. In the early spring, I prune off the long, thin canes that dangle to the ground everywhere - leaving about 18" or so to bear fruit. It's simple enough.

I'm not going to claim that it's work-free, but compared to most of what I grow, it's a piece of cake. The raspberries ripen when the strawberries are just ending (in mid-June, usually), so the timing is great.

Of course, the birds love them, and there's really no way for me to net the raspberry patch. (In a way, that's a good thing, because it took me all day just to net one of my cherry trees.) Usually, there's enough raspberries for me and the birds, but not always.

Last year, I invited friends over to pick them, but I ended up not getting any raspberries myself, because the birds kept them cleaned out after that. This year, I don't have so many young robins, but I've got huge flocks of grackles in the yard.

It's been best to get out early in the morning and pick what I want, before the birds can get too many of them. But what can I say? The birds planted them, after all. And the fact that I can't net them is, quite frankly, a relief, as much work as that always is. (And no, I haven't found any effective way of scaring off the birds. They're too smart for that.)

The squirrels never bothered my raspberries, even when I didn't have the electric fence barrier around the backyard. (As I was just now reminded, my apricots have been a complete waste of time, because I simply can not keep the squirrels from wiping out the whole crop, long before the fruit even gets ripe.)

My experience is really getting me to appreciate fruit which is easy to grow. But fruit that's easy to grow and also delicious is ideal. (My currants are easy to grow, but I don't even bother to pick them anymore.) Given that I didn't even have to plant them myself, these black raspberries have to be one of my real favorites.


*PS. I don't have room for this myself, but if I did, I'd drive steel posts at an angle on both sides of my raspberry rows (like this:  \ /). The cable - or wire, or decorative chain - would then run along both sides of the row, instead of down the middle.

Tying the canes to one side or another would leave the center free for the young canes to grow, since it'd get enough sunlight there. (With a single cable down the middle, the old canes often shade out the young ones.) And it would be easier to remove the old canes without damaging the young ones.

This would work great, I suspect, but I can't use it, because I barely have enough room as it is. Oh, well, that's the case with pretty much everything I grow here. It's all crowded together.

Strawberries

(image from 77 Ingredients)

Strawberries have been one of the easiest fruits I grow here in Nebraska. They don't seem to require any spraying at all, and even a dozen plants will spread all over the place. But note that they're not entirely work-free, either.

I started a few years ago by planting some ever-bearing strawberries in the northeast corner of my lot. That was a mistake. It might seem nice to have strawberries for an extended period of time, but only the birds and the squirrels got any.

Even with "June-bearing" strawberries (the Earliglow variety works well for me), which ripen en masse over about a month, they have to be netted to keep the birds from destroying my crop. And it's hard to keep the netting up for long.

Even a small hole will be enough for birds to get inside (though not out again). In fact, I'm not even sure a hole is necessary. I've had birds seemingly teleport into my strawberry patch. At least, I've never been able to find out how they got inside.

And netting, of course, won't keep the squirrels away. I had to put up an electric fence for that. Even then, it didn't work all that well until I put strawberry juice on the wires. Now that worked! :)

My squirrels are very tame. I feed them peanuts from my pocket (only in the front yard, these days), and they'll come running up to get one when I'm outside. But two years ago, I had strawberry juice on my fingers when I tossed a peanut to a squirrel, and he wouldn't touch it. Apparently, that strawberry-juice-on-the-electric-fence idea was excellent aversion therapy!

(Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to work with anything else. I've put peach juice on the wires with no result whatsoever. I don't know why. But the strawberry juice works very, very well. Even when they get into my backyard these days, they don't bother the strawberries.)

My original planting shrunk as my fruit trees got bigger. The strawberries would still grow just fine under the fruit trees, but then I couldn't spray when the strawberries were blooming. And although the strawberries don't need spraying, most everything else does. So I had to cut it back.

But I heard that strawberries don't need much sun, and that they'll grow on the north side of a house. So I put a new, larger patch there. I have a tall house, so they're shaded quite a bit, but they still grow great.

They might not produce quite as many strawberries, and they're a bit later ripening, but the plants in that patch are still loaded with berries. And it's a good location for another reason, too. Strawberries are very shallow-rooted, and they suffer terribly in our hot, dry summers. These on the north side of my house do especially well then, since they get some shade.

Anyway, I picked strawberries for three hours yesterday, and my back is killing me. I always have to unfasten the bird netting and crawl under it, then reach out to pick strawberries that can be very hard to find in the dense vegetation. I'm getting too old for this!

And it didn't help that my snakes just love the strawberry patch. They're just garter snakes, but my yard is full of them. I stood on the back porch yesterday and counted nine at once.  And that was just where I could see them. Inside the strawberry patch, they're effectively invisible.

Now, I like having the snakes around, but they can still surprise me. (Even a shed snakeskin can surprise me, sometimes.) A half dozen times yesterday, as I was picking strawberries, I'd be stretched out trying to reach the berries in the middle of the patch and a snake would poke its head up right next to me.

Well, they're harmless, of course, but I couldn't help but flinch each time that happened. We seem to have an instinctive response to such surprises - at least I do. Anyway, if the stretching to pick berries wasn't enough to make my back ache, the sudden jerk when I was surprised by a snake certainly was!

Ah, but it's worth it! These strawberries are much better than what you can buy in a grocery store (which are picked green, pretty much). They're red all the way through, and just wonderful. The earliest strawberries are the nicest - the biggest, certainly. So I give all of those away.

The later strawberries are much smaller, and they start to get more slug and ant damage. So I keep those for myself, freezing most of them for the winter.

Later, I'll have to remove the bird netting, then refurbish the plantings. You're supposed to mow off the leaves on the entire patch, then plow up half of it (alternating which half each year) and let new runners colonize it again.

That doesn't seem to work too well here, because it's always so hot and dry by then. It would be different if I could keep it irrigated, but I've got too much to do already. So I'm still experimenting with different techniques.

We don't seem to have leaf problems here - probably because it's so dry - so I think I can skip the mowing. And I think I might have to pull the old plants by hand, since my plants struggle to put out runners when it's really hot and really dry.

I don't know. My original patch didn't do very well last year, and I might end up tearing it out and replanting it next spring. But I'd rather not, if I don't have to.

At any rate, strawberries are work, but a lot less work than most of the stuff I plant. At the very least, it's easier putting bird netting on strawberries than over grapevines and fruit trees - a lot easier!

And I get a lot of strawberries from a relatively-small space, too. I give strawberries to neighbors, friends, and family - pretty much anyone who wants some - and often still have enough to freeze to last me most of the winter.

The plant murderer

It's kind of funny, but I hate to kill plants. A few years ago, I dug up some peonies which had been here since before I bought the house, and I felt like a murderer. I'm usually OK pulling weeds, but that's about it. Even my house plants end up feeling like pets. No matter how ratty they get, I don't want to put them down.

But earlier this year, I decided I needed to get rid of a couple of fruit trees. Partly, that was because I've got way too many here - there's more trees, bushes, and vines than I can handle, and it's all over-crowded. But these two trees were really pretty worthless for me, anyway.

One was a Dapple Dandy pluot (pluots are a cross between a plum and an apricot). It was a big, beautiful tree, well-branched, which was always loaded with fruit. Unfortunately, every year, all of the fruit would rot before it got ripe - brown rot, I think. But although I sprayed with various fungicides, it never made the slightest difference. Every day during the summer, I'd go out and pick off the latest rotten fruit, throwing it in the garbage, until it was all gone. I never got a single ripe fruit.

The other tree was a Hosui Asian pear. I've got a couple of other Asian pears which are just wonderful, but I've struggled trying to train this one. But the big problem is that the fruit has been absolutely tasteless. I can eat almost anything, but even I haven't been able to eat this stuff! (It's funny, because my other Asian pears are so good!)

So I haven't gotten useful fruit from either tree - not a single one. It was time they went. But as I was cutting off one limb after another, I just felt like a murderer, slowly dismembering my victims. "Please! Just give me one more chance! I'll be good, I promise."

OK, I'm not quite so far gone that I'm hearing voices, but I just couldn't kill those trees. I cut them way, way back, but I didn't remove them entirely. It's dumb, I know. What can I say?

But the really funny thing is that my pear tree is just a mass of blossoms right now. The only thing left of the tree is a trunk about four or five feet high and three thick, crooked branches, with the ends amputated, all on the west side of the tree. It looks kind of like a short ladder that's been split lengthwise.

But it's just a solid mass of big, beautiful, showy white blossoms. It really is pretty funny. It's the prettiest little tree in my yard, if you don't mind the odd shape of it. (I'd post a picture, if I had a camera.)

(Even funnier, perhaps, is that I apparently pruned off all the flower buds on my European pear trees - and those were ones I did want producing fruit this year. Oh, well, live and learn...)

The pluot is doing pretty well, too, but I left more branches on that one. Not too many more, but at least it still looks like a tree,... kind of. Of course, it's pretty stupid to leave it alive at all. But I really hate to murder my plants, even when I can't hear them scream.

Pruning

I haven't been blogging much lately, and that probably won't change right away. I've got a million things to blog about - thanks for the links you've been sending me! - but I'm not sure when, or if, I'll get to them.

I've been pruning my fruit trees, and it's been such an incredibly warm March that everything is bursting out at once. I just can't keep up with it. I've got my trees and bushes pruned, and I'm starting on my grapevines, but they're already starting to leaf out, not just bud out.

And it will be the raspberries after that, and - sometime - get my garden started. (I wanted to plant some cold-weather crops weeks ago, but I just haven't had the time.) The grass is getting long, too, which isn't a big deal, but does take time away from everything else.

Anyway, I'm just behind on everything. (You should see my email Inbox!) But I'll still be blogging. I'll try to post some things without much commentary, because those are quick. As I said, I'll try. You know how hard it is for me to say nothing. :)

And I do want to post my second year in Summitspear, my Dwarf Fortress fort. It's been nearly a month since my first post, but I've had little time to play.

Yeah, I know those aren't popular here, but I have a lot of fun writing them, and my vote trumps yours. Heh,  heh. Frankly, just the fact that they're fun to write probably means I'll get to that before most of the rest of this stuff.

OK, I just thought I'd give you a heads-up. I don't want to lose the readers I've got (each one as precious as rubies, I assure you). I'm not dead and I'm not losing my interest in blogging. But I did say that I'd be slowing down once winter was over, and I'm especially busy right now.

Spring

(ScienceNOW)

It's March, so I declare it spring. (You know, I've never understood making the equinox the "official" start of spring. What does that have to do with spring? Spring, after all, depends on your location.)

At any rate, spring, for me, means a whole lot more work - mostly outdoors, but also trying to catch up on all of the indoor work I should have been doing all winter. So I really need to cut back on blogging.

Yes, I've said that before. It's just hard to do. And considering how far behind I am already,... well, it's really pretty ridiculous. I've got tons of things I'd like to blog about. And I haven't even looked at some of the links people have sent me. Well, I'm really behind on my email in general.

Nevertheless, I need to switch modes here, from winter to spring. So if I don't post anything for a day or two, don't call the rescue squad. I'll probably continue to post quite a bit anyway, but I'm going to try to cut back.

Likewise, if I'm a little slower on email, don't be surprised by that, either.  As I say, it's spring!

PS. Wondering about that illustration up above? Expecting a robin, maybe?

(Dulcy's Doorstep)

Well, robins are certainly a sign of spring - early spring, even. But I've got a snake pit under the garage, where a whole bunch of garter snakes are probably having wild, passionate sex - if not now, then soon enough.

And it won't be too long before my whole yard is overrun with snakes. OK, it will be awhile yet. Snakes don't like the cold. So maybe I should have gone with the robin in the first place. :)

My garden woes

By this time of year, I'm normally just swamped with fruit. I'll have given fruit to my friends, relatives, pretty much all of my neighbors, and even people just passing by. I'll have my freezer stocked with fruit for the winter, and I'll have eaten so much fruit myself that I'm actually rather tired of it.

But not this year. For a variety of reasons - some of my own making - this summer has been a complete disaster. All my work, day after day, has been pretty much for nothing. And the main reason for that has been the squirrels. I just haven't been able to keep them out of my fruit this year.

I've tried all sorts of things. Finally, this past week, I took my electric fence charger in to be tested. Apparently, it wasn't working right (still shocking, apparently, but not all the time), so I bought a new one. This one was far more expensive than the first and much more powerful. This one is for cattle, not pets, and I was strongly urged not to touch it myself.

Note that it has a very high voltage - thousands of volts, I think - but very low current. So it will sting, it will probably hurt like hell, but it's not dangerous. It won't actually cause any damage. But when I first plugged it in, I quickly discovered a problem with my setup. I could hear this loud cracking sound from underground, where I've got an insulated wire going under the gate on my chainlink fence.

Let me tell you, that was a scary sound! After hearing that, I really don't want to touch the electric fence wire! Every second, when that charger would pulse, I'd hear it. CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!  I don't know if that would intimidate the squirrels, but it certainly intimidated me!

I dug up the underground cable (it's an insulated wire specially-designed for this purpose, because ordinary electric cable isn't insulated for such high voltages) and discovered a spot where the insulation was damaged. It wasn't scraped off completely, but it was thin enough that a high-voltage spark could jump to ground.

So I got that fixed - although I still hear cracking occasionally, where the electricity has found another place on my fence, due to water or dirt, to jump to ground - and I turned it on. The result? Pretty well... nothing. The squirrels are still eating my fruit. In fact, that squirrel eating the last of my fall peaches and fall apples crawls through those electric wires without seeming to notice anything at all!

Yeah, apparently squirrel fur is really good insulation. After making this change, now I'm terrified to go into my own backyard, or at least to go anywhere near those electric wires, but the squirrels don't notice it at all. Heh, heh. (Seriously, I think the squirrels will still get zapped occasionally, and will eventually learn to avoid the wires. Whether that will keep them out of my fruit or not is another question.)

It's not just the squirrels causing me problems, though. Squirrels don't normally eat my grapes, but the birds sure do, so I go to a great deal of work putting up bird netting. (Note that the wasps and bees really attack my grapes, too, and the netting doesn't do anything to help with that. I don't like to spray them, because I don't want to kill bees, but you can't believe the numbers I get here - or the damage they do. I don't know what commercial growers do.)

Anyway, I really worked to get the nets up and to make sure there weren't any holes anywhere. The result? The other day, I had four robins inside the netting! One of them was dead when I found him - tangled up in the netting, hanging upside down. Yeah, I hate when that happens! (There are ways to minimize that, but not to avoid it entirely.)

The other three were very much alive, and I was able to get two of them out of there. Well, I got one out, and the other seems to have found a way out on his own. At least, I don't see him in the grapes anywhere. But the last robin - a young one - was really a pain!

I could catch him through the netting, but never near an opening (and I didn't want to cut a hole in my net). I've got chickenwire along the ground (that's actually to keep the birds from getting tangled up in netting bunched along the ground), so I propped that up to let  him out. But when I got close, he wouldn't fly down, where he could get out, but always up into the netting, instead.

And when I left him alone, he didn't want to get out. What, and leave all those lovely grapes? I left him alone for two days, with the fence still propped up, and I could see him resting on the ground right beside that opening,... but he was just as happy as could be staying inside, eating all the grapes he could stuff down his throat.

Finally, this morning, I went out and got him out of the net. It was a struggle, but I finally accomplished that. Of course, by tomorrow, they'll be back in there again, I suppose. Or some other birds will be. I don't know how they get inside, but they do.

Of course, they really, really work at it. They can see those grapes inside, and they really do work to get at them.

Sometimes, I'll see birds just beating themselves against the netting. I don't know if they've become furious at seeing those grapes just out of reach, if they're trying to beat their way through the netting, or if they're merely trying to push the net closer to a bunch of grapes (any bunch close to the net is quickly stripped of grapes). But they really do work at it.

And they're very good at finding even the smallest opening to squeeze through. They're not very good at all at finding their way out again. But maybe they just don't have the same incentive then.

Speaking of which, I did have a squirrel inside my bird netting the other day. I don't know why. (I hope he wasn't discovering a taste for grapes.) When I walked outside, he tried to scamper off, but couldn't get out of the netting. Man, he was absolutely furious! Heh, heh. It was pretty funny.

I thought at one point that he might get tangled up in the netting, which wouldn't be funny at all (because I'd have to try to cut him out of it - without getting bit). But I deliberately scared him, so he might think twice before coming back. I even smacked him - lightly - with a stick.

Well, when a squirrel panics, all they can think about is running away. And when they're surrounded by nylon netting, that doesn't work too well. Heh, heh. Well, after a few minutes, I left him alone, and he had no trouble finding a way out then. He probably just got out through one of the seams. It's not that hard for a squirrel. (Before I got my electric fence set up, they'd slip in and out of the bird netting covering my strawberries with no problem at all.)

All this would be pretty funny if I weren't working my butt off for nothing! Luckily, this is just a hobby for me. But I sympathize with farmers and others who grow food for a living. It can't be easy. We do need to share our planet with wildlife, but I understand that it's not always easy.

My war with the squirrels

(image from NewsBiscuit)

My war with the squirrels has been going on for a few years now, ever since I started growing fruit in the backyard. (The birds are bad, too, but I can net most trees to keep them away. It's very hard work, and I can't leave the netting up for long, but it's effective.)

Oh, there were a few skirmishes with the squirrels before that, mostly over bird-feeders. And chewing holes in my house. But we'd settled into a guarded peace, mostly because I abandoned sunflower seed in my feeders entirely. But fruit proved to be the flashpoint to a new, hot war.

At first, I figured I'd just keep the squirrels full, so they wouldn't need to eat my fruit. I started carrying a pocketful of roasted peanuts, and my squirrels got remarkably tame. But no matter how many peanuts they ate, there was still room for dessert, I guess. Because it didn't keep them from going after the fruit.

Well, I know it was foolish to feed them in my backyard at all. So I started chasing them out of the backyard and only feeding them in the front. That was pretty funny, at first. My squirrels were so tame that they wouldn't even run away from me! I'd stomp my feet and yell as I rushed at them, and they'd just stand there wondering why I was acting so ridiculous (as my neighbors wondered, too, I suppose).

If I looked like I was going to step on them, they'd move a few feet, but no more than that. It took awhile until they got the idea. Then, they'd run until they got into the front yard, at which point they'd stop and wait until I caught up with them,... so they could get a peanut. I'm not sure who was training whom.

Meanwhile, I embarked on a major project to turn my backyard into Ft. Knox. I put chickenwire on the chainlink fence, so the squirrels (and rabbits) couldn't get through it (and hardware cloth at the bottom, so squirrels or baby rabbits couldn't dig under it). Then I ran a couple of strands of electric wire - high voltage, but low current, like a low-powered cattle fence - on insulators around the top.

I never saw the squirrels get stung by it (although I got zapped almost every time I worked in the yard - sweaty bare skin conducts electricity very well). Squirrel fur seems to be very good insulation. Plus, the wires weren't hot all the time, since the charger pulses. And the squirrels were just too quick at getting through them.

Still, they must have gotten bit by it occasionally, because they really learned to avoid the wires. They'd do almost anything to keep from climbing the fence, so I thought I'd won the war. Last year, I don't think they ate a single peach, and maybe only an apple here and there. And after I smeared strawberry juice on the electric wires, they wouldn't touch a strawberry even if you gave it to them. (Oddly enough, that only seems to work with strawberry juice, nothing else.)

But the squirrels were apparently just regrouping for a new offensive. Unfortunately, I've got some fruit trees outside the chainlink fence, including two apricot trees very close to the front yard. I put a low fence - just one foot high - around them, with a couple of electric wires on top of that, but it's really not much of a barrier. And last year, when my apricots got ripe, the squirrels just wiped them out.

The thing is, squirrels don't even like apricots. What they like is the apricot seed. They'll just spit out the fruit. But they'll very quickly destroy a whole tree full of apricots, just to get at the pits.

Now last year was the first year I'd ever had apricots. The trees grow well here, but they bloom too early and the blossoms almost always freeze in the variable weather of Nebraska's springs. So my squirrels had never even seen an apricot before then. Unfortunately, they learn quickly.  This year, I had apricots on both trees for only the second time ever, but they were all gone a whole month before they would have gotten ripe.

You see, my squirrels had learned that apricot pits taste good. And they'd also learned exactly where those electric wires were. They wouldn't climb or even jump that short little fence, but they still found a way around it. (Unfortunately, my yard is pretty crowded with fruit trees and bushes, and it's really hard to keep them from finding a way inside. If necessary, they'll just climb a nearby tree and jump from it, over the fence.)

After they wiped out my apricots, they came into the backyard and started working on the apples, plums, peaches, pluots, and Asian pears. They've completely wiped out my Gala apples, my delicious summer variety. I hadn't realized that squirrels liked little green apples so well, but they'll strip an apple tree in short order. With my peaches, they waited until they started to turn color. But I don't think I'm likely to get any ripe ones this year.

Still, I haven't given up the fight. I've spent the last few days trying to rebuild my electric fence. I should have made it more squirrel proof right from the beginning, because I'm sure they'd be easier to keep out if they didn't know that there were peaches inside.  Well, I don't think that "squirrel proof" is even possible. But there's enough open space on the east and north to put down a pretty effective barrier, I think. (I'd foolishly left some gaps in my original construction.)

On the west, well, I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep them out that way. My grapevines are so thick that they can jump up into them and be completely hidden from sight. Luckily, they don't seem to eat grapes. (I wish I could say the same thing about the birds!) But they can easily get from the grapevines to everything else.

And I don't think I'll ever be able to keep them out of my apricots, unless maybe I cut down all the nearby bushes. And even then, I have my doubts. But we'll see. The war goes on. The squirrels have won the battle this year, destroying almost everything I've got. But I haven't given up the fight.

And they have learned that they're not supposed to be in my backyard. When I open the backdoor, they run. When I open my front door, they run, too - right up to me to get a peanut. Yeah, they're shameless.

PS. I wish I could tell the squirrels apart, because I think that most of my problems come from my neighbors' squirrels, to my east and north, and not so much from the squirrels in my front yard to the south. (OK, the apricots were destroyed by my squirrels, I know that. But maybe not the peaches.)

I used to have a squirrel who'd lost her tail (her first encounter with an automobile, I suspect), so I could tell which one she was. She was the tamest squirrel ever. If I wasn't careful, she'd run right up and grab my hand with her sharp little claws (so I couldn't pull it away) and daintily take a peanut right out of my fingers. (No, I didn't encourage that!)

But she didn't come off so well in her second auto encounter, and I can't tell any of the others apart (except for male and female, of course, at least when the females are nursing young). I don't know what difference it makes, I suppose. But you can't win a war without military intelligence, right?

___
PS. Curious about how my war turned out? Here's Part 2.

Raspberries

My strawberries are done, just as my raspberries are beginning to bear ripe fruit. Nice timing, huh?

I talked about growing strawberries a couple of weeks ago. They're really easy to grow here, requiring no spray at all (my usual downfall when it comes to fruit). After the strawberry season is over, I usually mow off the patch (with the mower set as high as possible), and then remove the plants from half of it, letting runners from the other half re-colonize that part.

The mowing is apparently to reduce leaf diseases. But it's usually so very, very dry here in the summer that my plants seemed to struggle afterward. So last year, I didn't bother - and one of my patches did very well, while the other did quite poorly. Yeah, right now I don't know what to think.

This year, I just took a weed whip to the poorer patch - doing pretty well what a mower would do (since I wasn't able to get the mower in there) - but I'll leave the other one alone. And since none of my plants are more than two years old, I don't think I'll renovate either patch. We'll see what happens.

At any rate, my black raspberries are quite easy, too. Heck, I didn't even have to plant them, since the birds did that for me. Some years ago, I noticed a small raspberry plant growing at the corner of my garage and my chainlink fence, where the mower couldn't get it. So I thought I'd let it grow and see what would happen.

Well, that one plant has spread to two long rows now, and the raspberries are absolutely delicious! The sweet black fruit is borne on last year's canes. After it's done, I go through the patch and cut down the old canes (since they'll just die, anyway) and tie the new canes to a couple of wires. When they get to the topmost wire, I cut the tip off, so the cane will sprout out daughter canes. Then, in early spring, I trim those back to 18" or so. That's where the fruit grows.

Unlike red raspberries, black raspberries don't spread from the roots. Instead, the tip of each cane will root where it touches the ground. When you top the canes, to cause them to sprout out daughter canes, each of those will then root where the tip bends down to touch the ground. (And yes, they'll root even in thick grass, so a patch will spread, if you don't keep it under control.)

Like the strawberries, I never have to spray them. And unlike the strawberries (which are shallow-rooted), the raspberries don't need much irrigation (but the berries do better with more rain). However, the raspberries are so thorny that I can't even think about netting them. Still, although the birds get their share, it's only in really bad years where that matters much.

The instructions usually call for topping the new canes at 30" or so, but I let them grow higher - much higher - than that, because I don't want to get a backache picking them. After all, the canes grow like crazy, and the daughter canes all grow down to the ground even from six foot high. There certainly doesn't seem to be a problem with plant vigor.

On the other hand, I've been having increasing problems with the tops of my canes dying over the winter, and I suppose there might be a connection. I really don't know.

If I had more room, I'd do things a little differently. I'd put my fence posts at a slant, creating a 'v' shape down each row. Then I'd run the wires along the top of the 'v' at each side. The old canes would lie on one side or the other, letting sunlight get to the middle where the new canes were sprouting. After the old canes were finished bearing, I'd remove them, and then tie the young canes to the wires, alternately on one side or the other.

As it is, my old canes will sometimes shade out the new ones, since they're just tied to wires running straight down the row. But I don't have the room for anything else. My yard is horribly crowded with fruit plantings as it is.

This year doesn't seem to be a good year for raspberries (or really, for most of my fruit, for one reason or another). But I'm sure I could still eat my fill, every day or two, for the next couple of weeks. And that's really how the raspberries taste their best, right from the cane.

They're a bit painstaking to pick, since they're so small (and, as I say, the canes are really thorny). So it takes some dedication to pick a big bowl of them. Still, just like the strawberries, I like to freeze some to eat with my oatmeal during the winter. (And I like to give some away, too, but I don't have as many to give as I do strawberries.)

There's another advantage to these two fruits, and that's that they ripen early in the season. By the end of summer/early fall, I'm usually so swamped with fruit that I don't even want to pick it. And by then, I'm pretty well living on bacon and tomato sandwiches, anyway. But early in the summer, fruit is really welcome.

And both my strawberries and my raspberries are really, really good-tasting. I've never found anything comparable in the grocery store.

Maybe I should stop feeding them?

(from Cute Overload, via the Lincoln Journal Star)

No, this isn't one of my squirrels, but I don't know why not.

Strawberries

My strawberries are ripe, and this week, I've been spending hour after hour on my knees in the hot sun (temperatures approaching 100°F) picking them - and then until midnight each night cleaning and preparing them in freezer bags.

Well, they're worth it. I don't pick them until they're dead ripe, and they're absolutely delicious! And they're a lot less work than most of my fruit. But still, I'm glad it's raining today, because I really need a break!

Strawberries are one of the easiest fruits to grow here, requiring no spraying at all. I have to net them, to keep the birds off, but I have to net everything. And strawberries are easier to net than anything else I grow. I've got a low-powered electric wire to keep the squirrels out of them, and although that doesn't work well for anything else (squirrels quickly learn to avoid the wires), it does work for strawberries, at least so far.

You see, I put strawberry juice on the wires. They seem to learn pretty quickly from that. Heh, heh. So even when squirrels get into the yard, they don't touch the strawberries, not anymore. (Sadly, this tactic doesn't work for peaches or any of the other fruit I grow. I don't know why.)

I give away the early strawberries, since they're always the nicest. I give them to friends, relatives, neighbors, and even sometimes to people just walking past, when they express interest. After that, I like to freeze the rest, so I can eat strawberries on my oatmeal all winter. (I finally used up the last of last year's strawberries in April.)

I tried growing ever-bearing strawberries to extend the period when I'd have them fresh, but a long bearing period doesn't work for me on any fruit. It's hard to keep netting up for such a long time, and when birds do get inside the net - which happens occasionally, no matter how good a job you do - it's helpful if there's too much for them to eat all at once. Also, insect damage keeps increasing the longer fruit is available.

So I grow June-bearers (Earliglow is the exact variety), and they've been great. True, this year, one of my strawberry patches didn't do too well - the berries, right from the start, were really small, and that made them an even bigger job to pick and to pick through. I'm wondering if I didn't water them enough last summer - strawberries are very shallow rooted, and it's hot and dry here in the summer. I don't know. I guess we'll see what happens next year.

I do tear out half of the rows each year, after they finish bearing, and let runners fill it in with new plants. So far, that's worked well. My newer patch is along the north side of the house. Unlike most plants, strawberries will fruit well in partial shade - not as abundantly as they would in full sun, but still quite well. And they don't dry out as quickly there.

It looks like a poor year for the rest of my fruit, though. I had apricots - for only the second year ever, since they bloom too early here - but the squirrels destroyed the whole crop more than a month before they would have gotten ripe. (They don't eat the fruit of the apricot, but they chew them up to get the pit.) And I didn't spray enough this spring, so my apples, pears, and plums look horribly, disgustingly infested with bugs. Well, that's entirely my fault.

But some things just didn't set on fruit. For some reason, I don't have a single nectarine on the tree this year, and one of my pluots (a plum/apricot cross) doesn't have fruit, either. And only a couple of my gooseberries have fruit, and not nearly as much as usual. My peaches look OK, but I had to cut out a lot of dead branches this year. And I had a lot of winter kill on my black raspberries, though I still should get a good crop.

Admittedly, the grapes still look very good. Like strawberries, grapes seem to be very easy to grow here, even without spraying. Most of the year, I can just ignore them. (But they do have to be netted, and that's a real pain!)

Well, I just give away the vast majority of what I grow, so even in a bad year, I'll have plenty of fruit for myself. But strawberries are always the first fruit of the year - unless you consider rhubarb a fruit - and one of the most welcome. And since I try to freeze a bunch of them, a good strawberry crop can make up for lots of disappointment elsewhere.

Plus, they're really, really tasty.  :)

Backyard farmer

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OK, this is funny, but there's more truth to it than you might think. The past four or five years, I've been growing fruit in my backyard - apples, apricots, pears, peaches, nectarines, plums, pluots, cherries, gooseberries, currants, raspberries, strawberries, and grapes - and I think it would have been cheaper just to buy fruit, especially since I give most of it away.

And that's even considering my labor to be free. Let me tell you, it's been a lot of work. I figured that you could just plant a fruit tree and then pick the fruit when it ripened. What could be easier than that? Ha! There is always work I need to do, and I'm always behind in it.

True, I haven't cut off any fingers, but maybe that's because I rarely use power tools. (I'm usually scratched, cut, or otherwise dinged up in some way or another.) And although I haven't beaten any rabbits to death, one did die of heat stroke after I chased it around my yard for awhile one hot and humid day. Yeah, it was him or me. (Luckily, I wasn't the one wearing a fur coat.)

I must admit that my fruit tends to be much better tasting than what I can buy in the grocery store. But after growing my own, I'm just astonished at how cheap fruit and vegetables really are. I really don't understand how they do it....

Anyway, as long as I'm on the subject, let me give any prospective fruit-growers here a few tips. Note that this is my experience in Lincoln, Nebraska. Your results in other locations may vary, depending on your climate and different insect and disease problems. But I've found that some fruit is a lot easier and less time-consuming to grow than others.

Rhubarb - sort of an honorary fruit, I guess - is by far the easiest thing I grow. Heck, it was here when I bought the house 25 years ago, and I've never done anything but pick it. But it's way too sour to eat fresh, so I just give it all away. (I don't cook, or not much.)

My black raspberries have been pretty easy, too. The birds planted them - actually, they planted one raspberry, which soon grew to two long rows - and they need pruning a couple of times a year, but that's about it. Squirrels generally leave them alone, and although the birds love them, there's usually enough for all of us. (Mulberries would be the same way, but I've actually had trouble growing them.)

Strawberries and grapes are almost as easy. They need care - pruning the grapevines and managing the strawberry patch - only once a year, and I never have to spray them for anything (your mileage may vary). However, they must be netted when they start to get ripe or the birds will get the whole crop. And although the squirrels never bother my grapes, I've had to set up an electric wire (which I rub with strawberry juice) to keep them out of my strawberries.

Currants and gooseberries are both very easy, and they'll grow in places that don't get much sun. In fact, here in Nebraska, they really need some shade. The currants don't need spraying, but they must be netted to keep the birds out (luckily, currants don't have thorns), while one annual spray of Bt keeps the worms out of my gooseberries, and the birds and squirrels don't bother them at all.

The currants are even easy to pick, since they grow in bunches, like grapes, and they all ripen at the same time. (The gooseberries, which are low to the ground and very thorny, are easily the worst fruit to pick, as far as I'm concerned.) Unfortunately, they're both better suited for cooking than to eat fresh. I do like the Poorman variety of gooseberry - they're very tasty when almost ripe - and the Black Velvet variety isn't bad, either. But for fresh-eating, most of my gooseberries are too sour when green and too bland when ripe. (They all make great pie, though!)

Then we get to the tree fruits. Unfortunately, they generally need a lot of spraying - in fact, more than they get from me. Invading insects and diseases from all over the world keep up a never-ending assault on them. They also need a lot of work pruning and training the branches, at least when you're trying to keep them small (since I'm just a backyard fruit-grower, I've crowded everything severely).

And every bird and mammal in the world will seemingly be after your fruit. Birds will peck holes in one fruit after another, if they can't eat the whole thing. Squirrels will gorge on them and carry off everything they can. (My squirrels even like little green - and very sour - apples. They'll completely strip a small tree months before the apples get ripe, if you let them.)

It's really a lot of work. From spring through fall, I seem to be working in the yard almost constantly, and I rarely get caught up. Heck, even picking the fruit is a lot of work. Really! Since my mother was in the hospital last week, I'm even further behind than usual. So this blog has taken the short end of the stick, for now. OK, time to get to work.

The Dandelion King

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who likes dandelions. No, that photo isn't of my yard, but from this blog post in the New York Times by "the Dandelion King." And it's not so much that he likes dandelions as that he's surrendered in the war against them.

As I’ve told my neighbors, I feel bad about lowering the value of their property. I mean, it isn’t my goal to have a front yard that, by standard reckoning, is unattractive. The unkept look of my lawn is just a byproduct of a conclusion I reached a few years ago: the war on weeds, though not unwinnable, isn’t winnable at a morally acceptable cost.

Me? I like dandelions. I think they're a wonderful sign of spring. They're really lovely, don't you think? Even the seed heads are kind of neat, though all flowers get a bit ratty after the blooms die. But that doesn't keep you from enjoying other varieties, does it? So why should it matter with dandelions?

And I really dislike the monoculture lawns that are supposed to be the ideal these days (a wrong-headed idea heavily promoted by the lawn chemical industry). I dislike the whole idea of a monoculture - especially a chemically-maintained one - and I just think they're boring, too. Sure, keep your grass neatly cut, but... more than that? Why?

A healthy lawn should have a diverse mix of species. It should be a place that rabbits love, and birds, too. The soil should be rich with organic matter, not drenched with chemicals, and it should be filled with a variety of worms. (Can you believe it? Some people ask Backyard Farmer how to kill their nightcrawlers, because they don't like the tiny holes and lumps of dirt - the natural aeration - the worms create.)

It's also true that I grow a lot of fruit trees, bushes, and vines which are easily damaged by broadleaf herbicides. My grapes, in particular, are highly susceptible to 2,4-D. I often get damage just from herbicide drift from the neighbors.

But not from many of them. In my neighborhood, a lawn full of dandelions, clover, and violets is not unusual. But I still think I'm highly unusual in liking lawns like that. Certainly, I've never met anyone else who's expressed agreement with me on this. Luckily, I don't need validation on my opinions.  :)

I am trying to get buffalo grass established in my lawn, at least on the parking, where it's sunny enough. It's naturally short, it's very drought resistant (once established), and I just like the look of it. But I'm not doing a very good job of it. Partly, that's because I'm not as interested in the lawn. And partly because I'm very, very busy with all my fruit-growing. That's been a lot more work than I ever expected.

And I have a garden in the summer, too. And a lot of other interests, including - just recently - this blog. My lawn is far down the list in importance. I keep it mowed, but that's about it. Luckily, dandelions don't need much care (another thing I like about them).

Fruit

After the long, cold winter, it's really warmed up. And I've been swamped lately with getting my fruit trees pruned and the branches trained. I've really had a lot to discuss in this blog, but I simply haven't had much time.

For the record, I'm growing apples, pears (Asian and European), peaches, nectarines, apricots, pluots, plums, cherries, strawberries, black raspberries, mulberries, grapes, gooseberries, currants (white, red, pink, and clove currants), and... rhubarb (not a fruit of course, but it makes great pie) - all in my backyard. Heh, heh. I try to keep everything small, but it's still really crowded - one reason why it's so much work.

Right now, my apricot trees are in full bloom. They really look great, and maybe I'll actually get some apricots this year, for a change. Apricots bloom as soon as it warms up, and in Nebraska they're almost always hit by a hard freeze afterward. The flowers aren't too hardy, either. Last year, the temperature dropped to 23 degrees (officially, at the airport) just one night in April, but that killed every apricot flower. I had plums and pluots blooming at the same time, but it didn't seem to faze them.

If you're wondering, pluots are a cross between apricots and plums developed in California. I wasn't sure they'd grow here, but they really seem to like Nebraska. My biggest problem is trying to keep the trees small. I've got three different varieties and just got fruit for the first time last year. Well, all of this is pretty new to me. I've had raspberries for some years (believe it or not, the birds planted them - my two long rows spread from just a single plant), and some of the grapes for about five, but everything else is younger than that.

I've struggled to keep some room for a garden, too - reluctantly, since there are other kinds of fruit I'd like to plant. I really love blueberries, for example, but they'd be a lot of work here in Nebraska (they need acid soil and regular watering). I'm always tempted, but so far I've resisted. I'd like to try a fig, too (I ate fresh figs many years ago in Greece - a fond memory), but that would be even more work.

Ah, probably not. I've got more than enough here to keep me busy (frankly, I had more than enough to keep me busy even without this blog). And I've got to keep some room for tomatoes (hmm,... technically, that's another fruit, isn't it?)