Bear + Garden = Disaster & A Fun Summertime Read
I'm delighted you're here for July at the Little Farm! First, our disquieting bear saga continues...
Who knew one small bear could create so much havoc?
In the June Little Farm Writer, I shared the unprecedented black bear incursion at our place. In all the years my husband John and I have lived on our Foothills acreage, bears weren’t a big problem.
Once a year maybe, a bear would do a surgical strike to one of our apple trees at harvest time: crash down a fence in the middle of the night, devour every last apple, then make a quick getaway.
Then there would be nary a sign of another bear until a future harvest season.
Not this time.
Weeks ago, when John and I caught the bear smack in the middle of our spinach bed, I thought it was this critter’s second visit to our yard—the first being when I nearly ran into the bear scrambling out of our shop.
Turns out, ten days before, some animal had shredded a stump in our blueberry patch (for the ants), then tore a big patch of bark off the nearest apple tree—a Honeycrisp.
I thought a raccoon was the culprit, even though we have never seen a raccoon anywhere near our ten acres. But when we caught the bear with two paws among our spinach, it seemed clear: this bear was also the stump perp.
Now, I’m a big believer in the power of three, as in “Three times is the charm.” With the bear’s three visits to our place, surely he’d done all the food thievery he wanted. I so hoped we’d seen the last of him.
Turns out, the bear was just getting started.
You might think a small bear might be sort of cute, a little like Paddington, bumbling through the world of humans, his antics a bit charming and funny. Unfortunately, a wild bear seeking snacks is nothing like sweet little Paddington.
Before the bear investigated the spinach, he’d dined on our strawberries: smashed the fencing around one of our strawberry beds, torn through the nets, and ate every last berry with the tiniest bit of pink on it.
He also yanked out a berry plant, roots and all. We found the plant sitting forlornly on top of the disarrayed net.
Later that day, I saw he’d visited our other three strawberry beds. The berries hadn’t started ripening yet, so I hadn’t netted these beds. But this bear had gotten to them by bending the poultry wire fences, and just devoured whole clusters of white berries.
I could see my future, and it wasn’t good.
Heart heavy, I knew we couldn’t build fences around these unprotected plants fast enough. So in all three beds, I clipped off all the berry clusters, and said “Sayonara” to the chance of a decent crop of strawberries this summer.
John helped me set a stronger, reinforced fence around the first strawberry bed, and I re-netted it with another, larger net.
Then the bear struck again—somewhere else.
I guess while waiting for more of our berries to ripen, the bear moseyed over to our nearest neighbor’s place…and smashed their bird feeder to smithereens. They’re calling it “El Destructo,” but the situation is becoming a little more fraught…
In front of our neighbor’s horrified eyes (she was looking out of the window) the bear ambled right up to the flower bed next to their front porch and scared the bejezus out of their two cats.
It also poked around at the back, where they keep their smoker. If the bear catches a whiff of meat, I fear their smoker will not be long for this world.
Anyway, the bear soon circled back to our food garden, and attacked the netted strawberry bed again. It bent the fence and mucked up the nets, but luckily couldn’t get any berries.
I fixed the fence and netting, and hoped the dwindling crop would deter him from trying to invade our garden again.
But there’s more…
The next day, the bear hit the bucket of kitchen scraps, which we hang from a hook in one of the woodsheds.
Not thinking how much bears like sweet things—honey, flowers, and fruit and fruit tree sap comes to mind—I had made the big mistake of tossing sweet potato peels into the bucket the night before.
Back to the stump ant-raid… Interestingly, as meticulously as the bear must have extracted the ants from that stump without breaking so much as a twig on the blueberry shrub, he ate all the bits of sweet potato.
And like any vegetable-resistant little kid, left the broccoli untouched.
Needless to say, the old bucket didn’t survive the encounter.
The day after, we saw the bear from our sliding glass door, browsing on wild daisies and grass just outside our fence. Like before, a yell from me scared it back into the woods.
Then John ‘fessed up.
“I didn’t tell you,” he began, “I saw the bear a few days ago, about 4 am. It was just outside our bedroom window.”
My jaw dropped. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You were asleep—and I didn’t want to scare you,” said John. “I mean, the bear was right next to the house.”
Our bedroom is on the unfenced side of the house; the screened windows are low, and we leave them open at night.
I shudder to think of the bear being attracted to any food smells that may have wafted back to our room—and clawing its way right through the screen and into the house.
Still, the most recent bear damage seems a bit inexplicable: While starting to thin the little green apples on our Williams’ Pride tree, I stopped cold. What happened to all the fruit?
The tree had set dozens of apples, but now I only saw four or five. The bear had actually eaten all those immature apples, still two months from ripeness.
A quick look at our nearby Gravenstein tree I saw the bear broke two upper limbs, although the tree wasn’t really bearing this season. Turns out, he left two large claw marks near the top of the tree.
With two bearing limbs gone, John tied a rock to a small branch to train it for bearing fruit next year. We’ll see if any fruit survives!
While I hope our critter invader got a major bellyache from the green fruit on the Williams Pride, here’s the kicker:
Later that day, I noticed one of our empty plastic milk cartons, lid firmly attached as the recycle folks request, on the other side of the driveway.
That’s weird, I thought. We haven’t had any windy weather lately.
Grabbing the carton to return to the bin, on closer inspection, I saw teeth marks in the plastic. Not tiny rodent teeth, but larger punctures!
Fortunately, we keep the recycling just outside our fenced yard, so the bear hadn’t snuck through the fence for this stunt. But to me, this certainly indicated the bear was relentlessly going after any and all potential food sources!
At this point, John and I are, as the old saying goes, fit to be tied. Our neighbors are too. I don’t know what the future is for this small bear. But if he has habituated to eating human food in close proximity to people, he’ll keep doing it.
And he’s only going to get a lot bigger…
I’ll keep you posted—but I am dreading the day the bear gets a whiff of our ripening blueberries!
If you’re growing a food garden, what critters are giving you headaches?
I’d also love to hear what you’re harvesting at the moment!
Little Farm Bookshelf
In the summertime, fiction-loving folks often watch for the latest “beach read”—long, juicy novels with popular appeal.
As an avid reader, I think there’s nothing better than losing yourself in the pages of a great story, whether it’s at the beach, in your backyard hammock, or lying in the grass.
Or maybe, like Jo March in Little Women, your fave reading spot is being nestled on a sturdy branch in an old apple tree!
But if you’re a gardener, especially a food-gardener, you may be thinking, “who’s got time?”
In the summer, if you’re like me, you’re spending every free moment of daylight with your hands in the dirt: sowing seeds, weeding, watering, mulching, and harvesting. And once you’re inside, there’s all the cooking and home-caring you didn’t get to while you were in the garden!
Nevertheless, I managed to squeeze in some time after dark for some pleasure-reading.
I didn’t come across any Irish stories this month—but I’ve been enjoying what you might call a “science-geek read”—Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.
My fiction preferences—as you’ve probably guessed—are books by Irish authors, or in a pinch, Scottish stories, like the novels of my all-time favorite author, Jenny Colgan. But I’ll also go for books set in any rural spot in England…
For example, Downton Abbey or one of Jane Austen’s novels will do nicely!
However, I do take the occasional reading foray with American writers, like I did this month.
Set in California, I found Lessons in Chemistry entertaining and compelling—although my go-to kind of story is more life-affirming. And not to be too cheesy, but I’m all about uplifting novels that make me smile and give me a sense of hopefulness.
In a word, I like stories in which fate is much kinder to the characters than it is to the ones in Lessons in Chemistry.
Still, I found the woman chemist protagonist sympathetic and intriguing, and it was great fun seeing the book’s story world from her dog’s point of view now and then!
What are you reading these days? Can you recommend a book you’ve enjoyed?
To the new subscribers who joined Little Farm Writer this month, thank you so much! And to every subscriber and reader, I truly appreciate every one of you.
Please feel free to get in touch—you can leave a comment, or if you prefer, you can reply directly to this email. Whichever way you choose, I’d love to hear from you.
As always, thank you for sharing your time with me. And if you liked this post, I hope you’ll hit the ❤️ button—it can help other folks discover Little Farm Writer!
May you revel in the pleasures of summer—
~Susan, from the Foothills
My goodness! Reading this made me happy that all I have to contend with are raccoons and deer.
I'm quite delayed this month in reading and I can BEARLY believe what has been happening (sorry, had to).