Now that fall is underway, the harvest is in full swing. You name it, it needs
picking: zucchini, kale, potatoes, and carrots—the sweetest treat you can eat without
sugar!
With the harvest, however, I start asking two questions: 1) When
is too much of a good thing not good? And 2) How full we can cram our two refrigerators
and still close the doors? Since we don’t have a root cellar yet, and there are
so many mice around our place we don’t dare put anything in the crawl space, it’s
refrigeration or nada. One fridge is
already full of Akane apples, and yesterday, we discovered the Elstars are
ready. Actually, we should have seen it coming: when the tree fruits are ripe,
the yard fills with robins. It’s like they fly in carrying a banner that says, Hey, the apples are ready! And while we’re not looking, they peck mercilessly
at our fruit. With the robin predation comes these super-annoying tiny flies that
swarm everywhere. At luck would have it, they’re small enough to sneak through your
window screens and soon your house is full of ‘em.
The fall bounty has brought out another of our wild “friends”…namely the
bears. A tract located a few hundred yards from us was clearcut this past spring,
and has apparently brought the neighborhood bears out into the open. I’ve never
seen so much bear scat on our road—we’ve been seeing a fresh pile of their “stuff”
nearly every day. Needless to say, when I take a walk these days, I’m not
daydreaming about the story I’m writing, or working out plots. I’m watching my
surroundings. Vigilantly.
With bears so close by, folks around here advise that you
pick up any fruit falls and dispose of them. Meaning, don’t leave fruit out in
the open, tempting Mama Bear and her cubs to climb your deer fence to sample it.
That’s when your garden bounty can a problem, because conventional wisdom says
don’t put fruit in your compost. My guess is, fruit makes the pile too acidic,
and it doesn’t decompose as it should. Disclosure: I’m guilty: I do put fruit
peelings in the pile, and it works okay. I’m even guiltier: we also dispose of whole,
spoiled fruits improperly… But we make sure we toss it way, waaaayyy back in the
woods. Okay, we know it will attract bears, but we know they’re back there
anyway.
Needless to say, what with the bears, when Halloween comes, there’s no
trick-or-treating on our streetlight-free road. But I am celebrating All Hallow’s Eve with a Goodreads Giveaway of my
kids’ Halloween story, Morgan Carey and
The Curse of the Corpse Bride, starting October 1! I hope you'll check it out!