The Absent Homesteader…and the Bear

Frost-damaged tomatoes look ghastly!

Last week, I mentioned being away from home for a couple of weeks. It was an especially fun homecoming—my first morning back at Berryridge Farm, I was greeted by the sight of a coyote just outside my office window. 

In the 15 years we’d lived here, we’ve heard their yip-yip-yipping nearly every night, but we’d never seen a coyote so close to the house.At least when we were awake. 

Two years ago, coyotes (we are 99% sure) killed our flock of hens. Still, I can’t help but like these creatures. 

They’re smaller than you’d guess, given the high-decibel yipping they make, but very smart. I've encountered many coyotes from a distance, and it’s fascinating the way they give you a 100-yard stare for the longest time, then simply melt into the brush.

But on this morning, I didn’t have time to admire the wildlife—with all the chores waiting, I’d have to hit the ground running.

First on the list was tackling the chicken coop. Since I ordinarily clean it twice weekly, the situation was not pretty.

In late October, with darkness falling earlier, hens will spend more time in their coop overnight. And since laying hens do most of their…er, elimination in their sleep, as fall progresses into winter, you’ll find more and more manure in your coop. In my absence, the board beneath the hens’ roost had become piled high.

I ended up clearing three buckets of manure. It was satisfying to survey the clean coop, then lay down fresh wood chips. On the downside, all those days I was away without my usual lifting chores, I strained my shoulder hauling all that manure out to the composting site in the woods.

Still, the hens seemed glad to see me, since they kept me company (that is, got totally underfoot) as I cleaned up their yard.

Another task was usual culling of the mid- fall produce: delicata squash that didn’t mature, and zucchini that started decomposing with the first light frost we always get by mid-October. Also hit by frost: our tomatoes.

Generally, I’ll clean up the damaged plants the next day. But this fall, delaying the chore while I was gone, the rotting tomato plants and fallen tomatoes had gotten really gnarly. The soil probably got infected by even more fungus than usual too. 

Also, I had to go through the harvested tomatoes in the house. Given the amount of fungus around here, many tomatoes will start spoiling long before they ripen.

The Foothills get a lot of rain in autumn—but this fall has been usually wet. So I’ve gotten way behind on weeding. Rome wasn’t built in a day, goes the old saying, and I knew it might take me all the way to our first snowfall to catch up on the weeds.

But today, this first day home, I had one chore that would be a pure pleasure: our last apple tree harvest.

When I left, our Florina apple tree had been several weeks away from harvest—it’s our last fruit to ripen, and the harvest target time is late October. We had probably fifty apples on the tree, and this particular variety stores nicely well into winter—the perfect late fall apple.

John and I were planning to pick the tree as soon as I came back, and I pictured our shop fridge full of apples as we headed into the cold months. Instead of buying organic apples from the co-op grocery throughout the winter, our own harvest would save us a considerable amount of money.

All we had to do was clear some space in the fridge--and our horse-owning neighbors were ready and willing to take our old-ish August and September apples to feed their horses. A win-win situation, right?

Bear visit to the orchard

Well. John was away from home two days in a row: first to get new brakes on the car, then traveling to fetch me. We came home to a crunched up orchard fence—and a tree completely bare of fruit!

In this case: Bare = Bear. 

It’s amazing, that our neighborhood bear or bears—who broke down another part of the fence and almost killed our centennial crabapple last year—can have an immense feast without making a mess! There were no partially eaten apples on the tree, or even apple cores or other evidence laying on the ground.

It was like there had never been fruit on that tree.

What’s interesting about bears: if they’re determined to get to a food source, they will just take the most direct route to get to it. What we’ve seen is they’ve simply crashed or manhandled—or rather, bear-handled—their way straight to the chow. The Florina tree is just a few feet from the damaged fence.

And my guess is, the closer it gets to hibernation time, the more motivated bears are to attack your fall apples!

We’ve had other harvests cleared out wholesale before: the blue jays are champs at attacking our walnut and hazelnut trees long before harvest time. And if we didn’t net our strawberries and blueberries, there’s no doubt the birds and chipmunks would get every last morsel.

Puny human's attempt to keep the bears out!

You can't see it in the photos, but there's another steer wire panel that went to the top of the post. Clearly, it didn't faze this critter one bit.

My conclusion: as the evidence from the fence damage shows, you can’t net against bear.

Of course, our zero-apple harvest means we saved ourselves one chore: we didn’t have to find room in the fridge for all those Florina apples. But still.