Bear vs Strawberries & International Fairy Day

Bear just outside our fence

International Fairy Day, June 24, was exactly the day I expected to be in the peak of strawberry season.

Last summer, all our strawberry beds were on their last legs…but there was one vigorous plant that was shooting out runners like crazy. Hoping to create home-grown berry crowns, I set the runners into pots—and ended up with a couple of dozen!

Last fall, I transplanted the crowns, and ended up with four new strawberry beds, filled with robust plants. And as this month rolled around, I anticipated a veritable berry feast.

Then along came the scourge of our summer: a bear.

This young black bear has snuck through our fences numerous times, hitting all four berry beds. The first time, it tore into the earliest-fruiting bed that I had netted early, ate all the ripe ones, whomping one plant right out of the ground, and mangling the fencing around the bed.

It hit the other three beds, swiping at barely-pink strawberries. While John and I double-fenced and re-netted the one seriously invaded bed, the other, larger beds would be far more difficult to protect.

Well, I could see the writing on the wall.

With a heavy heart, I cut all the berry clusters from the plants in those three beds. The bear has trampled all over our garden, so I didn’t want to risk further damage--and I was sure it would attack my strawberries again.

A couple of days ago, the bear tried to get back into that now double-reinforced bed—but didn’t get any berries. Instead, it mangled the outer fence, and gotten the netting seriously awry.

Viewing the limited damage, I breathed a sigh of relief. Which only lasted until I heard a distressed, “Cheep, cheep.”

“There’s a bird in the net,” John said, low.

I looked on the other side of the bed and there was a female towhee, entwined in the net. Towhees are cheeky birds, and have often gone where other, wiser birds have feared to tread: they’ll try to get into even heavily-netted berry beds.

This bird had managed to worm its way through the disarrayed netting, and actually ate two of the biggest, reddest berries. As soon as we came over, it had tried to escape, and gotten tangled up in the nets.

John is our bird rescuer around here, and he gently lifted up the bird in the net, and tried to extricate it, as its cheep, cheeps intensified.

I ran to get the garden scissors, and though it took him about ten minutes, he was able to cut the little bird out. He set it carefully on the ground, then this plucky little girl crawled over to a protected spot among some stones, tucked herself up in a little roll, and just sat there. Barely breathing by the looks of it.

The next day, John and I found the bird a little ways from its hidey-hole, dead. I imagine it died from a combination of a broken wing, and shock.

 With this casualty of a little innocent bird, this young bear has been even more destructive than simply wreaking havoc in the garden.

Our nearest neighbors are having their share of problems from the bear too—earlier this week, it destroyed their bird feeder. Like, killed the feeder. We four are having a confab this weekend to see if we can figure out a solution.

The marionberries will be ready soon, and then the blueberries—without more preventative measures, I shudder to think of what the bear could do to all our fruit and infrastructure! 

On a happier note: Happy International Fairy Day! The day is loosely connected to the June 23 tradition of St. John’s Eve, the celebration of midsummer, celebrated in many Scandinavian countries and Ireland too.

Now, if you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’m big on fairies—especially Irish fairies—and International Fairy Day always lightens my heart. If you have a whimsical side too, and haven’t completely discounted the idea that there may be more mysteries in nature than we will ever understand, maybe you’ll be celebrating fairies tomorrow too!

The fairies in our house!

A quick note: I’ve been posting weekly here at the Little Farm in the Foothills blog the last couple of years, with only a few misses—and one of them was last week. This bear has increased out workload in so many ways, and this summer, John and I have to re-do as well as rebuild a number of sections of our fencing all over the property.

We've already started redoing our north orchard fencing--a portion of destroyed fence that another, bigger bear did getting to our apple trees last year.

And trying to keep up with the rest of our garden is going to be a challenge! I’m still planning to post here each week, generally Thursday or Friday, if I can. But if I'm not able to post weekly, I'll aim to share my Little Farm news every other week. 

There’s lots more about our bear invasion in my June newsletter—it’s free, and you don't have to subscribe to read it! I’ll be sharing this continuing bear saga in the next monthly newsletter, out July 10.

Maybe tomorrow, on International Fairy Day, I can fit in communing with our Little Farm fairies for a little positive energy. Which I think I'll need, to keep dealing with our bear invader! 

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.