Happy Friday!
Got ‘em!
At least…most of them.
The pawpaw fruit.
The firmness of the fruit and your sense of smell are a good way to gauge pawpaw ripeness. The colour can change too…but sometimes the colour change is after they’ve become fragrant, and that’s too late if you have raccoons in the ‘hood.
(I’ve heard of people wild-foraging pawpaws that fall from the tree, which they do when ripe…but that’s too late here. Too many critters that would gobble them up.)
Pawpaw fruit, like apples, ripen after you pick them. But…if you pick them when they're not fully sized up, they never amount to much. So there’s a fine line when it comes to picking pawpaws: Fully sized and starting to ripen—but before the raccoons and squirrels move in. (One year I jumped the gun and picked them when they were too green. Too hard. They never got to that melt-in-your-mouth custardy feel.)
What made me rush out and pick my pawpaws yesterday?
In the spring I wrote about my fruit-bagging frenzy. Organza bags over apples to deter codling moth and squirrels. (Ran out of green bags and to Shelley’s horror our apple trees were dotted with white mesh bags!) And I bagged the pawpaw fruit too. Never have bug problems on the pawpaw fruit…the bags are simply to make it more difficult for critters to gnaw at the fruit.
Yesterday I espied a chewed-up bag under the pawpaw trees…and decided it was time to pick. Or get nothing.
In other garden news this week, our fig harvest continues.
At least it did. Until the night before last, when a raccoon scaled my fig trees.
Snapped off the top of a couple of my younger trees. Infuriating.
First time I’ve encountered this…but my neighbour John experienced it a while back. He was ready to give up growing figs.
But then he found that a motion-sensor sprinkler solved the raccoon problem.
Seems that while raccoons love to play in the water, they’re not fond of getting wet when it’s not on their terms.
(BTW, he advises shutting off the water during the day so that it doesn’t drench the postal carrier.)
What’s new in your garden?
Steve
PS. I wrote last week’s newsletter two weeks ago. Because last week I paddled to a lake I love.
At the lake, there’s no cell reception. So none of the distractions I get at home.
Which is good for me. Because I often fall into the trap of consuming. Consuming news. Consuming information about topics that are on my mind. Consuming opinions.
Junk food for the brain.
The trade-off to consuming, and all that easy-to-get information is that I don’t take as much time as I could to tap into my own thoughts.
That’s why the only book I take back-country is an empty notebook. To scribble out thoughts.
I also keep a notebook in the garage, where I pot plants. Gardening is also a good time to check in with my thoughts.
