Living the Homesteading Dream – Part 7
Weeds and Bugs and Raccoons, Oh My!
I’m in the middle of the garden, dusk just tipping into darkness, wearing nothing but my underpants when I realise that chasing a raccoon whilst clapping and shouting—we’d just finished reading that they don’t like loud noises—might attract attentive neighbours with something they’d not likely seen yet.
And, believe me, they’ve been watching this little permaculture homestead come together for a couple of years now, so they have seen some stuff, if only via glimpsing across these boundary lines every so often out of perplexed curiosity.
The raccoon lopes away, turning to look back, suggesting this half-naked man’s—that’s me—effort is but a dream. I should have just stayed in bed because it seems to know that I’ll be back there soon enough, leaving the garden an unattended smorgasbord once again.
It started with our wood mulch pathways. Every morning we’d wake up to find them disheveled, the cardboard below them torn up in areas. Rocks from the garden borders would be tossed askew. Mulch in the garden beds would be tugged this way and that. Apparently, there were just too many earthworms for the resident raccoon to resist, so putting it all back together became a morning ritual for us.
The stakes got higher, though. When the strawberry mounds were promising huge harvests—we’d already pulled a couple of bowlfuls without making a dent in the future bounty—the raccoon started scrumping (Emma’s English term for stealing the farmer’s fruit in a sort of rascally way). The strawberries were all disappearing, with the raccoon having set the little green lids daintily on the ground after having snacked on them.
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