Raiders (Pests) Can Steal Your Crop Overnight

The story is as old as human agriculture. You prepare, plant, carefully tend, watching the food come to perfection in the summer sun. You watch as the colors brighten and the fruits get fat and yielding. The last dawn breaks and you head out to make the harvest … to find Devastation! The whole crop has been stolen or ruined by raiders in the night! Salty and I deal with the problems and solutions in this podcast:

The raiders strike with lightning speed!

The peaches were almost perfect. I’d enjoyed a few of the early drops. At 9 am, there were about a dozen left on the tree (late frost killed most of the blooms). Tomorrow, I’d decided, would be the day to collect the rest. Tree-ripened perfection. 

Mid-afternoon, Salty spied a squirrel trying to climb a tree while holding a peach. He called me out. My tree was bare! Oh, not totally, I found four peaches left hiding among the leaves. Nine peaches had disappeared in about five hours … and our tree only houses two squirrels!

There are several verses to the story, even in our limited food production history. An entire crop of blackberries devoured by birds in a single weekend. Two complete rows of sweet corn trashed by a single family of raccoons in one night (with just one bite taken from each ear, the greedy blighters). Worst, an entire house of hens slaughtered in one night by a single fox.

Why the raiders give no warning

With many pest problems, you have a chance to notice an early infestation and take measures to restrict losses. Other times, as in the stories above, the raiders give no warning before trashing the entire crop in a single day. Are they really that clever?

Nope. It’s the plants that are being clever. Did you ever wonder why a plant produce such luscious fruits, attractive to eye and nose? It’s all a bribe. Spreading your genes requires spreading out your offspring, but moving around is kinda tough for plants. They disperse as embryos instead. So the parent plant puts a tasty cover over its embryo to encourage animals to eat the fruit and deposit the seed somewhere else– often in a nice pile of its own fertilizer.

The plant doesn’t want the fruit stolen before the embryo is ready, so the fruit doesn’t turn into good eating (ripen) until the embryo’s ready to go. The plant signals the time with changes in color, smell, and edibility of the fruit. We know this and are only tempted to take *ripe* fruit. The raiders, unfortunately, also know green fruit from ripe. They also know to harvest while the harvesting’s good, so they gorge once the fruit hits ripeness.

When the raiders hit just before the human had planned to, Woe is Me.

What crops need protection from raiders

The problem crops are the ones that ripen all at once and aren’t good eating until then. Fruits tend to be the biggest problems, but raccoons are famous for doing the same to corn. 

What to do about raiders

I promise you, if my town would just ease its restriction on shooting in town…even with pellet guns … my yard trees would not be populated by thieving squirrels. *grumble grumble evil tree rats grumble grumble* Proactive pest removal can help where the raiders are decent sized but low in numbers.  We do intend to get some squirrel-sized live traps. (This intention was born about the time I found most of my peaches gone.)

Barriers are usually the best defense. Bird netting is good for berry bush protection. Raccoons are clever SOBs, but chicken wire fencing works pretty well; and if there’s a dog running around inside the chicken wire at night, it works Great!

Squirrels barriers … hmm. There’s a kind of cloth meant to go over fruit trees and be tied around the trunk I’m planning to try next year. The bird netting might well work, but I’m a bit concerned a squirrel will get caught up in it and I’d end up with a snarled mass of the stuff with a possibly dead squirrel in the  middle of it. Yuk.

This post has more information on fencing gardens and trees.

There are products that claim to repel raiders. I’ve tried several. No dice so far. There are probably working solutions, but I haven’t found them yet.

Timing is key.

For the barriers to work best, they need to be up before the raiders arrive, obviously — but not too much earlier. The year after I lost my berry crop, I netted the vines early. I had no real bird losses, but I did lose the netting. The vines grew up through the netting, making it impossible to remove and save for future years. The next year, the netting was kind of in the middle of the vines and I had to cut it out and toss it.

For fruit trees, the cloth does let in light, but it would decrease it anyway, reducing production. Absolutely you couldn’t have the barrier up until the blossoms fall, because it would block the pollinators. (That’s why I can’t use barriers to solve my squash beetle problem; the pests tend to arrive about the same time as the pollinators do.)

Prepping to repel raiders

Besides all of this very valuable experience we’ve been collecting, there are some physical preps we now know we need before crop loss would be catastrophic:

• Live traps for squirrels
• Fencing. The stuff we use to protect young trees from deer could also wall off a corn patch.
• Bird netting for berry bushes (This looks like the product I use, which has worked well since I started waiting until just before ripeness to put it on.)
• Light cloth for fruit trees, with long lightweight poles to get it over the trees. These will be less important over the years as more of our trees get to bearing age and get bigger. This kind of predator can be overwhelmed by Too Much Crop To Eat.