While doing my rounds this morning, I topped up the small bird feeder. As I took it down from its hanger, I heard something fly out from the plants below. It turned out to be a goldfinch. It flew onto a nearby lilac branch, and just stayed there, watching me.

As I went by again, on my way to the garden, I saw it again.

I came withing a few feet of it, and it just stayed there. Like it was trying to sleep and wondering what this idiot human was doing at 5:30 in the morning!

A few days ago, I noticed we’d lost a few sunflowers, among the Hopi Black Dye rows, and a couple of sweet corn. Off hand, I would have thought “deer”, but it was odd. There were just a few nipped plants, and they were in the middle of the rows, in roughly the middle of blocks, not along the edges as I would expect from a deer going around the roped off blocks.

Nothing showed up in the garden cam, which told me that whatever it was, it was too small to trigger the motion sensor where the camera was set up. So I repositioned the camera (mounting in on that flag stand was the best rig ever!) to hopefully catch something.

When checking the beds before watering them, I was disappointed to find this.

The second Crespo squash find has had its end nibbled off, too. Only as far as the hoop barrier, but then, the only vine had been nibbled about the same amount, and there was no barrier at all at the time.

Unfortunately, we don’t have another camera for this end of the garden.

As for the sweet corn…

Three corn plants were nibbled on. In the middle of a row, and in the middle block of the 3 corn blocks!

Just those three. Nothing else in the area was nibbled on.

It was a gorgeous 18C/64 when I first came out, but by the time I finished using the new action hoe to finish weeding a second row, it was already getting too hot for manual labour. So I headed indoors and checked the trail cam files, to see if whatever did this was captured.

Well, waddaya know. Do you see those two “lights” on the left?

Those are the eyes of two big, fluffy raccoons!!! And the far one could be seen coming out of the roped off area, while the nearer one was on the outside of the roped area.

*sigh*

So it is likely these guys that have been nibbling our sweet corn and sunflowers. We have not been seeing deer on the trail cams lately, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been going elsewhere in the yard. The water level in the kiddie pool is down, but not by much, so I don’t think anything as big as a deer has been using it.

The more stuff like this I see, the more I am thinking we are going to have to invest in a guard dog. A large breed that loves our cold winters. Which is a weird thing to think of, in our current heat.

As I write this, we’re at 33C/91F with a humidex of 36C/97F, and our high is predicted to be 34C/93F… oh, wait. My weather app icon on my desktop just changed. We’ve just hit 34C. The humidex is supposed to reach 37F/99F. Which is actually a bit lower than was forecast, a few days ago. But then, the weather forecasts have been unusually off this spring and summer. It’s one thing to be off by a couple of degrees, or even the continual calling for rain and thunderstorms that never happen. It’s when they say things like “rain will stop in X minutes”, and there’s no rain at all, anywhere in the region. Or “rain will start in X minutes”, but if I look at the weather radar, there isn’t any rain showing in the entire province, nor even in provinces on either side of us, nor the states to the north of us. Frustrating!

Still, over the next two weeks, the temperatures are expected to hover just above or below 30C/86F. One of my apps has a 25 day forecast, so it’s running into August, where, we’re expected to hover around the 25C/77F range. The average temperatures for both July and August in our area is 25C/77F, so I guess that’s about right. I was planning to plant spinach and lettuce in late July. I guess we’ll find out if it’s too hot for them or not!

One thing about our expanded gardening this year. We are continually looking at things and saying, “okay, so next year we’ll do this” or “next year, we’ll not to that.” 😀 It would all be a waste, if we didn’t learn anything from it! 😀

Now.

What to do about the raccoons…

The Re-Farmer