Poor Orchards Almanack: Let it Rain

           Double tasking today:  partly watching the rain advance on laptop radar, then getting up to watch it plinking into the frying pan we set on the deck to feed cats and measure rainfall.
        It could rain all day and rain all night and it would not be enough to bring the well up enough that we could actually water the vegetables … except from the ponds, which are only slightly more than mere wetland now, and I don’t know if much less than a week of rain would be enough to get the orchard through a good fruiting.
      It is a good thing we have social security and egg money, because ….  after several years of disasterous late freezes…  if we were depending on produce from our hundred trees, we would have been eating bark.

   Then this season, we had the early warm temperatures again, but (so far) no freeze, although … with the present administration of climate … a freeze could happen anytime.
        We had so many blooming Pear trees this season that I was afraid  there would be more fruit than I could tend to;  but I have only found a dozen or so trees that will have a full crop that I will need to thin and harvest. 
      I leave a few of the natural trees to grow tall in the steeple  form that allows them to come up above the brush and   pollinate the others through the wind. 
     But that didn’t suffice.  It seems we really need another agent of pollination.
 I saw a couple of honey bees when the Horse Chestnuts were flowering, which is not the swarm we need to do the job.but they are non native anyway; they are commonly trucked up here from florida, like other migrant laborers  in season. We do have neighbors with their own hives, but we should be able to depend on our native bees anyway, even if they can’t be enslaved and don’t look like Disney cartoon characters. 
  So have the native American bees all been pushed to reservations, or what?
   

Stormy Weathers

       
 I don’t know why my grandson named the kitten “Stormy”, but now, a few years later, he looks like he has been through some violent weather.  One day when he was still a kitten underfoot, I dropped a wet salmon filet into deep fat that splattered and burnt his  ears, so now they are jagged,  and, for years,  had chronic head infections:  sneezing bloody snot and developing continually oozing sores on the side of his head. He is partly or totally deaf, with a loud un-modulated voice. and despite, or along with all that he has bursts of wild energy, skittering across the floor and bouncing off the furniture  on his way from feeding dish to litter box, Some of those symptoms have eased and Stormy was generally improving … then the Racoon attacked.

          
             Hearing  a strange cry, I jumped up  and ran outside.
         Near the bottom of the deck steps, a Racoon had  our cat Stormy by a hind leg.

    I had seen that little criminal the day before he grabbed Stormy:  Hearing  our top rooster Gerald honking his alarm, I  jumped up, grabbed the loose table leg I keep by the door, and ran out to the deck. 
  I saw Swan the white hen, flying up the path between the  garlic patch and the little trailer, followed by six or eight other hens and a coon about hen size who went after of the hens as she dodged under the trailer.  He got her before she quite made it out the other side but by that time I was there with my table leg. they were just under the bumper of   the trailer,  and I couldn’t get a clear shot at him with the table leg, so  I hit the added wooden bumper next to them, hit it pretty hard, so the Coon dropped the hen, which ran off, and I went all around the outside of the trailer on my hands and knees and my belly, growling and shouting, but I didn’t see the coon anywhere. 
       

    It rained the next night as we knew it would,  and though we have evicted most of our least feral cats to sleep or stalk outside now that the weather is warm …. they know how to keep dry and they are somewhat nocturnal   …. but we kept  l Stormy inside because it seems sometimes that he does not know how to stay out of the rain, or that he doesn’t care if he is wet, as if he were just as numb as he is deaf. 
    

 Then came the day Stormy was so unbound that  he bounced off the wall onto my side-table and I stopped him only as he was about to run across this keyboard, which is where I draw the line.  I put him out.

      Then,  I heard a strange cry. I jumped up  and ran outside.
    where that small Racoon had  our cat Stormy by a hind leg.
  
        I got down the steps and grabbed the Coon around his neck, but it would not let go of Stormy.
 I picked it up by the back legs and   slammed him on the ground, but he was still attached to Stormy whom I didn’t want to slam on the ground too; so then I just stood on the Coon’s head…and pushed down hard … didn’t actually stomp, because of Stormy in those jaws … but the Coon let go, so I reached behind for a rock to bash the thing with, but then the little bastard was gone, and so was Stormy which, in itself,  was at least a good sign.
 After the Coon atttacked him  I didn’t think we would see Stormy again uintil we smelled him rotting somewhere under the house, but he is now sleeping peacefully on the back rest of Geoergia’s chair.
    I wonder how the coon fared after I stood on his head.
         I am hopin he has learned a lesson: . If you mess with Dogs Plot Cats, a  two-legged Oaf will stand  on your head very hard. You are welcome to eat with the Cats and even the Chickens, even to be out and about in the daytime, when Coons should be asleep,  but no eating family members.
          Georgia has bandaged Stormy up, and he has been sleeping, eating, and pooping since now, at the bottom of the page, a few days on, he is still just sleeping, eating, and pooping. He has enough use of that coon bit leg that he can scratch himself behind his ragged right ear, and bound around the house between his cat perch and the litter pan, like the bat crazy cat he is.
      
                     Most of the time  on most days,  Dogs Plot is a peaecablle kingdom. Racoons, Possums, and Skunks often live right under the chicken house and feed together on our deck with a sort of family understanding.
   But  every Spring,  Skunk, Woodxhuck, Fox, Bear, and Coon mothers in the woods around us evict  their adolescent children who must then explore new territory…  and something like this is likely to happen again next year.
                                    .
       
     Meanwhile we have an integrated, adult resident Coon , about  the size of a Bear cub, who  eats   with the cats, and sleeps away  the daytimes when the Chickens are about. 
       Yesterday down by the Asparagus patch I found a mess of feathers and the body of one of our several chickens we have allowed ourselves to name. Blanch, who  had already over the years endured several attacks, most recently by fun-loving Labrador Retrievers on their own adolescent wander-about.  I don’t know that the little coon I stomped on is responsible for the death of Blanch … looks more like the work of a weasel, as not much of her is gone.  The Weasels, I can tell you about weasels and that includes Mink as well as the usual local Short tail Weasels, that can weasel through a hole about the size of a mouse.

  But, as for Stormy:  we bandaged hime bandage on for a few days after the last change and when we took it off yesterday, you could hardly see the damage.  Except for the ears, of course.