The Raccoon Season

With Fall just around the corner and the harvest season starting to slow way down I thought it might be a nice time to revisit "The Raccoon Season".  The raccoon season began once the first section of the corn started to mature.  We knew that the orchard is a haven for the local animals around here.  Remember the "jumping cow" who loved anything and everything in the orchard and gave us some lovely scented gifts, cough cough. and then there are the local deer that loved the orchard and were helping themselves to several of the crops and one was even bold enough to do it while we were harvesting one morning.  The opossum also liked our orchard and I am sure we had some more visitors too.  The Raccoons were the pesky ones because instead of just nibbling here or there they were on full destruction mode.  Not only did they eat all of the corn that was ready for harvest but they then trashed the corn stalks so if they missed an ear it would die and leave us with nothing.  We started the trapping the raccoons, taking them to the river and releasing them.  After talking to some experts on raccoons we discovered that the only way to get of raccoons is to kill them.  Here we thought that maybe we were making a dent in the mass destruction of the corn because we were able to actually harvest some corn but that did not last long.  We still have some corn that needs to mature but we have stopped the trapping of raccoon. We have trapped 25 raccoons so far and some were really cute but we knew we lost the war after taking 4 raccoons out in a day and then seeing a mother raccoon and her babies cross our path and head to the orchard was a defining moment that we have lost the war.  It is let bygones be bygones and a losing battle for us making the 2016 garden and harvest is the raccoon season.