some may recall that last year around this time we though everything was looking peachy for a superb peach harvest until the squirrels swept in just as the fruit approached Peachy Perfection and cleaned out the tree in the span of 48 hours.

i got to enjoy exactly one peach.

my thoughts quickly turned to payback and i wrote, “rest assured, squirrels, that i will remember the taste of The Awesome Peachy Goodness as i plot my revenge. this means war.”

well, a year has passed and i’m coming up short on innovative anti-squirrel measures. i suspect in a week they’ll clean out the tree again if we don’t think of something.

the tree is close enough to a fence and the branches are laden with fruit and sagging low enough that the squirrels can just jump right up on the tree. we thought of tying pushkin to the base of the tree during the day, but he would really, really, really not be happy with that plan. odin is game for shooting them with a pellet gun, but that’s probably asking for trouble. i have some experience with trapping squirrels and thought maybe i could catch one and leave him caged in the tree as A Warning, but i suspect his uncaged mates would be more than happy to work around him. and if they can tear through wood fascia, i think they could make short work of any sort of netting we could put around the tree.

so, we’re left picking underripe fruit in the hopes that they will ripen properly in a paper bag in the kitchen which sort-of works, but a bag ripened peach does not hold a candle to fresh picked.

kris & odin are in search of peach colored balloons for decoys, thinking the squirrels will pop the balloons and be frightened away. i appreciate the novelty of the idea and we’re going to give it a try, but i am skeptical.

who knows, maybe it’ll work. i wonder if the balloons need to be peach colored? supposedly squirrels have color vision but are blue and yellow colorblind, which i think means they could distinguish peach/red from, say, white.