Time was I lost sleep leading up to opening days of duck, pheasant and deer season. Not so much anymore. But I expect some wakeful evenings ahead of me as the Nov. 10 start of trapping season draws near.
For all the raccoon lovers out there, stop reading now. Don’t bother emailing about how bad it is to trap, shoot or otherwise dispatch of coons. Maybe they do no harm in your fantasy world. The same is not true in reality.
Yes, little raccoons are very cute. But even they are a formidable foe. The things a raccoon can figure out never fail to impress. Problem is, those thingsusually involve destruction, pillaging and general malfeasance. Compounding the problem is a coon population boom that becomes evident along roadsides every morning.
Years ago, we made plans to grow sweet corn. The corn grew nicely, so we put up an electric fence. For all that, we got about four ears. The rest went to the coons.
So we shifted gears. Instead of sweet corn, we planted an orchard. Apple trees. Peach trees. Chestnuts. After six years, this was to be the first fall for a good apple crop. Pollination was not great this spring, but the trees set plenty of apples.
I’ve eaten two so far, a delicious Melrose apple and a Winecrisp harvested too early. The rest went to the coons, who leave only broken branches in their wake. We know it is raccoons, and not deer, because the trees are fenced off and because trail-camera pictures show masked bandits running wild through the orchard.
Last Sunday, I picked the last of the Granny Smith apples, though the fruits were really not ready. The ripe ones were already gone. And to wait until the last apples turned perfectly sweet-tart would be a mistake.
That’s frustrating, but what really got me fired up to set traps was seeing two white peach trees dug out of the ground. Those trees originated from a sack of peach pits given to me by kindly Janet McKinty of Elmwood. She may have got them from Louise Thompson, if memory serves. At any rate, I had bad luck germinating the peaches and only a few hatched. To give them a better shot at survival, we pampered them for two years before they were planted earlier this fall. They were watered in nicely and surrounded by tree tubes.
Visions of tasty white peaches to come danced through my head.
Instead, all I found Sunday were holes where the trees had been planted. That and dead peach trees with long, dry roots left to die on top of mounds of soil.
I’m not sure why raccoons dig up the trees. Maybe it has something to do with the peat moss and vermiculite used for potting soil. To cover the scent, I pile dirt from the holes and grass around the trees when planting. That helps, but coons still get about 20% of my fall-planted trees. In spring, they seem less likely to dig.
Add to that about 15% mortality of trees in tubes, which coons tear down to get at the wasp larvae inside, and it all starts to add up.
I understand that mortality is an expected part of raising anything. That’s why you plant more trees than you need. And I don’t begrudge the raccoons a few apples. But next year could be a good one for our young chestnut trees. I’d like to harvest more than the raccoons. And a few apples would be nice, as well.
So the countdown to Nov. 10 is on.
Contact Jeff Lampe at (309) 231-6040 or jeff@wklypost.com
10-17-24
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