Raccoons

I have had problems with raccoons eating the food I have grown in our yard since we moved to St. Louis. Before our house was even built in 1989, I was excited about planting corn in our yard, so I planted about 200 square feet of corn, but we were not living at the house yet and the raccoons ate all of the corn except for one ear I found that they missed. After we were living in the house, we had some level of success at keeping the raccoons out when our dog Nina was chained up next to the corn. I have tried this with later dogs without success. Rocky did not work because while he was chained up to the fruit trees next to the corn, he felt a need to dig under the roots of the fruit trees, doing too much damage to make it worth our efforts. I quit growing things that the raccoons like to eat.

Since then, squirrels have found that our fruit trees produce some pretty good fruit. They start with the apricots and then move on to the plums, pears, peaches, apples and nashis. Sometimes there was tree damage, so I guessed that the much heavier raccoons were helping eat the fruit. Squirrels only come out in the daytime and raccoons only come out at night. Last year, a freeze killed all of the fruit, so the squirrels ate all of my tomatoes instead. This year, the fruit trees produced in abundance, so the raccoons have been helping the squirrels eat it all.

On Sunday, August 3rd, the raccoons did not even wait for dark to start helping themselves to plums and peaches. This photo was taken at 7:30 pm when there was still quite a bit of light out. There were four of them together. Some of the time, it looked like one of them was watching the house to let the others know if anyone was coming. After they ate the fruit on the ground, one of them climbed up the tree to knock down fore fruit. This was one of those times that it was hard to think kindly thoughts towards the cute fuzzy creatures.