How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On the Farm, After They’ve Seen Beijing?

Still suffering from jet lag after flying in from Beijing Monday. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that I’m now logging late hours of Olympics watching on TV. But crops wait for no man, even Usain Bolt the world’s fastest man, so Wednesday I went up to Sonoma to check the state of the crops.
I was expecting a scene of devastation in the orchard since the pluots and nectarines were due to come ripe when we were in Beijing. I’d carefully netted them against birds, but expected to see them all dropped from the trees. Nothing. Both trees, having been bowed down under a bumper crop of fruit, were now picked clean. I didn’t even see any tell-tale pits around the trees. So either we have extremely crafty foxes who can lift up the nets, remove the fruit and carry it off to leave no signs. Or the vineyard workers who’ve been pruning and tying up the grapes in the nearby vineyards have been helping themselves to fruit snacks. I hope it’s the latter as I’d hate for all that fruit to go to waste.

Here's the sum total of our fruit harvest this month. A few pluots and one nectarine.

Back at our raised beds, our vegetables have gotten way out of hand, off the rails and into the realm of vegetable delinquency. There is no controlling them. They’ll be tagging the barn next.

Yes, the corn is as high as an elephants eye.

Our melons are looking especially menacing.

The Brussels Sprouts are decidedly feral.

But it's the tomatoes that are taking over! It's a gang turf war and the tomatoes are definitely the Crips.

On a very sad note, we’ve had to give up the fight to save the Coastal Live Oak that we’d moved from up at the house construction site. As you’ll remember from this post, it fell victim to a particularly evil indigenous beetle and a local arborist told us it had zero chance of survival. Seems these oaks just don’t take to being moved very well. It’s hard to live and learn on a farm when the cost is this high. No one told me losing a plant or tree would be as hard as losing a pet.

The unkindest cut. Removal starts.

Poor tree. Now it will be firewood for us this winter, since the barn living quarters have no heat but a small woodstove.