Wednesday, September 16, 2009

The peach tree has no peaches

We have a peach tree in our back yard. This is our third summer with the tree. Last year we got a pretty good crop of peaches and I remember calling Carolin for some dessert recipes that I could make with peaches. I made peach crumble, peach pie and a peach cake. My favourite was the cake.

This year the tree has grown so much but after the fruit started to appear, many of the leaves were diseases. We sprayed the tree and I also took off all of the diseased branches. (We forgot to spary it at the start of the year before the flowers appeared). There were so many little baby peaches on the tree that I felt that it was OK to discard the diseases branches even though they had baby peaches on them. I was still left with a good crop of peaches which I was sure would grow even better now that the tree could concentrate on providing food for fewer peaches.

Well part way during the summer my youngest asked when the peaches would be ready. We went to check the tree and we could not find any fruit on it. What happened? Did they all fall and got eaten by squirrels? A few days later we found one very large lonely but very good looking peach. We kept watching that peach every day. One day we went outside and the tree had grown so big that we could not find the lonely peach any longer. we figured that it too had dropped and was eaten by the squirrels.

Well last week I went out onto my deck and I have one wicker chair with a cushion on it. Sitting on my chair was my one lonely beautiful peach half chewed from some squirrel I'm sure. I could not figure out why the squirrel left it on the chair. We laughed as we thought of the little squirrel who was surely just trying to mock us. The squirrel must have had a good chuckle at our expense. My little one was so anticipating the fresh peaches that she asked if we should cut up the good part that was left from the eaten peach and share it as a family.

We never did do that but I left the rest of the peach in a flower pot and the next day, the other half was gone too.

Better luck next year.

2 comments:

  1. Those darn squirrels, I was looking forward to you cooking me peach pie, peach crumble and Peach cake. Just yesterday the little one and I were watching a squirrel hanging upsidedown from our largest sunflower. He was eating the sunflower seeds. He was hanging with his back feet and would swing his body up and grab a seed then hang back down again eating the seed but spitting the shell out. He was having a feast and within a half and hour he had cleaning the plant of all seeds.

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  2. Good stories Ladies. And yes the squirrel was mocking you. They love to do that. Love You

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