And A Cartridge in a Pear Tree

I can be a weird dude sometime, I'm not gonna lie.  When I get home from my office job, I visit with Tricia and Benjamin and then change into my 'work clothes' and start doing my afternoon chores and I have great fun doing them!  The chores can be classified into two categories:  routine things that must get done every day and items on my prioritized "knock-out" list.

Once I get that done, sometimes I'll just walk around and observe things.  In our fast-paced lives, we often overlook things if we don't make time to enjoy things - even mundane, unremarkable things. As I walked by the pear tree, I noticed one of the branches bending over due to weight of the ripening pears.  There were a couple of half-eaten pears laying on the ground beneath the tree.  I think the culprits were the numerous squirrels that inhabit our property.  Just to be silly, I hung a .12 gauge shell from the bending branch.

A cartridge in a pear tree

I began to think about This Post from last week about trying to grow some of your own food - vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, etc.  Birds and squirrels are two predators that you do need a firearm with which to protect your food, if you decide to grow it versus purchase it at the grocery store. Instead of having a partridge in a pear tree, you'd better be ready to have a cartridge in a pear tree or at least be ready to shoot one into your tree.  You can hang shiny objects like aluminum pie pans or rubber snakes or plastic owls to repel predators, but at some point, you'll need to go on the offensive to protect your crops.

The .12 gauge shell isn't the only thing of note hanging from the branch

But if you really want to protect your crops, you need to pull out the 'big guns' and by that, I mean what I was reminded of by the critter hanging on the bottom of one of the pears..  A Praying Mantis!

A praying mantis

If you really want a successful crop, you need to pray. Agrarian societies of old recognized the importance of humbling themselves before God and asking for His Blessings on their crops - and we should too!

A few pears for snacking on

I shook the pears to the ground and took them inside.  Pears will continue to ripen in the bowl in the kitchen.  Normally we'll cut up the pears and make a nice pear pie, but Russ ate a couple of them right out of the bowl and said they were crisp and delicious.