Monday, June 04, 2007

Paw Prints Revisited

Some of the lettuces I started early are getting robust enough that I can snip a few leaves and encourage more growth. In another day or two I should have enough for everyone in my family to have a dinner salad. I can't wait!

While I was harvesting the lettuces, I noticed this nice set of paw prints next to the peas:



I don't know for sure who they belong to. Any ideas? In a previous post I had some much shallower prints to work with. My best guesses were opossum, skunk or raccoon.

From this set of prints today, I can (thankfully) eliminate skunk as a possibility. The toes of skunk tracks are not long and slender like the specimen in my garden.

Raccoon and opossum are very similar in the front paws and very different in their hind paws. The good mud that this critter stepped in does not seem to show the opposable thumb.

To discourage further visits from the critters who keep eating my green beans as soon as the shoots erupt from under the soil we invested in some Deer Scram. It makes me so mad that they eat those seedlings! I planted two packets of bean seeds and I'll end up with fewer than 20 plants. If it works, I'll probably be a customer for life.

4 comments:

Scott said...

Them thar be coon tracks. Time to make a hat.

Kim said...

I know exactly how you feel!

I've lost almost all my peas, beans, and all the cucumbers to pests.

I hope the deer scram works.

Kirken said...

i heard of a trick at church yesterday on how to keep at least deer out of your garden it may work on other things. Take some hair, either get some that was cut from a head or from your hair brush and put it out there, a bar of soap is supposed to work, some one told me to take last years raspberry stalks and lay then around your plants, the prickles keep the animals out.

Scribbit said...

I know what you mean but instead of deer here it's moose that eat anything. The things they did to my crab apple tree are heartbreaking.