The Porcupine and the Peach Tree
High Summer, Continued...
In my last post about our Maine adventures, I left you, my lovely readers, in suspense about the fortifications we had erected to protect our peach harvest from a mysterious creature who had decimated the peaches when our friend Henry inhabited the house a few years prior. A metal collar around the trunk, a mesh fence around the tree, and a peach-cam were all in active duty. Would that be enough?… We could but wait and see.
I knew the peaches were almost ready for harvest when I set off on a 4-day road trip with my daughters, Hannah and Lily, to move Hannah into her new apartment in New Haven (she is about to begin her PhD in English Literature at Yale. Proud mommy? Yes, incredibly!). We spent three days lugging a salvaged desk, a FB Marketplace sofa and kitchen island, an Ikea haul, and the contents of a Uhaul cube that had arrived from her last abode at the Iowa Writers Workshop (see some of her poems here, in the Chicago Review, if you love poetry!), up a flight of stairs into her new aerie, settling her for her next chapter.
Meanwhile, Beau stayed at the farmhouse, happily indulging in some projects around the house, finally having some alone time after a summer of house guests. He was left in charge of watching the peach tree as it approached its harvest time. First a monsoon blew in, knocking some peaches off the tree. But the morning of our return, he was concerned at finding a larger than normal amount of fallen peaches inside our temporary fencing, with teeth marks in them! Had they blown off the tree, enabling a squirrel to take advantage of the windfall? Our peach-cam gave us no intel at all! It was a mystery, and a worrying one at that.
When Lily and I finally arrived home from our trip, in time for dinner, we gobbled up our supper, and then I quickly went to the barn to take a closer look at the tree. It was already dark by then, and as I stared at the tree, its branches heavy with fruit, I suddenly heard a distinct sound of munching in the branches. I couldn’t see anything. The mysterious, telltale sound stopped and started, punctuated by crickets. I called Beau to come have a listen, and of course, the sounds went totally quiet when he arrived to give a second opinion. Just as he was about to shrug and walk away, he too heard the sounds. Undeniable. We looked at each other, my worst suspicions confirmed. “Uh oh!”
Beau found a flashlight and shined it into the tree. There was something we couldn’t quite identify perched in the branches. Something very big. At least 3 feet long. Was it a large bird? An owl, maybe? As we stared into the foliage, Beau thought he might be seeing quills, not feathers. “I think it’s a porcupine,” he concluded with certainty. We had never seen a porcupine around the property before, though we suspected they were around. One of our favorite local farms is called Quill’s End, named when they found their new farmhouse filled with quills from a family of porcupines who had taken up residence there for many years. I quickly called Lily to come see what we were seeing. “Are you sure it’s not a skunk?” she asked, peering into the foliage. Beau was very confident of his assessment. But what to do?? The creature was still munching, impervious to us.
We started yelling at the beast, trying to convince it to come out of the tree, to no avail. Munch, munch, munch was its only reaction to our antics. At that point we were a bit concerned about flying quills shooting into us if we went outside to scare it away. Thankfully, the Oracle (as I fondly call Google), explained that porcupines don’t actually shoot quills, contrary to popular belief, unless you make physical contact with them.
We made the difficult decision to resort to a more serious deterrent: Beau went for his slingshot, thinking maybe a couple of gently deployed pellets might convince our tree visitor to leave his peachy feast. After Beau bravely stepped outside yielding his weapon, and shot a few carefully aimed shots, the animal finally made its way down a branch, landing in the fenced enclosure. It was indeed a huge porcupine, his quills on end! He ambled back and forth along the fence, looking for a way out, seemingly a bit blind and clumsy. Lily cheered him on, as he approached a passageway out, and then watched with dismay as he missed his opportunity. “Little spiky mole rat!” she exclaimed. (Sound on, below, and you’ll hear our collective frustration!). We went back outside, and bravely opened up a larger breach in the fence; finally our spiky friend was gone.
“That’s it!” I announced to Beau, “we’re harvesting this tree now!” I grabbed the flashlight, a ladder, and a laundry basket, and we quickly stripped the tree of all the remaining fruit. “Our spiky friend will be back to finish the job if we don’t get those peaches off the tree post haste!”
At this point I checked our peach-cam, to see if we could figure out how long the porcupine had been in the tree. Mysteriously, there was zero footage to be seen. Did this creature have a cloak of invisibility? Had he booby-trapped our peach-cam? Did he have some way of climbing the tree under the cover of night, so he couldn’t be seen? I have no idea, but the peach-cam worked perfectly well when we went to harvest. Go figure.
Our job done for the night, we cut open one ripe peach as our reward, marveling at our delicious treasure, saved from the clutches of the porcupine.
I then turned to my cookbook bookcase, to find Saving the Season, a treasured cookbook about preserving, by my friend Kevin West, who I used to buy jams from about a decade ago! In his section about peaches, he has an entire roadmap for how to tackle such a project. I then climbed into bed, leafing through his recipes, thinking about all the different peach projects we would tackle over the coming days…
The next day we started by stocking up on sugar and lemon juice, ready to start preserving.
Day one: “canned” peaches in syrup — we flavored the syrup three different ways — with mint, vanilla, and rose water. This winter we can report on our favorites!
Day Two: it was time for an almighty peach pie. I used Sam Sifton’s recipe for the Perfect Peach Pie. We added more blueberries from the garden (we also have a huge harvest of those to manage somehow!) The pie didn’t disappoint.
Day 3: it was finally time to make Kevin’s Peach jam recipe. We weighed out another 5 lb of peaches, got to work peeling and pitting, and macerating the fruit in the enormous copper zabaglione bowl that came with the house. Beau and I make a great team for these projects. I tend to the prep, he tends to the cook. We filled up more mason jars, and gave them their baths.
But our job still wasn’t done. We still had a large bowl of peaches remaining.
Day 4: Peach and tomatillo salsa, using tomatillos from the garden, to bring it along with us to the neighbors house for supper.
By Sunday, a full week of peach preparations later, we knew it was time to finish the job. A batch of peach and habanero jam, and some peach chutney were our last project. I am now very speedy at getting the peaches peeled and pitted, after a full week of service!
Next year, hopefully we will be graced with peaches again (we see you Mr. Porcupine!), and our routine may become even more adventuresome. But for this year, our yield of 6 jars of canned peaches, 7 jars of jam, 4 jars of chutney, 1 jar of peach and habanero jam, and a decadent peach pie, seems like a triumph. We have about 3 peaches still ripening in a bowl, and if they cooperate, our last project will be peach and blueberry ice cream. Maybe tomorrow! Do you have some favorite peach recipes? Please share them for our next harvest!
Sounds like you may have visiting gifts for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years! What a wonderful story! Maybe Shammy and I can be part of your adventure next year! I might be able to help wash and cook! She might be able to help scare away the prickly animal without getting pricked!
Well done!!! I can not wait to taste some of your peach jams when I go up north next year!