AKA protect your crops!

Above: behold: our chicken pecked tomato…

I’ve been busy—finishing the academic year and not so happy with my last assignment. My head buzzes most of the time and I seem to have not managed to develop a strategy for focus and note taking. This has lead to an endless folder in my Mac full of über interesting links as I stash and store this gob-smacking news item and the next academic paper that I know will be totally ‘on the money’. Sigh. But I digress…

Chickens Hurumfph! We have just harvested about 50% of THE most amazing heirloom tomatoes! I am torn between calling them ‘Black Russians’ and ‘Beefsteak’, but basically I have no idea, having long lost their identifying tag. 😦 What I know, in Australian parlance, is that they are ‘rippers’!

But why am I so ‘down’ on the chickens? Well, there was a slightly rotten/compromised tomato—it had a visible hole in it and when squeezed, produced grubs, so I stupidly threw it to the girls. Little did I know that this was all they needed to find a new-found taste for our beautiful bounty, which seductively hung over the veggie patch fence, into their part of the ‘paddock’. And so…only one day later, they had decided to make a meal out of the biggest, sweetest of the low hanging tomato crop. Grrrrr.

On discovery, I needed no encouragement! I picked all those tomatoes within reach of marauding beaks. So, ripe or no, they came inside. There are a few more on the vine, but happily out of reach.

I must say they are wonderful specimens (see below)—whatever variety they are!