Last evening Bracken and I went outside to dump the compost when I noticed something unexpected- a big bear pile in the pathway in our garden. You could see what the bear had been eating: huckleberries. Then I looked over and saw that it had torn down part of our fence to get into our garden and get to our apple tree. I didn’t like the idea of a bear being in our garden and of course Jeff didn’t either when we went and told him. Most of the apples were gone from the tree out back, though we weren’t too bummed since that tree hadn’t produced that much this year. But we immediately went to check the apple tree out front. It was loaded this year and we’ve been ever-so-patiently waiting for them to ripen. As we got closer, it looked like the bear hadn’t gotten them and I said a silent cheer. We tried one and it was pretty close to being ripe. We had wanted to wait to pick them until they were fully ripe, but we knew if we left them that the bear would surely get them. So we decided to pick them all and let them finish ripening in our pantry. As we were picking them, we noticed some of the bottom apples had large bite marks out of them, from the bear. I think it filled up on the back tree and if we hadn’t picked the apples on the front tree, it would have come back the next night and gotten those.
This morning Jeff went outside and saw a bear out back in the daylight! It’s one thing to have them come in the night, but quite another to have them come during the day. We’ve got work to do around here to keep bears out of our garden. Some major fencing projects (and repair) that need to be done. We’ve had bears mess with our chickens in the past, but we close our girls in every night and the coop is pretty solid and protected. We don’t want the bear to find other things in our garden to eat besides apples.
As Bracken likes to say with his grandma, “Get in the woods, bears!”

We got a lot more apples than we were expecting, from that front tree. We separated the wormy ones so we could cut out the good parts and make applesauce, but there were hardly any ones with worms in them.

I wrote about this apple tree and the neat thing about how it has two varieties of apples on it, in this post from last year.

While we were out there, we also decided to harvest all of our basil since the weather has been turning and we didn’t know how much longer it would last.

Then Jeff made some incredibly delicious pesto with it. We’ve enjoyed it with our meals today and Bracken kept asking for more.

The lighting was beautiful last night in the garden. Our camera, however, only seems to like to take pictures when it’s sunny, a bit of a problem when you live in the Pacific Northwest. Usually whenever there is not abundant sunshine, the colors turn out really funny on our pictures. I’m sure glad I had it though, so I could capture that moment when I looked over to see Bracken laying in the grass next to the basket of apples. He was so content, just daydreaming, and it was really sweet.