Each morning, inspecting, I tenderly felt their heft. One beauty, fairly bursting to become a two-pounder, I marked for a future photo session. I noticed tomatoes with bites in them, one per tomato. I lifted a leaf and found a field mouse, who either was blinded by the sudden light or else winked at me. I heard cawing, looked up, and saw six crows hunching along a crab-apple branch.
Crows are savvy critters, but like the squirrels in our peach tree, they take one taste and move on.
I bought a cunning plastic replica of a great horned owl, a forbidding, fierce-looking bird of prey that crows, and most other pests, fear, and I wired it to a post. Above the tomato plants, I arranged netting and anchored it with 30 spikes. Five days later, back from a calming seaside respite, I found two sputtering crows stomping around beneath the netting and a third making comments from his perch on the owl's head. The pair on the ground had been crafty enough to break in, but apparently were too dumb to find the way out. Many of my Brandywines had been vandalized, but the prize specimen was untouched.