I cannot tell you what is getting your peaches. I can tell you what gets our peaches: squirrels, deer, squirrels, coons, squirrels, squirrels and squirrels. I don't even see squirrels around our place that often. They mostly stay down in the 10 acres of woodland in the creek hollow and don't come uphill often to the higher ground where we have the house, outbuilding and gardens, but when I do see them, it usually is in or near the peach and plum trees. Given both peaches and plums as options to pursue, they'll chose peaches every time. The deer come along and eat small peaches right off the plants at night. Never underestimate the ability of squirrels to strip fruit trees of fruit as they do it often and once they start they normally don't stop until they've taken all the fruit.

If no peaches are dropping on the ground, then you can rule out that a late freeze or wind damage got them and probably can rule out diseases. If those were the issue, you'd see the fruit lying on the ground, unless coons, deer, skunks or possums are coming along on a regular schedule every night and cleaning up the fallen fruit, which would be a possibility. I can tell when and where the deer are in our yard this week because it rained, the ground is soft and they are leaving hoofprints. Are you seeing any sign that anything is prowling around your yard? Even barn cats have to sleep at some point.

Growing fruit in Oklahoma is easy. Getting a harvest from the fruit is incredibly hard because every living creature that shares the earth with us seems to like fruit and all those creatures will do everything in their power to take your fruit. Most of them are not picky and will gladly eat unripened fruit, so they always win because they will harvest our fruit long before we ever would consider doing it. One of my biggest pests in the garden is turtles because they like to eat low-hanging tomatoes. I let them stay in, and in fact live in, the garden anyway because they also seem to eat lots of pest insects. For years we had a turtle who made it his or her mission in life to patrol the rows of potato plants and eat all the potato bugs each and every day. As long as that turtle was around, I never had to deal with Colorado potato beetles, and that was well worth the price of occasionally losing a tomato to a turtle.

I used to be a very enthusiastic fruit grower, but after fighting all the critters and varmints for 20+ years here, I don't care if I grow fruit at all any more. We aren't going to get to eat any of it, but the wild things will enjoy it all, so what's the point of growing it? We never had trouble, not even with squirrels, when we lived in town, but it is quite different out here in the country.

Squirrels are the only thing I could think of that makes sense given the lack of fallen fruit, but I rarely see them on that side of the property. And I just don’t understand eating miniature, unripe peaches when there is plenty of other food around. The orchard is closer to the road and furthest from the woods on all sides, but they are cagey varmits. I haven’t seen any deer tracks lately, and usually when we have them they are back in the wooded part of the property, which is an acre from the orchard. They generally stay near the tree line, and don’t bother the garden much.

In LA, you could grow fruit anywhere. But then you had the rats. Giant, ugly things that would ruin your whole harvest and make you not want to go outside and look up. Blech. But at least it isn’t just Oklahoma?

—Marleigh

Marleigh, my squirrels have a taste for green tomatoes. So, green peaches isn’t much of a stretch. They even rip apart my fabric grow bags.

One of the things I often wonder is whether or not the wild animals have taste buds like ours. Case in point: have you ever eaten a persimmon that wasn't ripe? It is the most sour, most horrible tasting fruit in the world at that point. Yet coyotes will eat them by the dozens all summer long, stripping all the lower branches of fruit. Sometimes I wonder how coyotes would survive the summer if we didn't have all the native persimmons.

I am sure parts of Oklahoma have rats and that they plague gardens and orchards, but we don't seem to have them here that often. Sometimes if somebody around us tears down a really old farmhouse that has sat empty and unused on their property for decades, everyone will have a sudden influx of rodents in their yards and outbuildings and will have to deal with them, but that doesn't happen often any more because most of those very old buildings have been torn down, knocked down or burned down. We do have huge hordes of wildlife since our back property line is less than 1/4 mile from the Red River, but the good thing about a large wildlife population is that you have lots of coyotes, bobcats, foxes...and even the cute little ringtailed cats....to prey upon all the rodents. Oh, and snakes. Snakes eat a lot of rodents and I blame our plentiful snake population partly upon the huge pine vole population in the woodlands.

I once grew tons of fruit---blackberries, strawberries, peaches, plums, figs, etc. and got tired of fighting the wildlife tooth and nail for every ripe fruit. In fact, the hardest thing was to protect the fruit from them until it was able to ripen. As our shade trees get larger, they have begun shading out our fruit trees that we planted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I'm okay with that. We just cut down the fruit trees once they are too heavily shaded to produce. We have a large grove of native persimmon trees and lots of native dewberries, and we leave all that fruit for the wild things. It never was our intention to come here and take away plants that feed them. We've let a small clump of native sand plum trees (ironic in our heavy clay to have sand plums) become established alongside our driveway and we can make plum jelly from those plums, which are not eaten heavily by the wildlife like the larger cultivated plum varieties are. I do miss picking fresh peaches from the trees and standing there in the yard eating a peach with the warm juice running down my chin, but that's life....unless I am willing to sit in the yard 24/7 with a gun and shoot all the squirrels, we're never going to get peaches again. We used to have a great squirrel-chasing dog, but she died long ago and our younger dogs just aren't as persistent as she was. They'll chase a squirrel up a tree, bark at it, lose interest and forget the squirrels. Sheila would chase the squirrels endlessly---as they jumped from tree to tree, she followed them, and she made it clear that she'd follow them to the ends of the earth. When she was still alive, squirrels didn't get our peaches and plums, but she has been gone for longer than a decade now, and the squirrel population doesn't fear the 4 dogs we have now.

If I was serious about growing fruit here, I'd grow each tree in a fruit cage---a fenced pen that includes a fencing top over it, and absolutely no space wide enough to allow the wild creatures through. Young squirrels can squeeze through really tiny spaces though. I had to grow my sweet corn inside a corn cage for almost a decade to protect it from the raccoons or they'd get every ear. Perhaps it is easier to get a great harvest of some kinds of crops in the city---out here in the country, you have to fight the wildlife endlessly.