'Get the flying faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark off my appppppllleeees', I wail, arms flying and flip flops flapping as I race towards the fruit trees to scare away what can only be called a gang of cockatoos. When these big white mofos come down on the trees it's like a zombie hoarde of singleminded destruction, except they're going for plums and quinces, apples and pears - not brains. If you haven't heard what a gang or horde of cockies sound like, they're kinda like a rusty door held up to a microphone and open and shut 300 times - actually fifty rusty doors open and shut in random order. The corellas are even worse en masse - listen, please, so you have an idea of the sound they make:

'You've gotta help me net the trees,' I moan. I'm probably bird like myself, cawing and cackling about what was the flipping point of planting fruit trees in an attempt at fruit self sufficiency if the birds were going to eat them all and I don't care if hubby doesn't even like fruit, because I do, I water and fertilise and prune the bastards, and what do the birds do? Eat fruit and shit everywhere, that's what they do, look at all the purple shit everywhere from them stealing elderberries and blackcurrants, I mean, it's like someone's got a bird shit paint gun and played paintball in my garden. Hubs backs away slowly, of course, hides in the garage and pretends to be busy sanding the roof of the Defender.

He adores birds. They make him happy. They make all of us happy - me included, if they're not stealing my goddamn fruit. The maggies that warn us against foxes, the rosellas like flying rainbows, tiny finches and butt shaking willy wagtails with their harem like the stud featherfluffs that they are, the green grassparrots strutting across the garden like they forgot out to fly, the galahs off the telegraph wires, the punk haired doves sitting like stoners on the garden arch, the occasional white goshawk, the kookburras in the distance laughing their asses off (likely at me, banshee'ing across the garden), the pardelotes - tiny and dotted, new England honeyeaters a-swinging from the banksia.

But they sure as hell aren't eating all my fruit.

It's been an El Nina year so we've had unseasonable rain. Consequently, there's more apples and pears than I've ever had. It's not a plum year, except for the Japanese plum, whose fruit hangs in clusters of giant gonads. The pear trees are gigantic - I couldn't net the whole thing if I tried. And I'm worried the bird brained - well - birds will find their way through the netting and get stuck and dehydrated and panicked and caught up in netting and die. If you want to see the saddest thing ever, look at my husband's face when he sees a bird die.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, so I get inventive and begin a process of wrangling netting. I buy two huge ones from Bunnings and almost get myself wrapped up between two branches of red pears that are dripping from the dizzy heights of the tree. Yep, that's a fail. So I try something else. I cut big ribbons of netting, about a metre wide and a couple of metres long, and wrap them round the branches like giant condoms, pegging as I go. I'm happy to leave the top half for the birds - in fact, they'll get likely two thirds of our crop, because how much fruit can I eat anyway, and how much stewed apple can I fit in my freezer?

It takes me a few hours before I'm done. I have pegs in my pockets and hanging from the bottom of my jumper like some punk homesteader apple farmer. My hair's japanese chopsticked with fruit branches and my arms are scratched with an youngberry that managed to stretch itself under the plum. But the trees are netted.

I tweet my accomplishment to the hubs, who is still cleverly disguised as a man sanding the roof of a Landrover. 'Look! I did it!'

He looks towards the pear closest to him, where I've creatively wrangled a kind of giant sleeve that keeps the fruit encased. It's long and kind of - phallic. He and the kookaburras are laughing.

'It looks like a giant penis,' he says.

Well, I did think it looked like a giant netted condom.

With Love,

_{Join The Best Natural Health Community on Hive}

_{PeakD - The Best Way to Experience The Hive Blockchain}

^{MINDFUL LIFE is a Natural Medicine project which supports meditators on HIVE
Discord II Community}


_{Creating Abundance for on Hive}