PT 4: Planning

A porcupine don’t take a dump without a plan.

On my first day alone at the cottage I woke up invigorated with a new sense of purpose. I was going to solve this porcupine dilemma once and for all. But there was a lot of work to be done. First up I had to decide on which approach I would take.

Option A: Baffle

This design is attractive in its simplicity but complicated in its execution. At home if I had a problem like this I would simply cut a hole in the centre of an old trash can lid and then slice it from the centre to the edge and then put it around the tree.

But all the trash can lids here belong to my cousin and she HATES it when I destroy her things. Also as you can see from the photos the tree is HUGE. At the base it’s bigger than your average residential trash can.

Option B: Sleeve

This design also had some limiting factors. The main one being – what material do I use? Again if I were at home, I’d simply drive up to the Home Depot and pick up a thing of sheet metal (in the duct section). The circumference of the tree is about 36” (1 m) so I’d just need a couple (this tree has two trunks for some reason) of 24” x 36” pieces and some duct tape and we’re done!

But the problem is the car is back in Ottawa and the only sheet metal here, well, I’d have to make myself. FORTUNATELY my guests and I drank a lot of beer this week so I have plenty of cans from which I could stitch together a makeshift aluminium sleeve.

So if the tree is 36” (91 CM) around the outside and the sleeve should be about 24” (61 CM) tall and the useable cans area is 5” x 5” (12 cm x 12 cm) with some overlap I’ll need 6 cans high and maybe 8 or 9 cans wide – so that’s 48 beer cans times two trees and I am sad to report that my friends and I did NOT drink a hundred beers in the past week.

Boo!