Thursday, May 28, 2009

How to Create a Deer Banquet, or: A Fundamentally Unsound Idea

I have some advice, just in case this ever comes up: If you live in deer country, and spend a great deal of time and money installing an eight foot deer fence around an acre of garden space, do not think to yourself, "Hey, wouldn't all that fencing make a fantastic trellis for cucumbers?"

And before you break your back digging up the foot-deep, native grasses, enrich the soil with composted turkey manure and build eleventy million cucumber hills, try to recall why you built the fence in the first place.

And during the several hours it takes to run new irrigation tubing, to hook up said tubing to the main water manifold, to pull it all out again and re-rout it for a more efficient path, ask yourself at least once, "Now why did I build that fence?"

Because if you do not remember at least once during the several days of digging, double-digging, spreading manure, running tubing, and planting seed, why you built a deer fence in the first place, you will feel very, very foolish when all those cucumbers become a deer banquet -- when you go out to your garden every day to see the grass trampled on the outside of the fence, to see the leaves on the cucumber plants gnawed back to sad little stumps, and sometimes, to see a couple of extra-bold deer chawing away like they're at a Luby's on Sunday after church.

I'm just saying.

2 comments:

  1. Oh No! I put pole beans on the fence this year in one of our gardens. Now I'm wondering if I will have the same results.

    Some things that are supposed to keep deer out are human hair. Place clippings around the garden. If you have boys let them "irrigate" around the garden (if you don't have close neighbors that is!)I think our dog is what keeps the deer out of ours though.

    Good luck and thanks for participating in Firsts on the First at MIFS!

    ReplyDelete