The Buck Stops Here

    I had planned to do an update earlier this month but have been procrastinating.  The garden, in the last week, has been visited by a young buck with a taste for kale and flowers.  And just about everything else.  The idea of posting pictures of dozens of damaged plants didn’t exactly fuel my enthusiasm to post.

   I finally saw him on the evening of July 12^th.  I was standing on the front step.  He was about 15 feet away, in the south garden, quietly finishing off what was left of the sunflowers.  He - I assume it was him – had polished off most of the flowers in the garden during previous overnight visits.

   I was OK with (resigned to…) seeing him eat the remnants of the sunflowers, but then spotted an overturned tomato pot and branches bitten off nearby tomato plants. That's when I started clapping wildly, loudly reprimanding the muncher, and chasing him up the driveway towards the (thankfully, quiet) street.

 

   We haven’t had an adult male deer in the yard before. This young fellow is beautiful, with a shiny coat, big, brown eyes, fuzzy antlers.  He is gentle and curious.  But man, does he love to eat.  He is like a cross between a goat and a teenage boy: he eats a lot, he eats with gusto, and he eats darn near anything.  

 

   Not only has he eaten down just about every flower, leaves included (calendula, begonias, alyssum, pansies, nasturtium, sunflowers, asters, dahliettas), but has eaten almost everything that HAS flowers, including plants deer haven’t touched in the past (e.g., tomato plants, borage).  He has eaten most of the kale (which he seems to prefer to Swiss chard) and the iceberg lettuce.  He has chewed off the leaves of several bean plants, another example of something deer have typically left alone.  He even came up on the front step during the night to eat the Swiss Giant daisies (thank goodness I’d taken a picture of them the day before) and to take another bite of the begonias, which I’d moved onto the step for the express purpose of protecting them!

 

 

BEFORE

 

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

  

   So far, he hasn’t gone after any of the alliums (not surprising) or the herbs (other than borage – the fuzziest, prickliest herb in the garden, but it’s the one with flowers).  He hasn’t touched the squash plants, carrots, tomatillo plants, pepper plants, cucumbers, asparagus fronds, cabbage (covered with floating row cover since it was planted), “faux tomatoes” (covered with a mini greenhouse), large dahlias (grown from tubers), poppies, or zinnias.  He hasn’t eaten the beets, as they have been covered with netting.  Only one vine of the Swedish Red peas was eaten; the only vine that had escaped the netting with which it was covered.  We bemoan the fact that the deer never go after chickweed, which grows abundantly in the garden and raised beds.

 

   Yesterday, R. bought more plastic netting and began the task of covering the tomato plants and greens.  The larger plants will simply be draped with the netting, while the smaller plants will have a framed cage of netting set over them.  It is a big job, a lot of extra work and extra expense that we didn’t need.  As much as I genuinely love the wildlife and find the visiting deer and moose beautiful, the damage they do – and the effort to prevent them causing further damage – has taken some of the pleasure out of gardening.  As someone who is functioning on fumes to begin with, the added work – and seeing the work already put in be for naught – is draining and disheartening.

 

 

 

 

 

   The pictures were taken at dusk and are a bit, but here is the young fellow.  (Click to enlarge.)