On 5/19/2014 2:43 PM, Terry Coombs wrote:
While sippin' my second cuppa this morning my wife started hollering for
me to come to the kitchen . She points out the window and it takes me a
second to realize there's a whitetail doe munching on my lettuce ! Time to
start taking steps I guess ... and then we start discussing the damage I
thought insects were doing to our new fruit trees ... yup , the forest rats
have been at them too . I mean , it's not like there's a shortage of
succulent new growth for the buggers to eat ! The woods here are just
bustin' out all kinds of green , why oh why do they have to eat the stuff I
grow for me ??

So this afternoon I'll be using 8 of my new 5' tall tomato cages to try to
keep the deer from eating my trees . Hope it works , because they're skinny
this time of year and not very good eatin' .


They can sometimes reach about 6 feet off the ground. As everything
greens up, they may neglect your trees but come back when they fruit.

I call them rats with hooves to differentiate from the tree rats i.e.
squirrels.

Young trees need to be fenced. In the fall, bucks can tear them up
polishing their antlers. I've seen them destroy trees up to maybe 6
inches in diameter. Park near here wanted to reforest an area and just
wrapped the trunks. They lost about half the trees.