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' .

by creating a forest meadow you've pretty
much put out the welcome mat.

we've tried all sorts of things and found
that if deer are hungry enough they'll eat
about anything even if it's been sprayed with
all sorts of things. and as for deer proof
plants, if the deer are young enough they'll
sample plants. get enough deer to sample a
plant and it's about as dead as it would be
if it were prime deer feed.

in the end, for the formal veggie gardens
a fence has solved the problem. for the gardens
outside the fenced area, i plant multiple plots
of veggies and hope the critters don't get them
all. usually it has worked well, the outside
plots act as decoy and diversions to keep
critters happy and away from the fenced gardens.

today for example, we had visits by rabbits,
woodchuck, chipmunks, snake and cat and none
of them were in the fenced gardens. most of
the time the woodchuck spent mowing the tops
of some of the alfalfa in the spiral garden
(a green manure patch). the chipmunks ran
around and picked maple tree helecopters out
of the limestone mulch. the bunnies were out
front, i don't know what they did, but probably
ate plantain and clover out of the grass.
the cat came along later, but i don't know if
it hunted or not. i just happened to be
looking at a short round bird through my small
binoculars when it popped up way back at the
fence and i thought at first it was a bobcat
it was so big...

of all the critters the one i'll likely have
to move along with the air rifle is the woodchuck
as it has gnawed some of the garlic off and i
don't want to encourage it for coming up closer
to the house. they do run quite fast. i was out
yesterday and caught it in the same spiral garden
and it ran off. i was thinking that i was very
glad it didn't attack me as it could move pretty
fast and it wasn't a small critter at all.


songbird