Oh Deer.

Oh Deer.

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If you’re gardening anywhere outside of the center of a city, you deal with deer, right?

And if there’s anything those little buggers like even more than wreaking havoc on the highway by leaping out right in front of your vehicle, it’s wreaking havoc on your edible and ornamental plants.

Having previously lived in the center of a city for 35 years, I’m still rather new to this conflict and am still creatively inventing what works here (and what doesn’t). Much of what I know I’ve just read, but I’m getting a little more first-hand experience every year.

I used to assume they’d steer clear of a yard with obnoxiously barking dogs, but no: these guys just walk in slow motion, like a cat, while my dogs give themselves coronaries freaking out about the oversized intruders to their territory. It’s sort of hilarious, really. What’s not hilarious, though, is the damage they can do.

Planting pest-resistant and repellent plants has always been appealing to me as a way deal with nuisances. No plant is 100% deer-proof, as they’ll sample pretty much anything that looks interesting, then decide whether to come back later for more. Deer in different areas have different “tastes” (dietary needs depending on what else is available) but there are some things they all seem to dislike: mainly super-aromatic plants. This includes most herbs: sage, thyme, rosemary, lavender, oregano, catmint, bee-balm, yarrow. All the stuff I love to smell, so that’s a win-win.

They also will avoid plants with fuzzy or hairy foliage like lamb’s ear, yarrow, even cucumbers and squash are usually a little too prickly for them. Other plants with toxic compounds that cause stomach upset are poppies, bleeding hearts, euphorbia, daffodils, and ferns. They don’t like grasses and are offended by the onion family. However, they are delicate nibblers and will gently browse the good stuff from in-between the bad. I watched a deer in my yard gently strip all the tiny leaves off an entire snowberry bush while avoiding every single (toxic) berry.

This of course isn’t a complete list, but it gives you a good idea where to start if you’d like to plant a deer-resistant garden.

My own pest-repellent garden is coming along slowly but surely.

Here, the main vegetable garden is fenced and kind of a dense/busy area with all the raised beds and structures. I know if a deer really wanted to, they could easily clear the 6′ wire fence, but so far they haven’t bothered – I’d like to think it just looks like too much trouble to risk entering that small of a space (only time will tell).

But in one of the outer areas of the yard, there’s an adorably short (as in, perfect deer-browsing height) little crab apple tree with the sweetest, most perfumey little apples I’ve ever tasted. Every spring it’s loaded with blossoms, but so far we’ve only gotten a few apples come September.

Years ago, long before I lived anywhere near a deer, I read a letter to the editor in Organic Gardening magazine saying they’d had great luck hanging Irish Spring soap in their tree branches to deter deer. I would enthusiastically share this tip with friends from the suburbs and country every time they’d lament about deer, but was usually answered with “no, NOTHING will deter these beasts” and I’m pretty sure none of them ever tried it.

The first summer here, I talked about that a lot, but didn’t get around to buying the soap until late in the season. It seemed like I may have saved a couple apples this way, and a couple apples was all we got. Last summer I was a little more on-the-ball and hung a bunch of bars mid-summer. Deer still ate several apples, but the ones closest to the bars of soap were left untouched.

This tree is small and as the apples grow, they weigh the branches down nearly to the ground if we don’t prop them up with stakes. I had been hanging whole and half bars, which weighed them down even more. It took me a couple seasons to realize on this particular tree, I should have been hanging more and smaller pieces closer to the apples rather than just the few big heavy ones.

Just a couple weeks ago we noticed that although the apples are still tiny (and must be crazy-sour!) our deer had wandered through and sampled several clusters of apples and tender leaves.

So I went out and bought a big package of my trusty Irish Spring: this time cutting each bar into 4 or 6 smaller chunks that I could hang closer to each apple cluster and farther out on the ends of the branches without additional staking. 

I cut several pieces of garden twine about 12″ long each to tightly wrap each soap chunk like a little present. Tying it tightly pulls the twine into the soft soap a bit, securing it – but be careful not to pull it too tightly or you’ll cut right through the soap.

There’s enough string to tie around the branches; some are secured tightly to the branch, others dangle a bit just below the clusters of apples, depending on its location in the tree. I had good luck last summer using the smaller chunks like this in a beloved rose bush, although the aesthetic quality of brightly colored, highly-scented soap chunks in an ornamental shrub may not appeal to most folks.

I realize these smaller pieces may need to be replaced during the growing season from rain and weather, but you can smell the soap just walking past so I’m hopeful they choose to leave it alone. JD picked up a few more big packages of Irish Spring the other day, so we won’t run out before the apples ripen.

I think creativity is key here: keep trying different methods to confuse and annoy them. A few days after hanging the soap pieces, I wrapped some of the branches with old Christmas tinsel that will move a little in the breeze. Next week I’ll hang some metallic curling ribbon from the branch tips as well (I had the ribbon out already to try to keep the birds out of my strawberries, but that’s another subject for another day!). By the time the apples are ready to eat, this poor little tree will look even more ridiculous, but at least we’ll get to enjoy those amazing little treats.

And finally, I originally tried Irish Spring because that’s what had been recommended by the other OG reader in their letter to the editor so many years before. I also tried a pack of Old Spice because it seemed pretty highly-perfumed also – but the Old Spice not only didn’t deter my deer, but was also apparently a delicious treat for the local rats.

Do you have any tried-and-true methods to keep deer out of your favorite plants? I’d love to hear them.

The Edible Garden, Year 1: Lessons Learned

The Edible Garden, Year 1: Lessons Learned

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Well, technically this was Year 2; the first year’s garden consisted of a couple pots of tomatoes on the patio while we watched the movement of sun and shade through the growing season and started getting to know the property.

Months of sketching, mapping, & measuring led up to this. I used to be the throw-stuff-together-however-I-can-and-call-it-good type, but I now share my space and my life with a mechanical engineer, so stuff gets measured and steps don’t get skipped. And I’ve got to admit, it’s kind of awesome this way.

We’ve got crazy-dense hard red clay here that sticks to and looks like dog poop on your boots, so I thought raised beds would be the way to go.

I’ve always built my beds with this no-till layered method: I first saw it in one of my parents’ Organic Gardening magazines when I was a kid (yeah, I was that little girl who read OG and Prevention magazines for fun). Although I’m pretty sure it has a real name that makes it sound more official, I’ve always just called it Lazy-Bed Gardening.

For smaller beds I’ll turn over a section of turf/weeds (didn’t do that here) spread a layer or two of cardboard and/or newspaper, a layer of raw/un-composted clippings, food & wood scraps, whatever’s on hand – then top it off with finished compost and garden soil. The cardboard/paper decomposes in a couple years but (supposedly) not until it’s suppressed any weeds still alive below. Every year as more layers break down I just add new soil/compost to the top.

I’d been saving all our big moving boxes for this as we unpacked. A ton of tall grass cleared from the creek area and 1-1/2 year’s of weeds & scraps seemed like a lot of composty-stuff to start with, but it just barely covered the cardboard. I ran over the whole mess a few times with the mower, then scooped the bulk of it into the bed areas.

We salvaged shipping frames for the 3 main beds from a local window manufacturer (normally they get broken down and trashed). I’d meticulously disassembled my bottle borders from my Seattle garden (I know, there are other bottles in the world, but I already had these) and they were packed and moved here. Rocks and random garbage found around the property finished the beds.

I showed JD some photos of squash-arches I’d saved in Pinterest and he designed the structures using branches and brush cleaned up around the property: we pre-assembled sections on the ground then screwed them to the bed-frames for stability.

By early May it was ready for planting. The topsoil blend I’d bought was seriously nitrogen-deficient and even with purchased/bagged compost my little seedlings had a super rocky start. We still don’t have chickens and I’d already used every bit of my compost building the beds so all my kitchen scraps and weed tops got buried in next to the babies and I fed them every concoction I could throw together trying to keep them from withering away in stunted, yellow-brown sadness.

By June, stuff was filling out and leaves were all green again. I was feeling like a real gardener. Someone in a nearby town had advertised free wood chips on Facebook Marketplace after removing a huge old pine tree from their front yard, and we gathered 3 truckloads to spread in the pathways between beds.

By August, I was like “we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Flimsy posts weren’t enough for these tomatoes so almost daily I was adding sticks and tying up vines and trying to keep them upright. One morning I came out to the entire tangled structure of 30 or so plants leaning out of the bed at a 45 degree angle and had to run around finding stuff to prop it up before it took out one of the other beds as well.

 

I’ve been growing vegetables and herbs however I could manage for over 30 years but this is the first time I’ve had space for a dedicated vegetable garden with full-sun all day long, so I’m learning as I go. And in 1 year there have been a lot of lessons to learn.

I’ve always planted super-tightly which worked fine in the limited space/sun of my city garden. But the tomatoes were a ridiculous mess to manage and even harder to harvest, and maybe 1/3 of my Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi produced at all because they were suffering in the shade of those that did. I suspect that might have been the issue with a lot of my winter squash as well: 1 or 2 plants thrived and the rest just kind of sat there looking small and bored. My peppers which had been planted in the prime south-facing warm-soil spots in the 2 big beds got lost under the shade of the monster tomato vines anyway, and I got maybe 3 or 4 peppers from over a dozen plants.

My old chop-and-drop weeding method, immediately burying bits of the pesky buggers for a little extra nutrition, doesn’t work here either. These weeds are like creepy little aliens from a sci-fi movie: multiplying and becoming more powerful than ever when cut to bits or buried more deeply. Also, I’ve recently noticed the grass that pops up in my pathways has roots that run along the top of the cardboard layer: yup, it’s all that dried-but-not-composted grass I laid down first.

I’d like to think I know what I’m doing now but like everything else, there are a lot more lessons in store for me to learn. As May starts to wind down already I’m still trying to wrap up this year’s planting and be sure my little babies have the best chance to survive and thrive in the months ahead. Where there’s a garden, there’s always hope.

 

Sheltering at Home.

Sheltering at Home.

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Are you tired of these words yet? Just so over it? Cooped-up, overwhelmed, worried, exhausted?

Yeah, I know. Although if I’m going to be real here, from the outside my own day to day life doesn’t really look much different during this quarantine than it did before. I’m an introvert who’s been running my art business from home since 1993. I live out in the country now, and before this started I usually only went into town once a week anyway.

But even for those of us whose daily lives haven’t been turned completely upside down and inside out from layoffs and closures and kids at home, everything feels so different, right? It’s weird and draining for everyone. Fear, insecurity, disagreements, anger, more fear . . . it can be a constant cycle of negativity if we let it.

I jotted down a few thoughts in my sketchbook I’ve been going back to, kind of like little mantras – and they’ve helped me start to get out of that weird emotional rut. Maybe you’ll be able to relate:

Because simplifying our lives starts from the inside out, right? Letting go of anxiety, downsizing, freeing ourselves from physical and emotional complications, becoming content with what we already have – all this uncomplicates us.

You don’t have to be way out in the country or have a farm to live more sustainably and simply. It’s about uncomplicating our minds. We keep so much clutter in there: negative thoughts, fears, worries, regrets. Isn’t it time to let that shit go, to quiet our minds? Now more than ever this is true for me, maybe it is for you too.

So pretty much I’ve been keeping busy pulling weeds in the garden beds. Out here I suspect I could pull weeds all day every day and never be done for the rest of my life, so it’s a pretty good thing for me to focus on right now anyway. What’s been your favorite way to quiet your mind during all this?