{"id":119,"date":"2008-10-20T17:05:09","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T01:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=119"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:00","slug":"oh-deer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/oh-deer\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Deer!"},"content":{"rendered":"

OH DEER!
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Two weeks ago I was standing in line at the deli when I heard someone behind me say, “I saw two deer yesterday–big ones–right on the front lawn.”\u009d<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then, a few days later, I went to an end-of-season party at the little public garden in my town.\u00a0 I was sipping punch and gossiping about real estate when I heard someone mention the tiny wooded area where the garden abuts the neighboring properties.\u00a0 “There are deer in there,”\u009d said a party guest, who gardens on one of those neighboring properties.\u00a0 “They ate all my hostas,”\u009d he added with a sigh.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now, in many parts of the country statements like the ones I heard wouldn’t cause any surprise at all.\u00a0 Listeners’ reactions would probably be limited to a few sympathetic remarks coupled with helpful hints about deer repellants.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But in this part of the suburban world where the population is dense, the green space is limited and New York City is only twelve miles away, deer didn’t used to be a problem.\u00a0 You can understand why the remark about deer in the neighborhood sent a chill down my spine.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I confess that for years I treated the deer-afflicted like some kind of a single-minded cult, even as I read about the increasing sizes of deer herds just about everywhere.\u00a0 I tried not to listen when friends told me that if you enter the words “deer”\u009d and “gardens”\u009d in the “Search”\u009d box of Barnes & Noble’s website, you will come up with seventy-five citations, some of which are for books devoted entirely to the subject.\u00a0\u00a0 I fumed at the fact that it is impossible to read any garden-related book, magazine or blog without running into references to deer problems. \u00a0When friends who live farther west talked for what seemed like an eternity about does giving birth by the back porch and bucks squaring off in front of the stubs of chewed-off daylilies, I thought about other things.\u00a0 Fellow gardeners often spoke about enrobing young trees in chicken wire barriers to keep the deer from eating all the tender shoots and babbled on about the high cost of deer fencing.\u00a0 Not only did I take no pity, I thought it morbid to speculate on ways of persuading deer to indulge in monkshood, hellebore or other plants that are truly poisonous.\u00a0 “How foolish,”\u009d I said to myself, “to hang soap in the trees, collect human hair to sprinkle in the borders or spray animal urine on ornamental plants.”\u009d\u00a0 As I stood at the garden party, all those sins came back to me.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

I thought pictured all of my roses, daylilies and campanulas.\u00a0 Starting to tally up the amount of money that I have spent on ornamental plants over the years, I considered the inadequacy of the fence in back and the privet hedges in front.\u00a0 One of my friends, whose New York State garden has been besieged by deer, swears that they can distinguish between cheap and expensive plants.\u00a0 If the deer who inhabit this corner of suburbia are as upwardly mobile as many of the two legged mammals, the voracious plant eaters probably won’t accept just any begonias from Home Depot either.\u00a0 In fact, I am absolutely certain that they will prefer the latest Japanese painted ferns from White Flower Farm.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

So what am I to do?\u00a0 The deer are not just in my town, they are in my end of town.\u00a0 I garden organically, so they won’t be deterred by the foul smell of pesticides and herbicides.\u00a0 My cats, the plump and brainless Arthur and the crafty, cautious Sarah, don’t even scare the groundhog, let alone something the size of a deer.<\/font><\/p>\n

I may have to actually read one of those books on deer proofing, while I am saving up to buy deer fencing.\u00a0 Next spring, I will make a major investment in poisonous plants like foxglove and lily-of-the-valley. \u00a0But all is not lost.\u00a0 A mixed blessing has been spotted on my neighbor’s back forty, and it may give the deer a reason to seek greener pastures.<\/font><\/p>\n

We think it was a coyote.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OH DEER! \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Two weeks ago I was standing in line at the deli when I heard someone behind me say, “I saw two deer yesterday–big ones–right on the front lawn.”\u009d \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then, a few days later, I went to an end-of-season party at the little public garden in my town.\u00a0 I was sipping punch … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1665,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/1665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}