Spring Garden Dreaming – and deer wars
I’m thinking dirt.
Gardening dirt. Making compost. Harvesting my own organic vegetables. On my desk are two packages of Burpee Kentucky Wonder pole beans, my favorite. And out next to the raised beds of my garden is the tumbling composter I got for Christmas, loaded up with some leaves and left over debris from last season’s garden and a daily feed of kitchen scraps and waste.
I need to figure out a couple of things. One is a starter kit of some sort to get that compost cooking. I’m checking out the supplies at Urban Garden Solutions, a treasure trove of gardening info and inspiration. Any ideas anyone?
But the larger challenge I have involves the deer around my property, who, despte every effort short of fencing last year, got more of my produce than I did. So this year, it’s fencing.
I’m in need of a plan to get some stakes in the ground and a pretty high fence around everything. Anybody ever done that? And before you send me powders or homemade spray ideas, know I tried a bunch of those all last year. They didn’t work. Fencing is my only surefire alternative. It’s going to have to be pretty high, two, as whitetail deer are powerful jumpers.
Some veteran deep fighting gardeners have told me my fence needs to be eight feet high. I think six will do it as the raise beds I need to protect are only about five feet wide and a deer able to bound six feet up and over would have so much momentum that it would crash into the other side of the fence or leap right over it, too.
The snow is falling out there today. But I’m thinking spring.
at 6:59 pm
I like your discription of the deer jumping over the fence, created a funny visual, go with the fence. Good Luck
at 3:08 pm
I was at a garden where the guy used orange plastic safety fence. I see Lowes has Tenax 84″ x 100′ Plastic Netting for about $50. It will probably still require a buried chicken wire near the bottom to keep the chewers/diggers out. I’m going to give it a try this summer.