Every so often I hear guys whining about how lousy the hunting's become, there are no whitetail deer left in Baraga County, if there were no wolves the deer would be back in record numbers, and so on ad nauseum. We have a neighbor, for example, who claims to never see any deer anywhere anymore.
 |
| Fawn tracks in the driveway. I was wishing I had a dime to set next to them for scale. The tracks are tiny. |
The guys doing the whining are either the most incompetent hunters on the planet or they're blind. I practically tripped over a doe yesterday while hanging out the laundry. Then when I was on my way to check on how my freshly planted raspberry canes are doing in the garden, I noticed evidence of recent browsing nearby.
Maybe we should connect the fence charger. If the deer are browsing within spitting distance of the Woman Cave, sooner or later they might decide the broccoli growing a few feet away looks good.We haven't bothered connecting a battery to the charger for a couple summers, but sooner or later there's going to be a new generation of
Odocoileus virginianus that's going to question why they always detour around the fencing instead of trying to go through it.
The deer barrier, which is about five feet away from this patch of browsed on vegetation, consists of a 4-foot wide strip of poultry fencing topped with 3 strands of electric fence. Years ago we started off with just tall livestock fencing, which the deer skipped merrily over. That's when we started adding electric fencing. When it got up to three strands, they quit trying.
I can never remember the name of the stuff the deer have browsed on, but it's kind of a nifty plant for providing fill at the back of a flower garden. I'm contemplating digging some up to fill in empty spaces in the native plants garden at the museum. Maybe. My gathering focus at the moment is more on trilliums and virgin's bower than it is on plants that are so mundane I can't remember what they're called.
Deer were a real problem for my garden when we were in Kentucky. We would look out into our back field and sometimes see as many as twelve at a time - they ran in herds in our county . They would come into the yard and I would fire off my pistol and they would move about 25 yards and then stop and look at me defiantly. I put up a motion detector activated horn in the garden and it helped.
ReplyDeletethe Ol'Buzzard
Keeping ditch donkeys out of the garden is a major undertaking.
ReplyDelete