I mentioned my battle with the whistle pigs recently, but didn’t mention the other notorious varmint damaging my garden: Deer.
Signs of Deer
A few weeks ago I noticed signs of deer because the stems of some of my tomato plants were missing. They were still only about three feet high and I didn’t see obvious deer tracks, so I left it open that the whistle pigs may have been the culprit. Not so.
Interestingly, the last few years the deer didn’t bother with the tomato plants; they focused on the pepper plants and flowers, mostly. However, this season, I installed a small fence around the pepper plants, sun flowers, and flowers. So, the deer have decided to take the least resistant path and just focus on the next best appetizing veggies such as the tomato plants, and to a lesser extent, the leaves off of the sweet potatoes and green beans. The same with the whistle pigs.
Horse and Chair
From a psychological perspective, this behavior is interesting. Both the whistle pigs and deer can easily gain access into the fence. The former can crawl or dig under the fence; the latter, even the small deer, can hop over the fence since it’s only about four feet high. They choose not to do so. It reminds me of tying the leads of a horse to a plastic chair.1Archive of horse tied to chair.
Per the image, “sometimes the chains that prevent us from being free are more mental than physical.” As such, often times a horse will believe it can’t roam free, and won’t even try to do so.
Attack on Big Tomato Plant
Anyway, this past weekend, on Saturday early morning, I noticed an attack on a couple of my tomato plants. The one they targeted most is the tallest of four plants, exceeding six feet high. Several stems from bottom to top were snipped off.
Also, the leaves of one sweet potato plant and all the bean plants (one in the foreground) had the leaves snipped off. The latter could have been attributable to the whistle pigs, but the timing seems to indicate the deer are to blame.
In the picture below, I’m pointing to one of the stems of the tall tomato plant that got snipped by the deer. It’s slightly above eye level for me, so it’s about 5.5 feet high.
I’m surprised the deer could reach that high.
A Deer Presents Itself
Later Saturday evening, while working on my computer near the back screen door, one of the likely culprits was making a beeline to my garden. My backdoor is about 30 meters from the edge of the woods. The garden is another 10 meters away.
After I saw the deer heading towards, and eyeing, my garden, I grabbed my camera and snapped a low-quality picture.
Deer left scat
It stopped to look at me at about five meters from the garden, so I whistled and made a verbal command. At that point, it paused for a moment (I think this is when the deer had the scat scared out of it!), and then ran away.
I hope it communicates to its siblings and parents that the garden is now off limits to them.
Footnotes
- 1Archive of horse tied to chair.
