Every morning after my bird chores, I try to take a look around the garden to see what deer damage occurred overnight. Of course, it’s not just deer, the raccoons in particular have also been really annoying, but the deer can do so much damage in a night. I wasn’t prepared for the emotional toll it would take to watch plants I started from seed be ripped from the ground, to watch cuttings that I babied into brand new plants chewed mercilessly, and to watch flower buds form and get me so excited for their blooms, only to have them all disappear overnight.
I should have expected it, though. After the first day, and subsequent days of electric fencing and gates fully failing despite assurances that the goats never ever got out before. Okay. Sure.
I should have expected it after walking under the house with not one, not two, but three plumbers who had no words for the patched-together homeowner’s special DIY done to the pipes. That was expensive to fix.
I did not realize that buying an established homestead would mean inheriting all of the previous homeowner’s to-do list. The same to-do list that led them to decide they needed more help and support, so they decided to sell, packed up, and moved to family property states away. Having them take all the animals was the smartest thing I could have done.
It took months to get the bird yard ready to actually hold animals and provide some level of predator protection. Untold numbers of birds have disappeared from this property over its 25 years of occupancy, yet not one fully contained and secure structure remained, if one was ever here to begin with.
If I’d waited to get the birds, I could have spent this spring fortifying the garden, but I didn’t know I needed to. Looking at that garden, there are fully established plants on both our side and our neighbor’s side. Plants have grown there before I arrived. How successfully is a question, but according to my neighbor John, both garden owners typically abandon the garden by June 1, leaving him to keep up with the watering. Maybe the deer have been eating everything all along and that actually leads to the garden being abandoned.
I moved all my remaining fig propagations to our backyard. The presence of the dogs should keep most predator activity low so those figs can grow into nursery stock as intended. I’m putting up cages around the most sensitive things, though not fast enough, as the new fruit trees are losing leaves as fast as they can make them. Things supposedly “deer resistant” are just as likely to meet their end overnight as things we know deer like.
On the necessary but boring side of things, I had a much overdue eye doctor’s appointment. Turns out that I am now “needs reading glasses” old. We’ll see how progressive lenses treat me.
I’m starting new seeds, one last batch of flowers, zinnias and perennials to add to my new front walk cutting garden. It doesn’t look like much yet, but the vision is there. Eventually it will be all perennials, but between the fungus gnats and deer, we’re filling in with annuals.
It’s been brutally hot, but we also finally got some much-needed rain. It’s going to be an interesting summer.
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