The Damn Deer Ate My Strawberries!

Isn't that how it always starts? We have a small plot of wildflowers, strawberries, buffalo berries, blueberries, and potatoes up where my wife, Erin, and I are building our house. We left our starts out just a little too long after dusk and our strawberries paid the price. In the name of all strawberries (and manly pride) I had to find a way to keep those deer away! I needed a cost effective and sustainably minded solution. I looked around for some thing to reuse and remembered the old fence I'd torn down a few months before. It would work perfectly. 

Being conscious of where I was cutting, so I could use the long wire pieces on the ends for attachment, I cut 4 4'-6' chunks for circular cages for the wild flowers and blueberries. I capped them with pieces of chicken wire cut to fit. For the strawberries I cut an 8' piece and used a 2x6 to bend the wire into a box shape and then crease the middle to form a kind of "strawberry house".

Left to right: Blueberry cage, strawberry house, 3 wild flower cages and one long tent in the back for the Morning Glories. Wire is hard to photograph....

Take that deer!...And they did!!! We lost a few more of the replacement strawberries because we had yet to learn that you needed to pin down the runners to create new plants and to keep the leaves out of the reach of those sneaky deer! Live and learn.

Garden Report

My plot will contain watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkins, slicing and pickling cucumbers, peas, and giant and baby bells. I also have Danver carrots in the greenhouse that are doing very, very well! My peas didn't germinate due to a bad seed batch, I think, and my watermelons didn't make it out of the seedling stage. We've replaced the pea seeds, which I'll direct sow early this next week, and the watermelons with starts which will go out then too. Pretty much all of my seeds are direct sow in June so this next week should be very busy for me, but I can't wait to see the results this fall.

Rory