By Steve Chamberlain
Contributing Writer
Since the successful deer control efforts by the Village of Fayetteville, things have changed in my garden. No deer coming from the north (Fayetteville) to the Manlius cemetery were in evidence for months. I did not see any deer in my garden, nor any damage from deer until the hot dry spell began in July.
Initially, my 100 percent organic fresh salad bar (plantings outside the fence along the street), began to get customers from Mill Run Park. Then I began to notice single deer in the garden. After a number of encounters, I realized there were just two. A young doe (probably born last year) who is sleek, beautiful and afraid of me and an older, large, scarred doe who is not really afraid of me at all. The young doe, I named “Cutie Pie” the older doe, “Nasty.”
For the past month we have been playing the exclusion game. Can we modify the fence so as to keep both Cutie Pie and Nasty out of the garden? (Note: my concern is less my plants being nibbled and much more Lyme Disease. This concern was heightened when a close friend who lives nearby came down with Lyme Disease just last month.)
Cutie Pie found a place where trimming back a climbing hydrangea opened a hole in the fence. We also watched her put her nose under the fence, lift it up and crawl under it. Each time we observed an entry tactic we addressed it to prevent repeats.
I actually have not seen Cutie Pie in the garden for more than a week and maybe she has gotten discouraged. Her browsing behavior was interesting. Rather than munch down on hosta flowers, or varieties she liked, she tended to wander around tasting pretty much everything — tree leaves, shrubs, daylily buds and flowers, hosta flowers, a hosta leaf here and there, oenethra, sedum, etc.
She’s never been to this restaurant before and wants to sample the menu. Her response when I walked in the garden to slowly chase her away was interesting. She obviously did not seem to remember how she got in, but ran frantically all along the fence, jumping against it, etc. Finally she found a place in the back corner where with several attempts she is able to jump/fall over it. This part of the fence slants outward and is unlikely to be a point of entry, so we’ve left it like that.
Nasty, by contrast, keeps finding new points of entry and has been in the garden pretty much every day. She comes in late afternoon and seems to like particular hosta plants. Here and there in the garden there are now “celery-stem” hostas. When I come into the garden, often she faces me, puts her head down and paws the ground. When that doesn’t work, she calmly walks to where she came in and leaves. Moreover, she tends to hide in secluded places in the garden so I won’t see her. As I’m walking around, she suddenly jumps out and startles me. Yikes. She’s much more of a challenge than Cutie Pie.
On the other hand, she is sort of like a testing participant in a beta version of the fence. Each time I watch her, it leads to strengthening the fence in a new way. For longer runs of fence, for example, we are adding stakes along the bottom that rigidly tie the bottom of the fence in position. Nasty has not been able to overcome our reinforcements, but she’s still creating new entry points. Eventually, I think she’ll be excluded completely, but it’s an ongoing process.
So far, none of the plant damage really matters. Along the street, outside the fence, it looks like a war zone. Inside the fence, all the damage is either barely noticeable, or one hosta here and another hosta there that have no leaves at all — sort of a foliage variant. Hostas don’t do much from August onward unless we have a really wet autumn, so the worst effect might be that severely-browsed clumps might be slightly smaller next season.
Meanwhile, I hope that greatly reducing the number of mass transit vehicles for infected adult deer ticks might be actually reducing the risk of being bitten by an infected tick in my garden. It’s not what’s in the earth at this point, but what’s lurking on the plants that’s the concern.
