deer

Looking back at 2021’s gardening season

Jen Powell4 Comments

We had a decent summer. I got really busy and have not updated here in awhile. My main garden is fenced, inside another fence (for our dogs). The deer have not really gotten in until this year – my dogs are getting older and I guess don’t really bark at the deer when they come in. The deer figured this out and essentially annihilated my main garden toward the end of the season. They ate all my tomatoes, and zucchini, and anything else they found out there. I did get a good harvest but I had to get what I could before they could eat it all. There are some things I didn’t even get to harvest because of the deer, including cauliflower and broccoli. Looking forward to next year, I’m going to have to make my garden fence taller, or something. I’ll figure that out. Luckily they didn’t get into our cottage garden (not sure why, but I’ll take it). For now, here are some cool pictures of the end of our gardening season 2021:

  • Here are some of our tomatoes and zucchini that we got, before the deer figured out they could get into the garden.
  • A bee on a Torch flower (Mexican sunflower)
  • A Monarch butterfly on the torch flowers. These flowers were wonderful and got about 6 feet tall and stayed blooming into October.
  • Some cute mushrooms growing in the old mulch of my cottage garden.
  • Our giant sunflowers this year. One got to about 12 feet tall.
  • A view of the sky between the tall sunflowers.
  • Here is an earlier picture of the torch flowers, when they were smaller.
  • My zinnias. These came up and bloomed after all my poppies were done. I also had some asters in this bed that bloomed into October.
  • Here are my “giant” pumpkins. They did get large (over 12″ across) but I believe they were stunted by the deer eating the plants and biting into these. You can see the damage they caused. I had to cage them in using old fence pieces so that I could keep the deer from demolishing them.
  • A foxglove bloom – my plant from last year either re-seeded or came back.
  • Some inky cap mushrooms growing in our driveway.
  • I put in sunchokes a few years ago (Jerusalem Artichokes) and they finally got a flower this year. We have yet to try to dig up tubers to eat them. I wanted the bed to get established, and this shows that they are finally getting there.
  • A closer photo of the one sunchoke flower.
  • Some cute mushrooms growing in the mulch by my Haskap berry plants. There were hundreds of these little guys. This pic does not do it justice. They are kind of hidden by the leaves as well.

Deer Devastation

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Our strawberries have been coming in well – I had gotten a couple cups a few days ago, and at that time there were a bunch almost ripe and ready to pick. So yesterday morning,  I walked out to the strawberry patch to harvest, and came across this sight:

deer eaten strawberries

A deer got into my strawberry patch and eaten the tops and the berries off most of my plants. The way they were eaten and the amount taken points to deer. And we have deer in the yard a lot. Here is what the plants were SUPPOSED to look like:

stawberries last week
My strawberry plants last week.

Luckily they just got the tops of the plants, so the plants will live to give me strawberries next year. I have it all fenced with a makeshift gate, but the gate had been off, since I don’t have to worry about chickens getting in there. The deer must have figured out she could get in through the open door.  The deer also got into the open gate of the cottage garden (which I also had left open since we don’t have chickens anymore) and tried a bunch of other things. She must have thought it was a salad bar:

deer eaten beans
Some of my green bean plants got the tops taken off.

The deer ate some bean plants, some chard, some lettuce, a bunch of my orach, some Borage and some broccoli. She wanted nothing to do with the huge patch of Kale or Asian greens that the chard and orach were between, for some reason.  This deer just came in and had a taste of random things.  A lot of herbs were untouched as well, fortunately. I have since made sure that gates are closed, and also got some fence to cover things a bit – I laid pieces of fence a little over so the plants are okay but the deer can’t get to the leaves, just in case they decide to just hop the fence to get some more salad. I was lucky that they didn’t completely devastate anything, but it was close. I only will get a few more strawberries, not the nice crop I was hoping for.

One bright spot was that my poppies are starting to bloom:

poppy

I’ve been trying to get poppies started for a few years and usually the seedlings disappear after I plant them. I put a ton in this year and they are all coming up and now this was the first bloom.