That’s some helpful information. Freaking deer. We might just enclose it in some netting, that worked for our red cedar baby trees. I’d heard that if you plant basil with your tomatoes, that keeps away the slugs. Dunno if that works, though.
Tomato, cucumbers and tasty herbs sound appealing. Maybe garlic and peppers (I love those) like abasket has, too. My husband wants corn and potatoes, but I don’t know how well that grows around here. We actually have room for several hugelkulture piles, if this works.
This caused me to look up hugelkultur. We have not done this, but do have raised beds that I have “double dug”, meaning that they have all been dug down to about 2 feet in depth (and filled with a lot of compost). I used to double dig 1/6 of the garden every year, so that it took me 12 years before all of it had been done twice. The goal seems to be similar, which is to get raised beds with a lot of very deep soil.
Our approach does seem to work well, but takes time and effort. Hugelkultur might remove a big step in that you use a lot of wood, rather than having to come up with organic material in other ways (such as composting, or buying a lot of peat moss). Of course it would take some time for the wood to rot out.
Tomatoes to me seem to be a must. We also use pesto about as much as tomato sauce so basil is also a must. Basil has the advantage that wild animals do not seem to be interested in it. Anything in the onion family also seems to be more or less ignored by the small furry creatures. Most herbs similarly do not seem to get stolen by small furry criminals. Most other things need to be protected, which we do with physical barriers.
I have had quite a bit of trouble over the past two years protecting strawberries. We have them growing in a box, and have another box that fits over the top with a metal mesh cover (this uses 2x6 boards, so the whole thing is just under 12 inches in height). Something digs under the box and comes up from underneath (I am pretty sure that it is mice). I have wondered about digging up the whole thing, putting a 1/2 inch metal mesh on the bottom of the box, and then putting the soil and strawberries back. One thing that I wonder about however: Is there any danger of lead leaking out of the metal mesh (eg if it rusts)? I have also thought of making the sides of the box deeper hoping that there is some limit with regard to how deep the mice will dig before they give up. I do not currently have an answer to this.
We have had good success with blueberries, but this does take a few years. For the larger plants I have an enclosure which I call “fort blue” which is a rather major effort. There are large polyester mesh bags that you can buy and I have wondered whether just wrapping a bit of aluminum foil around the base of the plant and then putting a polyester bag over the whole thing would work just as well. Two 5 foot tall wild plants have just sort of planted themselves in a sufficiently vacant part of the yard and are covered in white flowers right now, so I guess that in a couple of months I will find out whether the big polyester mesh bag works. I do not know whether these plants are offspring from our wild low bush blueberries, from our cultivated high bush blueberries, or a cross. There are also some “half high” blueberry plants that you can purchase that are likely to be easier to fully protect compared to the high bush varieties.
We have an electric fence around our vegetable garden (and also around fort blue) which seems to get the job done with regard to deer. Keeping deer away from rhododendrons and hosta and mountain laurels seems to be a tougher problem. One issue here is that putting a fence around all of the above sort of defeats the entire point which is for them to look good.
Now I am wondering whether our hosta are serving the important function of being just as delicious as our vegetable garden, but not having the annoying electric fence for them to knock down on the way to dinner.
I spend half my time at a garden center looking up whether a plant is deer resistant or not.
Plants that have strong smell and texture seem to be on their “do not like” list though as they say, if they are hungry without resources nothing is truly safe. They leave my sage, chives, rosemary, thyme, and lavender - all out in the open - alone. Mint too. I wish they’d eat that! I didn’t plant it but can’t get rid of it.
Flower/perennial wise I took a note from my neighbor who has been here for decades and bought - or she gave me - similar plants. Peonies, lilac, daisies, nepeta, astilbe, daffodils, wild phlox, iris, cosmos, cleome among those that are safe. Usually zinnias but last year mine got pummeled - I think that was a groundhog though!
Because of groundhogs, I can’t plant Cone flowers, petunias, Gay Feathers, etc. in the backyard where there is no foot traffic and little noises. They don’t like to come to the front yard so I can plant those flowers. Occasionally, they have sneaked up front and munch those, too. They can climb (and dig under) fences and trees. We have little deer pressure but serious groundhog damage. An electric fence is out of the questions for us at this point.
Yeah, that does sound similar, depending upon how high your raised beds are. I think the hugelkultur goal is to provide nourishment and moisture for many years, and I’ve read it’s better to have either decomposing wood, or wood that decomposes rapidly, not cedar or other hardwoods. We have a LOT of cottonwoods, which are the most useless wood ever, except for this purpose.
Tomatoes, basil and onions sound like a tasty combination. I love strawberries and blueberries, but we’re going to try blueberries in our backyard where we can water them regularly, and I don’t know about strawberries if they attract pests. The metal mesh is recommended to be stainless steel or galvanized, which supposedly can take decades to rust, so hopefully that won’t be a problem.
I planted a golden zucchini plant this year instead of green. I harvested the first one a little earlier than I usually would and cooked it in the air fryer last night. So tasty! Our pepper, tomato and corn plants are all doing very well so getting excited about those. Also, I tried to grow dahlias last year and all of the tubers rotted, probably because we got too much rain. This year I tried again and three out of the four are growing nicely so far. I can’t wait to see flowers and I’m hoping the deer don’t get them.
My radishes fizzled out this year - again! First it was too cold, then we had wild temperature swings. Oh well. Hope the deck garden does ok. Mr. B rigged a drip irrigation system for the containers so we can leave it unattended for a weekend if we needed to.
I haven’t gotten any more golden zucchini since that picture I posted. The last few developed end rot so that was a bummer, but several others seem to be growing well. All the pepper and cucumber plants seem to be doing great, and my husband was very excited about his tomato plants last night. He counted at least 75 tomatoes!
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