The Garden: Oh, Deer!

So last weekend I came downstairs at 4:30 am to eat breakfast (had to go to work early that day) , and suddenly there's this HUGE thing flying around the kitchen!! Scared the crap out of me. Judging by the shape of it's wings and it's flight pattern, I realized it was a bat. It flew into another room, where it flew around a few times and then disappeared. I left a note by my parent's door before I left for work, so they wouldn't freak out if they discovered it. Hours later when I got back, no one had found it yet. My dad finally found it nestled in between the screen and glass of an opened window. It refused to budge when we tried to prod it outside. Apparently it was SOUND asleep.

Here it is, just "hanging out". It stayed in this spot until after dark, when it finally flew away. Looks a lot smaller asleep than it did when it was flying around the kitchen.

Anyway, it's been a somewhat frustrating week in the garden. The deer have returned almost every night, nibbling on some things, and mostly just trampling and leaving big hoof prints everywhere. The cardinal rule of bio intensive gardening is: never step on the beds! They are stepping all over the soft soil in the beds, damaging and killing plants. I looked up homemade deer repellent recipes on the internet, and found one that seems to work. I mixed up 3 eggs, several cloves of garlic, and a whole lot of pepper in a blender, and then diluted that with about a half gallon of water. I've been basically painting that on everything, and they haven't eaten anything I've put it on, yet. But they're still coming back. Putting up a large fence is just going to be too expensive. So it looks like I'll be putting deer repellent on everything once or twice a week. Maybe I should set up a tent and start sitting outside all night? In addition to the damage I listed in my last post, they also ate the tops off several of my tomato plants. =(

I harvested broccoli! Yum! The heads aren't huge, but I didn't want to wait for them to get larger and risk having them bloom, like they did last time I tried growing broccoli. I was weeding in the garden yesterday and noticed a fair amount of insect damage to the plants. So I practiced some organic pest control: squishing all the caterpillars that I could find on the leaves. They're already growing side shoots, and I'd like to be able to harvest them before the bugs destroy the plants.

Corn! Deer haven't gotten to these.... yet.

Sunflowers. They lean back and forth every day, following the sun. The deer ate two of them.

A healthy pumpkin volunteer growing on the edge of the strawberry bed. Deer don't like squash plants, because they're prickly. They also haven't touched my onions or broccoli.

What's left of my tomatoes.

Chamomile from Maine, which I've already harvested numerous flowers from.

This is my vertical frame contraption, the idea of which I got from the Square Foot Gardening book. I've hung string from it, which hopefully the tomatoes can be trained to grow up.