Deer Chaos in the Orchard

 

The other day I was training tomatoes in the garden, when I heard a strange sound coming from the orchard...

... the orchard is located nearby the garden, but is far away enough that it has its own fenced in area. We had been having issues with some sort or animal (we were thinking a groundhog, but we really dont' know) squeezing through a weak spot in the fence. It was mostly eating the strawberries we had and harassing one of the plum trees.

 

The sound I heard, was the sound of something against the fencing... initially I thought, "I bet that's the darn groundhog trying to claw back into the orchard!" So I immediately stopped what I was doing in the garden and sprinted over to the orchard in order to foil the alleged groundhogs mischief.

 

To my surprise, I discovered not one, not two, but THREE deer- INSIDE the orchard! I think I was freaking out about as much as they were once they saw me. In moments, I witnessed one deer jump clean over the orchard fence which is about 8 feet tall. Perhaps unwisely, I entered the orchard to face off the enemy. The second deer was panicked and was jumping sideways into lower sections of the fence until it blew right through some chickenwire in the manner of a football player. The third deer was actually a fawn, it still had it's spots and all. It kept jumping at the fence, but was unable to jump high enough.

 

In all this chaos, my first thought was that the fawn was never going to get back out and was only going to trample things in the meantime. I ran after the fawn in order to herd it towards the side of the orchard where our 'gate' was open and give it a means to escape.

 

The fawn did half of what I had hoped. It was super freaked out and ran towards the right end of the orchard, but instead of going out the gate... it blew through a different section of the fence. UGH!

 

Fast forward two more days. I had temporarily repaired the sections of damaged orchard fence and thought that my scary encounter would be enough to keep those deer away for quite some time. But I was wrong. 

 

 

Upon walking to the garden I noticed that the orchard 'gate' was open. I thought maybe my boyfriend had been doing something in there, so I decided to go over and see what he was up to. Instead I found the aftermath of what undoubtedly was the deer again!

 

They not only blew through the gate, but they knocked down a whole section of the fence, which included bending what I had thought was an indestructible solid metal stake. They also blew through the same section of fence that the fawn had busted through. Holy shit, what is going on here?

It was one of those moments where you feel disbelief above all else... though disappointment, frustration, rage... yeah, violent rage was mixed in there.

 

 

The deer not only did a lot of damage to the fortifications of the orchard, but they did considerable damage to the fruit trees we had growing in there.

 

We have six apple, three cherry and two plum trees. Tree after tree had entire branches that were striped of leaves...

 

... had branches broken...

 

 

... and most profanely of all, utterly leaf-less. Pictured above was a cherry tree. It now has half of one leaf left to its name. I don't know if a tree can recover from something like that. Poor cherry tree! *sobs*

 

A mood of vengeance filled me, but since there wasn't anything I could really do directly to the deer... I moved into other activities in the orchard that helped me with my grieving.

Besides repairing the fence as best as I could, one activity included saying goodbye to some zucchini plants that were murdered by squash vine borers. I cremated four plants. This is actually something that is recommended. You don't want to compost a plant with an infestation like this, because there is a chance that the vine borer will still complete its life cycle. By burning the plants you ensure that the larvae are destroyed. An alternative is throwing them in the trash, which I've never done.

 

 

Another activity was taking a walk around and accessing what was going on with the other orchard plants. You can't tell from the obscenely overgrown scene above, but there are several rows of strawberries and an asparagus bed.

 

Real mental healing began with the surprise discovery of ... tomatoes... tomatoes everywhere it seemed like. My boyfriend must have fertilized the strawberries and asparagus with some of our compost. Everywhere I use the compost, I get tomatoes. Tomatoes tomatoes everywhere. In the garden I actually had tomato plants as WEEDS. I've heard that tomato seeds are pretty tough. In Nancy Bubel's book The New Seed Starters Handbook she mentioned a story where some town used to get tomato seedlings from their waste treatment plant. Amongst other things, apparently tomato seeds can survive our digestive tracks as well. Therefore it shouldn't be so surprising, I suppose, that the tomato plants grew from seeds that came to the compost pile last year as waste products from my salsa and sauce making projects.

 

So while the deer shattered our fence and my sense of security, it was nice to find the wild tomato plants growing all over. It was as though an unpleasant surprise was partially replaced by a pleasant one. And a added bonus was that we also seem to still be getting some strawberries.