I've gotten into the habit of walking around the garden every day when I first go outside, just to look at the plants and see how things are growing. A couple of days ago, I noticed that some of my bean plants had been half eaten, and that started me on a search to see if anything else was damaged. At that point, I had no idea what might have done the damage, but I figured that it was either a rabbit, or a deer.
I started looking more closely at the plants and in the garden to see if I could find any tracks. Once I looked at my housemate's corn patch, it became obvious that the damage was caused by a deer. There were a lot of deer tracks in the soft dirt of the corn patch.
After finding the tracks, I had to do a better inspection of the garden to see what else the deer ate. I was surprised that the deer didn't doo more damage than it did. It took the tops off of a couple of my tomato plants.
It's a bit hard to see on this plant, but the top is gone.
The damage to this tomato plant is more obvious.
Here's a foot print between the rows of tomato plants. I think the deer was walking on the boards, because tracks were hard to find in the main garden.
I'm still not sure where the deer got into the garden from. The only place that I could come up with was in the back of the yard by the alley. The fence was lower there than anywhere else. I think it jumped over the snow fence that I use to block off the back yard. I have seen that the deer will jump over a 4 foot tall fence to get into the garden. I need to have at least 5 foot high fences to deter them from coming in the garden. They can jump a 5 foot fence if they really need to, but they won't bother if they're just browsing for food.
I ended up using a partial roll of 2 foot tall fence wire to extend the height of the back fence to attempt to keep them from jumping it. The fence in the back is now about 6 feet tall, so hopefully I won't have any more deer in the garden this year.
That's all I have for this post. Thanks for checking it out!
