We own a few acres here in the country. About an acre in back of our house is securely fenced and this is where we grow the majority of our perennials, bulbs & flowering shrubs. The fence is sturdy wood and hardware cloth, 4’ high and impossible for my terriers to escape.

The dogs will tromp the flowers and weave their own paths through the beds and lawn, but mostly they leave what we have planted alone and seem to enjoy the evolving display of color, scents and foliage as much as we do. We can’t use many natural fertilizers, as one of the dogs believes in her heart that these were meant to be in her food bowl. So we use a limited amount of inorganic fertilizer and some organic stuff in the Spring or Fall when we can bury it under a deep layer of mulch.

Birds of every type – plump cooing morning doves, brilliant cardinals, bluebirds, jays, darling little house wrens, titmice, chickadees, finches of all colors, nuthatches, sparrows, grackles, cowbirds, juncos, all three sizes of woodpeckers, flickers, thrashers, robins, mockingbirds, two kinds of hummingbirds, crows and even the occasional hawk and eagle stop by. And we’ve heard owls at night, but have yet to spot them. 

We feed them all, have shallow watering troughs for them and seem to spend more on their various foods than we do on food for the house pets.

Of course, the same terrier that thinks organic fertilizer is part of her diet, believes the cracked corn we feed the doves is meant for her, as well.

Until this Spring – our garden was a haven for birds, squirrels, lizards, tree frogs, toads, the occasional friendly stray cat and our beloved house dogs. Oh – and the occasional snake. Ugh. Yes, I’m trying desperately to make my peace with black snakes just as I am with lizards, frogs and toads. But it is an effort and one I haven’t yet mastered.

Our fence has been doing its job daily and proven impossible for other animals to penetrate.

Or so we thought.

My beloved Labrador died last winter. He was my dog, not my husband’s. My heart still aches for him. After nearly 15 years of mutual devotion, there is emptiness to every walk. Even on moss, there is a lonely echo to every footfall.

With his loss, we have found our fence is not so impenetrable as we believed. It seems the darling little woodland creatures preferred to remain outside the big dog’s domain and beyond his reach. Who knew? Of all the animals, wild and domestic, he held the biggest chunk of my heart and was obviously at the top of the pecking order of all the animals on our acreage. Benevolent but respected.

Now we have a pair of darling baby rabbits that visit inside the fence nightly. Well, they were babies when they first arrived. Now they are fat, happy adolescents nearing adulthood and full of my asters, poppies, phlox, daisies and liatris. Undoubtedly they are feeling their oats and thinking about fathering their own little brood of aster-eating baby bunnies.

Hubby – good man that he is! – has added more hardware fencing on the bottom half of our gates – which has not yet foiled the darling creatures.

Today hubby’s plan was to add additional hardware fencing where the fence meets the garage.

 

The spaces hubby is dutifully plugging with mesh are considerably smaller than than 4”, but our wildlife seems to delight in squeezing themselves flat like pancakes to fit through. We know because we have installed motion sensor lights and have gone out in the night with flashlights and caught the little escape artists in the act.

We have also wrapped areas outside our fence with poles strung with fishing line and tacked up pieces of Irish Spring soap. And when I groom the terriers and the old Persian cat, I gather up all their fur and throw it outside the fence around the things we’ve planted. These tactics are the best we’ve found to keep the deer away from the things we’ve planted outside the fence. Cheap, effective and inoffensive to us.

I have numerous lists of deer resistant plants which I know by heart. But sometimes an area outside the fence simply calls out for hosta, daylilies, hydrangea, camellias or azaleas – all of which are deer candy. Our deer gobble up these lovelies on odd days when they get a taste for them. Usually stringing a few strands of clear fishing line around trees under which perennials and shrubs are planted is sufficient to deter Bambi and all his little friends. But sometimes, it’s not.

We’d had NO damage all season from deer using these measures until about two weeks ago –even though we had proof that deer cavorted happily all over the unfenced front and side yards. Then one night they decided to devour three clumps of fancy specimen hosta down to stalks — in an area where at least 25 other big, lush clumps of old fashioned, un-named hosta thrive and are now blooming. Those three clumps of stalks without leaves are an anathema. They irk me no end every time I glance that way.

The deer do the same thing every single time I plant new azaleas outside the fence or along the woods. Huge old azaleas 4’ tall will be growing luxuriously next to a 1-gallon or 3-gallon specimen recently planted and the deer will opt to eat every leaf off the recently planted shrub and leave the old established plant untouched. And I’m convinced, the rabbits happily help them!

Wild turkeys visit our property as well with their offspring, sometimes in large groups. But they seem to do little damage. They rout around and may break a few perennials here and there but they tend to stay outside the fence. But I think they eat all the ticks, for which I’m grateful.

Friends tell me to mark the areas I want to protect with coyote urine to keep the deer and rabbits away. Other friends swear by the granulated repellent pellets that can be purchased at nurseries and home improvement stores. The labels say they are pet safe, but they also tell you to store them out of reach of pets and children. Still other gardeners swear by a concoction of eggs and other stuff that you let sit outside, ‘cook’ for a week and then apply. Were I to use these remedies, I’d need gallons and bushels of this stuff given the size of our property.

Well, the urine, the pellets and the gawd-awful homemade egg mixture stink! Truly awful stinky smelling stuff. I don’t want my garden – even my garden outside the fence – smelling that way. Even if only for a few hours. I know I’d toss up my cookies if I had to apply anything that smelled that bad. So, I don’t.

We stick with motion sensor lights – which I secretly think the deer and rabbits like as the light helps them to see exactly what looks tastiest to them – and clear fishing line; Irish Spring soap, pet fur and the occasional intervention from me, hubby or the terriers. Certainly not a foolproof system, but we do seem to be experiencing less damage than our friends. And we can still smell the roses.

 And perhaps one day there’ll be another Labrador… to even the odds, dog my footsteps and fill the void.