Deer in the Garden

We are blessed with fabulous wildlife here and although my ethos is to put wildlife first in the garden, when roe deer start stripping out the leaves and tiny fruit on the apples, pears and cherries up in the verger and eating all my young plants in the potager, drastic measures are required.

After losing an entire bed of young cauliflower and cabbage plants, we erected a makeshift combination of green mesh fencing, an electric fence and bright blue baler twine along the bulk of the boundary that separates our garden from nearly four kilometres of woodland. There's a lot of room for deer in there and they'd become so confident I would frequently startle one sleeping out in the open in the mornings! 

Part of the problem is of our own making; the need to thin the trees along our side of the ditch, especially felling a large and increasingly precarious birch has left quite a few gaps where once a healthy bramble and rose thicket had made the boundary fairly impenetrable. 

But the many lovely straight ash poles we've removed have made excellent wigwams for sweet peas, and I guess the next lot - ash grows like a weed around here - will go back into the boundary horizontally to add solidity to the rose and bramble.

After a week of no obvious visits from the deer, no new damage and nothing on the trail cam, I started to relax. With a vegetable plot now full of tender plants, my focus was rather more on keeping on top of the population of hungry slugs and snails, so to wake up one morning to find a good half of my chilli and pepper plants nibbled down to the ground and the bulk of the aubergines trampled into the mud was really depressing. 

So now once again my potager has horrible wire fencing on the sides furthest away from the house, and the arch soon to be covered in sweet peas and morning glories no longer leads out of the potager but just up to a wire fence. 

Hopefully this will be enough and next spring the holes along the boundary will have filled in once again. Otherwise we will have to invest in a more permanent fence, either of the whole garden, or just the more vulnerable sections.

But annoying as it is, I would definitely rather see deer eating my vegetables than slugs. And if push comes to shove I'd be far more happy with a haunch of venison then roti d'escargot!