Wow! Good For You!

They ate the entire garden!  The deer found a weak spot in the fence, knocked it down and devoured everything in the garden.  My bell pepper plants were loaded with about 30 big, beautiful peppers; they ate the peppers, the plants, leaving just the stalk.  They ate all the squash, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, eggplants, refrigerator watermelons, and okra.  I couldn’t believe they ate the prickly okra, but they stripped them clean.  Here’s a picture of naked okra stalks.  Beware Bambi – this is war!

Okra stalks after deer attack

I had noticed that the squash plants were beginning to wilt, but thought all the rain had something to do with it.  Late yesterday afternoon, I was finally able to get back into the garden (after a month of neglect followed by a week of rain).  I pulled up dead squash plants and began burying the stems of the others.  Then, I began to notice the little orange stuff oozing from spots in the stems.  With a sharp knife, I slit open the stem of one, and there he was, that drated little critter that robs me of my wonderful summer squash – the squash worm.  I spent the next several hours performing surgery on all the plants, pulling out worms, and burying the stems (when my surgery didn’t kill the plant).  Hopefully, a few will survive.  I did this same “cut, pull, smash” on the worms in the spring and most of the plants lived.  Next year, I will not plant squash in hills, but in wide rows so the stems can grow straight out and I can cover them as they do.

As we enter into the month of August, the summer garden is showing signs of stress from a week of heavy rains following a month of neglect.  My job required so many man hours during the month of July, that the poor garden was fortunate to get watered occasionally.  Still, it produced an abundance of tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, green peppers, okra and green beans.  It’s still producing, but the squash are in pretty bad shape.

On top of that, the deer attacked last night.  They stomped down fencing to get in.  They chomped the leaves off most of the okra, munched on green beans, ate tomatoes and peppers, and stomped down the squash and watermelons.  We unloaded and installed more wooden pallets – our cattlegaps.  The pallets seem to be working, but it’s taking a while to collect enough to totally surround the garden.  We’ve even used a few old windows.  In addition to the pallets, we’ve hung plastic bags around the garden – a tip from my son-in-law’s grandmother.  We also have deer netting put up as a fence around the areas that don’t have pallets.  The plan is to eventually paint the pallets green to blend in with the grass.