Well. So much for that.

[pasithea]

Our next door neighbors had to put their dog down last week. He was old and had lead a good life. He'd been suffering with cancer most of the summer and they'd taken him to be treated but he wasn't recovering and his health was getting worse so they did what was best for him. Poor guy.

And poor us, it turns out. Since we'd put up the fences, the deer hadn't bothered our garden though they'd been through the yard many times. It would appear though, this was in part due to London's vigil. Friday night, the deer tore down the fences on every terrace level of the garden and absolutely decimated it. They ate nearly everything to the ground. Tomato plans, beans, peas, cucumbers, squash, all the greens. Garden is ruined.

Next year I'm only planting things with huge thorns and vicious posions. Monkshood, castor beans, euphorbias, and maybe some kind of plant that sprouts rattlesnakes and sharks just for good measure. It's been hard enough growing a garden this year because of the lack of sun. We finally get to where we can harvest something and... I got TWO WHOLE TOMATOES before it was destroyed. :(

Or maybe I should see if my nutter parents will mail me my bow. There's no law specifically barring bow hunting in a residential area. Just 'firearms'. And since they're full of MY vegetables, it's not exactly like I'd be not being a vegetarian. Right? We're eating loophole tonight kids!

:(

You're still fucking fired, 2010.

Comments

[frith]

I doubt the deer are being greedy, they are eating first the plants that are the most nutritious and the easiest to digest. Plants mount chemical defenses to make themselves unpalatable and difficult to digest (for example, tannins -- tannins bind to protein and make it indigestible). Our garden plants have usually been selected by us for their nutritional value. Seems like the deer approve.

Acorns are full of tannins. Ever bite into a raw acorn? Very bitter.

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, the plants revived around the watercourses. This is not because the few wolves in the area were massacring the elk (they weren't) but because the _presence_ of wolves changed the land use by the elk. In short, the elk avoided waterways if there were wolves around.

You had a "wolf" living next door. Your "elk" stayed away that part of its habitat that included your garden. The "wolf" is gone, the "elk" roam where they wont. Mmmm, tomatoes.

Predators do _not_ control prey populations. It's the other way around: weather controls plants, plants control herbivores and herbivores control carnivores. Wolves, cougars, bears and coyotes do _not_ plan their appetites and fecundity around a census of prey populations. All population go through boom and bust cycles, there is no such thing as a stable balance of predators and prey. At best you'll see behavioural responses like the one I mentioned for the Yellowstone elk.

"Wet and green" does not equal "better than tomatoes". Most species of North American deer are browsers, not grazers. My guess your deer are either mule deer or blacktailed deer (same species). If I recall correctly, elk are the grazers. So your deer will eat some grass, but it's the protein-rich shoots and young leaves that are easiest to digest.

Blacktailed deer are not feral or introduced and they "belong here" more than we do, especially after we've built favorable habitat for them.