Category: Animal Damage

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Dealing with Animals in the Garden

Fox searching – 6 by iglooo101

Living in nature is beautiful, but it can seem so defeating. TheGardenLady has written columns about how she lives and has to practice good wildlife management to enable her garden to grow successfully. All the animals want to enjoy her garden to the extent that if allowed, there would be no garden.

Every gardener has this problem. If it is not deer, then it is rabbits or squirrels or…. you name it. One friend was happy when foxes moved into the culvert near the front of her driveway. She never saw a deer or rabbit on her property after that. But one can’t allow foxes to live on your property for a variety of reasons, so she had to have them removed. So far I haven’t seen foxes living on my property, but I have seen opposums, raccoons, woodchucks and at night, coming home sometimes I have smelled skunks. Those animals are all living harmoniously together, I hope, with Bambi and all his relatives as well as the numerous squirrels that live in my black walnut trees or hickory nut trees all inherited with the house when I bought it.

chipmunk by Dawn Huczek

But at least, I told myself, I didn’t have chipmunks on my property. As cute as chipmunks are they can cause a lot of serious problems including coming indoors where they can do damage. I knew that there were chipmunks in my county because I had seen one at the big hardware store about 5 miles away. There a little chipmunk was being fed by one of the cashiers who thought it was “sooo cute.” But I hadn’t seen chipmunks in my town or on my property until I looked out this morning. I saw my first chipmunk scurrying across my deck. And where there is one, I know there are many.

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Don’t Always Blame the Deer

I Blamed it on the Deer by mtsofan

TheGardenLady wrote a column about deer and specifically said: Any person who is knowledgeable about deer will never tell you there is a plant that deer will not eat.

Deer will taste everything and will eat anything depending on how hungry they are. Deer have favorite plants. The plants that deer love they will eat entirely to the ground UNLESS you have a fence or you spray your plants with a deer deterrent.

Some people will tell you that deer don’t eat their sweet pea flowers Lathyrus odoratus yet other people will tell you they love to eat their sweet pea flowers. Deer will eat sweet pea flowers. Because a plant is poisonous to humans does not mean it is poisonous to deer. Perhaps your deer have enough other plants that they prefer eating in your garden. Deer have their preferences.

But remember, there are other garden pests who enjoy your garden. Rabbits love many of the same plants deer like and they often like many plants that are not deer favorites. So do not blame the deer for all the eaten plants in a garden. For example, rabbits love sweet pea flowers. For a list of the plants rabbits prefer check out this site:

 

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Trying to meet the challenges of gardening

NOT ME!! I DID NOT EAT YOUR FLOWERS! by Snap-Smith

Gardening can be a serious challenge for the gardener.  Consider the weather.  Who knows what to do in a profound drought like the one the MidWest experienced this summer? You cannot water plants when the water level goes down too low. Who knows what to do in extensive floods like the ones the MidWest experienced earlier in the late spring/early summer? Consider the insects.  They either go after the garden, like Japanese beetles do, or they go after the gardener, like the mosquitoes or gnats.  Consider the wild animals.  Everyone knows about the problems caused by deer or rabbits.

But we humans are the smart creatures on this earth who should be able to solve these problems. Aren’t we?

We have had dry weather where I live, so I water my flowers daily. I am religious about this job. But the next day after I water my plants, they still look wilted and sad.  I tried holding some basil between my lips as I was told that Italian farmers did to prevent mosquitoes. I wasn’t bitten by the mosquitoes, so maybe the basil helped. And I sprayed my flowers with Liquid Fence to deter the deer and rabbits. But they, too, want what I plant.

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Battling Animals in the Garden – Part II

Baby Groundhog #1 by Chiot’s Run

Besides battling the deer in my garden (see last post), I have rabbits. They could have eaten some of my plants. I haven’t seen any rabbits on my property so far this spring, so that was why I had not blamed them for this early spring eating. Liquid Fence supposedly guards against both rabbits and deer. So I hope they won’t eat what I have sprayed.

Then I have squirrels who have not vacationed over the winter. They may be digging up some of those acorns they planted last fall or some of the bulbs I planted, like crocus bulbs.

Or is it the resident groundhog (Marmota monax) also called a woodchuck that lives on my property who is eating everything? (There is probably a family living with him) Since I am not a Jane Goodall type who can tell one groundhog from another to be able to name them, I cannot discern how many waddling groundhogs are out and about each day. To my eye it seems to work solo.

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How To Reduce Fall Deer Damage

                                                   Photo by Worldman

Because male deer’, the bucks, antlers reach full growth in the fall, they want to get rid of the soft velvet that protected their antlers while they were growing. Early in the fall you may see a buck rubbing his antlers on the trunk of a tree or see evidence of the rubbing. Besides rubbing off the velvet on the antlers, later in the fall the deer can be marking his territory by rubbing trunks of trees. Bucks use glands in their foreheads to make scent markers on the trunks of trees. These rubbings are called  “buck rubs.” Look for buck rubs on trees, usually one to two feet high off the ground, from September to December.

Though most trees are resilient to the buck rubs, it can be bad for the tree, especially if it is a young tree- losing bark on the tree trunk can kill a small tree. Damage that completely encircles the tree’s circumference is more deadly than damage up and down because the tree’s vascular system is just under the bark. Young trees have very thin bark that offers no protection from such damage.

You should surround the tree with a sturdy fence or barrier that can keep the male deer away from the tree trunk. A 6-foot-tall barrier of welded wire mesh, supported by 8-foot-tall rebar pounded into the ground at regular intervals around the circumference is one suggestion to keep bucks from rubbing on young trees. Another option is corrugated plastic drainpipe that has been slit along its length and placed around the trunk.  While deer repellents can help prevent deer browsing, they are not very effective in controlling buck rubs.

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