Simple Meal Plan

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve been having some…challenges…keeping the wildlife off the vegetable garden. More succinctly, the deer have been eating my tomatoes. We’ve tried several strategies to discourage them from treating our garden like their own personal salad bar: Liquid deterrent (which is somewhat effective, but has the downside of needing to be reapplied after every rain), electric fencing (which they seem to have learned to jump over), and visual deterrents (such as aluminum foil hung to move in the breeze) have all been tried, and have all failed.

I was starting to get desperate; the blossoms were beginning to form on the tomato plants, and if the deer ate those, we might as well pull them up and plant grass for all the tomatoes we would get this year. So in desperation I turned to one last trick: Soap.

I’ve read about all sorts of “old-time” tricks to discourage deer from eating the garden, from powdered hot pepper sprinkled around the base of the plants, to bags of human hair hung amongst the plants. One that I saw quite a lot of was the soap idea. Essentially, you hang bars of soap among the plants and the deer avoid the plants because of the smell. I didn’t give this idea much credence at first, but as I became more and more desperate, I began to think it was worth a try.

So last Friday I gathered all the Ivory soap bars in the house, grabbed a few washcloths, and made my deer deterrents. I placed about 1/3 of each bar of soap in a square of washcloth (the thin, disposable kind you throw out after a while), gathered the corners together, and tied each washcloth into bundles. I tied each bundle to a tomato plant using green garden twist ties (they’re longer, so they were perfect for the job), and started praying.

It’s been almost a week, and so far there hasn’t been any further deer damage. I think it might just have worked, but I’ll keep you updated on the situation.

UPDATE: It’s currently POURING outside, which means I’m probably going to have to replace the bars tomorrow. But a few bars of soap are a small price to pay for homegrown tomatoes!

Yesterday, I did the math. The depressing math.

Six out of 13 tomato plants have been damaged by the deer. One of those plants is probably not going to produce any fruit, as it looks like the deer ate the blossoms. I’m leaving it in, though, in the hopes that it will produce more blossoms before the end of the season. Read the rest of this entry »