Well, well, well. Hello, readers. It certainly has been a while. Though I am quite settled into a
perfectly lazy summer (perhaps the Last Real Summer as a Not Real Adult), soon
enough I will return to H-town for my final year of school. (Coming soon on the blog: Kelsey and
Claire Roadtrip to Houston!)
First installment of What
I Have Been Up To This Summer:
GARDENING
Call me a grandma, but
every summer I do love working in my vegetable garden. Am I a particularly good gardener? No. Somehow we only ever get three beans at a time. (Makes for some great three bean salads
though, am I right, family??) (stole that joke from my mom…) Anyways, every year, we struggle
against the garden-invading deer.
As some of you may know, our part of New Jersey suffers from an over-population
of deer—the normal, ugly, hungry, stupid kind. I always put up this humungous fence around my garden to
keep them out, but by the end of the year, the netting gets all torn and
tangled and terrible. It’s a big
pain in my butt. So this year, I
decided to do some research on other ways to keep deer out.
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| Yes, I actually read this book. |
If you are looking to keep deer out of your garden or yard, I can highly recommend Outwitting Deer, from the author of Outwitting Squirrels, Bill Adler Jr. He has many interesting
suggestions, most of which involve concocting large amounts of solutions of
eggs, sriracha, garlic, old socks, etc. I didn’t really consider any of those options any more
favorable than putting up the large fence, so I chose one of the simpler deer-invasion-preventers—Irish
Spring soap. Apparently deer hate
the scent of good old Irish Spring. So I go out to my
garden every week or so, with a potato peeler and two bars of soap, and
shred it around the perimeter of my garden. (I’m aware that I appear crazy to neighbors and
passersby). Now our entire yard
has a fresh, clean smell, and (so far, knock on wood) the deer have stayed
away.
I admit that at the
beginning of the summer, I was a little worried to leave the fate of my
tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers in the hands of Irish Spring alone. So I also bought a jug of DEER SCRAM.
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| When I first saw it I thought it said DEER SCREAM, which was a funny thing to imagine. |
DEER SCRAM is an environmentally
friendly mixture of 39% dried blood (deer blood, I presume. Outwitting Deer man says that deer stay away from the smell of
their own blood because it makes them fear their own mortality. How he knows this, I am not sure.), 51%
other meat meal (yum), and the rest garlic and chives. As per the instructions, I sprinkled
this liberally a foot and a half away from the edge of my garden (and have
reapplied after heavy rain). We
now have a ring of dead grass where I spread the DEER SCRAM, but the mixture seems to have contributed to the keeping-deer-away effort, so I can’t complain.
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| FOUR BEANS. It's a miracle. |
