Even with a foot of dense compacted snow on the ground there are gardening things that need to be attended to. Right now the main problem is deer. They're hungry! This is the sort of winter that brings out the worst in deer. It has been cold for weeks with night temps in the single digits and they need calories. The snow cover has not let up and it is getting dense and hard to dig through. We are expecting another foot or more tomorrow on top of this. When we drove through town yesterday I noticed that people's rhododendrons are taking a real hit. In a normal winter deer usually leave those alone. In a hard winter they will strip one down to the trunk.
My particular problem is our landscape bed with the myrtle ground cover. This isn't the only place we have myrtle, but it is the largest and lushest patch and every year the deer trim it down. This isn't normally a worry because the myrtle is very vigorous and can take a trimming. This bed started out full of perennials with just a clump of myrtle under the plow so I wouldn't have to crawl under there an weed. My Dad literally gave me a shovel full. Took a spade and dug a clump out of his garden, and I used a spade to take a chunk of ground out from under the plow and plopped it in there.
Over the years the myrtle has spread and I've had to remove the things I really wanted (the hostas, astilbes and veronica) or lose them forever. There are still some day lilies and an iris in the back corner, and the wind flower persists in a scattered sort of way. But everything else has gone.
And now it is a big wooly mound of myrtle.
You can see why I don't mind the deer mowing it a bit.
Deer are low on good ol' common sense. With the deep snow they have gone beyond mowing and are now in the excavation phase. I do not want the knuckleheads digging up deep mounds of mulch. The myrtle store is closed for the season. We had some wire rings that we weren't using and I opened them up and lay them flat over the open areas of the bed. The wire is woven in one inch squares so they are not at risk of getting their hooves or legs caught in it as they would with chicken wire or something similar. This should stop them from destroying the bed any further. I use this method throughout the summer to divert their paths. I have squares of wire I move to areas they start walking through. They don't like to be surprised by something springy under foot. This barricade should at least slow the digging during this next blast of snow.
Time for a walkabout to check the other defenses. We put rings around all of our evergreen shrubs. Even those that are supposed to be deer resistant because a hungry deer will eat just about anything and everything. Each night they walk through and check again. Just in case....
Although they don't like stumbling through uneven footing, when they are really hungry they will walk up the creek beds. Here one has stopped at each exposed butterfly bush and deemed it unpalatable. But I see the deer on the left took a left turn at the top of the creek bed so I want to go up there and check my pear tree.
Luckily she turned here and headed out of the garden area.
But I sprayed the pear tree well with deer repellant anyway. You can see I have a lot of trip hazards set up around here to divert their wandering. But if they are really hungry that won't matter. We've even seen them climb up and stand on deck railings to reach over wire rings.
While I can assure you there is plenty of rodent activity going on under the snow, sometimes you can see what they are up to on the surface. This must be a fat little field mouse coming and going from the shelter of the lilac bush to the wooded area.
Sometimes the only help the tracks can give you is to figure out where you will have to trap or protect next year. Sometimes the damage will only be revealed when the snow melts. But you still have to check and see what can be done. Sometimes you can catch problem before it gets too bad.
Parting Shot: Supertunias in the myrtle bed whiskey barrel 2017
You do a lot of (more) work to keep the deer from destroying your hard work. Our deer, though plentiful, seem to be able to find enough to eat so far this winter. About the only thing we have outside our fenced in area that they bother is our high bush cranberries. They tend to get overly tall if not pruned so I don't worry about the deer nipping the tips of them. Some years they prune them a lot, some years they don't get touched.
ReplyDeleteI'll take two tubs full of those supertunias for this summer, please!