When doing my rounds this morning, I gathered more garlic scapes and did some weeding in the beet bed next to the garlic. They were doing very well, and I was planning on gathering some beet greens later in the day, to include in a salad or something.

This afternoon, I made a quick trip into town, then drove into the yard to unload the van. As I was unloading, something about the beet bed across the yard looked… off. So I made a point of checking it after putting the van away.

No wonder it looked off, even from a distance!

It’s been decimated.

And yes, those are deep hoof prints in the soil.

Planting the onions around the beets wasn’t enough to keep a deer out.

The crazy thing is that this happened during the day. We were indoors, but we were still moving about and near windows. The girls can see this bed from their windows upstairs, and they saw nothing. In the summer months, we never see deer in the yard. At most we see them on the trail cam going through the gate, and I haven’t even been seeing them on the garden cam at all, and even then, we only see them at night, or very early in the morning.

The beets might recover, though I’ll have to find a way to cover it again. The mosquito netting on the hoops kept blowing off. I’ll see if I can make a cover for it using the chicken wire we got for the squash tunnel. It’s a 50′ roll, so there will be more than enough to spare.

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to do it. We’ve been hearing thunder for a while now, and my desktop weather app just popped up with a severe thunderstorm warning. Because of the thunder I was hearing, I had checked it before starting this post, and it was still saying only 60% chance of rain, so something changed in just the past few minutes! From the looks of the trees outside, I might be shutting down my computer soon!

Well, at least the weather will keep animals sheltering themselves, instead of eating our garden! It’s a good thing we planted so many beets in the old kitchen garden, too. Even if this bed doesn’t recover, we will still have lots of beets.

The Re-Farmer