Well, crud. Look what I found this morning!

Almost the entire bean bed has been eaten!

From what I’ve been able to see on the trail cams, we’ve only got one deer still coming into the yard, since we got rid of the bird feeders and stopped putting deer feed out all winter. A few nibbles here and there were found in the beds by the vehicle gate into the inner yard. I was working on plans on how to protect the corn, carrots and turnips. I didn’t think of the beans as a priority, since the deer have never really gone for them all that much, before.

This high raised bed, however, must have made for a nice buffet table for a deer!

We planted so few beans this year, too. This bed is basically it. I have no idea how the pole beans planted with the purple cord will do, since they were planted so much later.

There were still flowers, and I think the plants might recover. We shall see.

Then there was this.

Something keeps flattening the potatoes in this bed! Usually, they stand back up again on their own by the end of the day, but this is the flattest I’ve seen them yet. I don’t know of it’s cats fighting on the bed, or skunks or racoons, but something is mashing them during the night.

I ended up going out today, which I will write about later. When I got back, I repaired another leaking hose and, then set up the spray thing for the water soluble fertilizer I picked up and gave the entire garden a watering with it. I hope it helps the Roma tomatoes in particular. They’re having the hardest time, but more on one end of the bed than the other. We’ve had issues with that end of the bed in previous years, so there is something going on with the soil there.

After the watering was done, I decided on how to protect the beans from further damage. After several failed attempts, I was able to finish this.

I’d hope to be able to fix the supports for the hoops on the outside of the logs, but that just didn’t work out. It now has netting that will still allow pollinators in.

I didn’t think to take photos, but before I did this, I worked on the Indigo Blue and Black Beauty tomato supports, too.

Oh, dear. There has been scrambling noises behind me as I wrote that. A kitten has managed to get out of baby jail. This is the second one that has managed it, so far!

My daughters are now on kitten duty! 😄

Where was I?

Ah, yes. Tomato supports.

The Indigo Blue has a twine support, but the weight of them was making the vertical twines sag in the middle. The boards that were used to cover the Uzbek Golden carrots were long enough, so I lashed them to the tops of the posts, then added more twine to pull up the sagging vertical twine supports, which pulled the horizontal twines and their tomato plants up and straight quite nicely!

The Black Beauty tomatoes each have their own bamboo pole to support them, but the one at the end that broke in the storm was still tippy – and is a lot shorter now! I ended up lashing horizontal bamboo poles across the bed, just high enough to support the shorter pole. Now, each vertical pole has more stability. The tomato plant on the pole that broke also needed more support. They didn’t get pruned in time, and now they have big, extra branches that are starting to grow tomatoes. I attached the horizontal support at that end with an overhang that I could use to hold the twine I used to support the branches, with more twine added along the row to catch a few other branches that needed extra support.

It’s not pretty, but it does the job!

I was still thinking about ways to deter the deer from the rest of the garden. I want to avoid the posts and netting we did last year. They not only kept the deer out, but us, too!

For now, we’re using distractions. I went around and hammered some of the posts we used to support netting last year in strategic places, while my daughter went around and used electric tape to attach pinwheels to them. Then more pinwheels were added to things like trellis supports. My daughter added posts and the last of the pinwheels to the low raised beds with carrots and popcorn in them.

All we need now is some wind. After having high winds so often, now that we have pinwheels up all over, suddenly there isn’t even a slight breeze!

All of this took much longer than I thought it would, and were not the jobs I had planned for the day, but they needed to be done.

Ah, well.

The Re-Farmer