The Nude Gardener - Deer, oh boy.

I've been wanting to start a gardening blog for a long time, but my writing skills aren't that great, nor my nerves. But, here goes. My wife and I purchased our current home at Smith Mountain Lake in 2017 and love the lake life. Unfortunately, the Virginia clay soil is not ideal for gardening. The house has a very large deck, 16ft x 24ft, on the second story and at first, I had all my garden in planters on that deck. Beans and hot peppers did very well, but tomatoes and bell peppers suffered in the sweltering, no shade, space during the hottest part of the summer when setting fruit should be taking place. What fruit did set was small and sun burned frequently. Tomatoes, even being watered every two hours, couldn't take up enough to overcome the blossom end rot and the sprays I found did nothing to help the situation. So, Phase 2. [br} My wife and I built a small greenhouse, 6ft x 10ft, in the back yard, and bought some raised beds. We put tomatoes, chives, basil, and lettuce in the green house. We put the raised beds around the outside of it. I moved the pole beans, bell peppers, and hot banana peppers to the new beds and added some potatoes, a few bush beans, and zucchini. To keep out the deer, I put a 4ft electric fence around the entire raised bed section, then built a 5ft bamboo fence on the back side of it about 3ft from the electric fence. The deer stayed out for the most part. A couple of times the got in to the electric fence. The tended to tear it up a bit when they got shocked, but it did keep them away. The beans and banana peppers did great as did the chives and basil in the greenhouse. I got two tomatoes from 24 tomato plants in the greenhouse even though I followed advice from the internet and shook the plants daily while they were flowering. Bummer. So, Phase 3. Over the winter, I put some plastic down on the floor of the green house and put in a small heater. I put potatoes, carrots, onion, celery, cabbage, and garlic in there. Everything grew well and tall. We ended up with about 10 pounds of potatoes, a couple great heads of cabbage, and quit a few carrots. The onion and garlic I left to start bulbing in the summer, but they didn't do much and I eventually pulled them to free up space for this winters crop. I did plant some more onion up on the deck and it did well. For my summer crop, I bought a couple new 2ft x 8ft raised beds. This allowed me to move the tomatoes and bell peppers, then put in a great crop of pole beans, cucumbers, zucchini, hot banana peppers, and a good number of bush beans. Unfortunately, I had some trees removed (especially a white oak tree that was sending acorns through the roof of my greenhouse, but that's another story), and the folks that cut them down destroyed my bamboo fence. So I added a 5ft deer net fence where it used to be. I had tons of flowers on everything, and fruit starting to set. On 12 tomato plants I had 50+ green tomatoes about 2" long and many more starting. Beans were flowering by the hundreds, bell peppers, hot peppers, even great flowers on the zucchini. Enter the deer. We came home from Bar-S Ranch one Sunday and disaster had struck. The pole beans had no leaves from the ground to about 5ft. Almost every leaf was gone from every other plant in the raised bed area, and not a single tomato remained. Phase 4 and 5. I started trying other things I found on the internet like peppermint oil, hot pepper powder, etc. After about 3 weeks everything was coming back wonderfully. All my tomatoes and peppers were shooting out new branches and flowers. Even the zucchini was throwing up new stalks. Nope, they struck again. I was devastated. So, I added a second 5ft deer net fence 4ft behind the first one. The double fence was guaranteed to work. On top of that I bought a small bee bee gun and started stinging their butts every time they were in any part of my yard. It seemed to help. Yea, until things started growing back again. This time it was too late to let the plants try to heal themselves. I ripped out all the plants I had left and threw them all in the compost pile. Then I ripped out all the deer net fencing and the electric fence. Now its time to get serious. Time to build a sturdy, 8ft deer fence that they cant jump. So here we go. Got some treated 4inch x 4inch post from the hardware store and concreted them in for my first section. Then started the frame. Of course, I needed to be able to get in to the garden, so I added a door right at the bottom of the steps from my back deck. And, of course, every door needs a lock: I'm not going to bore you with stories about the rest of the fence build. Suffice it to say, its going around the rest of the garden and the deer, who used to be cute, are going to keep their butts out of my garden. I'm still going to sting their asses though.