Gardeners' Holidays 2026: First Fruits

June is the month when our garden really hits its stride. It's the last hurrah of the arugula before it bolts in the summer heat, but our all-season lettuce is still going full blast, giving us enough leaves for salads with every meal if we want them. We just harvested our first full meal's worth of snap peas, and we've already started gathering dill for pickles (though with store-bought cucumbers, as ours aren't producing yet. By the time they are, the dill will be all bolted. A bit of poor planning on Mother Nature's part). Our honeyberry bushes are yielding about a half cup of berries every day, and we've just started gleaning the first early raspberries and a few little strawberries.

Unfortunately, it looks like all this production may soon be cut short—literally. 

Just a couple of days ago, Brian came in from the garden and declared grimly, "We're going to have to step up our deer game." As the deer in our area have grown more numerous, they've also grown more rapacious, and apparently our makeshift deer fence is no longer enough to deter them. The latest intruder had eaten the tops of all our pea and bean plants, a few tomato vines, and even one leaf off a prickly zucchini plant. Strangely, it had left almost everything within three feet of ground level untouched, so we still have plenty of lettuce and herbs. Even the arugula, which has almost all flowered by now and would have been no loss, was unscathed. But this damage (accompanied by a pile of deer scat that clearly identified the culprit) was a clear warning sign that we'd need to take more drastic measures to guard the rest of the crops.

Unfortunately, when it comes to deer, that's easier said than done. They can easily jump over anything under eight feet tall, and while a shorter fence can deter them if it's completely solid, that would also block sunlight out of the garden, defeating the purpose. Of all the ideas in this article, the only one that seems practical is to augment our existing groundhog-proof fence with eight-foot poles, then wrap the whole construction in deer netting. Unfortunately, this would also make it difficult for us to get in, as we'd have to duck under the netting to get through the garden gate. We might try to leave that area net-free and instead add some tall spikes to the top of the gate itself. These would (we hope) deter the deer while still allowing us to open the gate.

In preparation for this project, Brian has pruned away the lower branches of the big evergreen at the corner of the garden, which were thick enough to be entangling the existing fence. The next step is to take an inventory of our existing supplies and see if we have enough netting to go all the way around the garden. If we do, we can just try attaching it to the poles forming our current deer fence and see if that's enough to support it. If not, we'll have to buy more.

I'll keep you posted here to let you know how the construction of the fence goes and whether it succeeds in keeping out the intruders. Until then, we'll just do our best to keep our eyes open and be prepared to go chase away deer as needed. And we'll also focus on enjoying the produce we still have while we have it, for tomorrow it may be deer food.