All creatures, great and small, are eating my garden.
Let's start with the big ones. The deer seem to be unfamiliar with a basic law of nature, namely that big wild animals and humans are not supposed to so intimately share living space. (They probably have the same complaint against me.) Instead, deer come right up to my house like invited guests, eating everything. I can picture them at night, their white tails smugly settled on my front porch swing, smirking over their triumph.
The small offenders are pillbugs. I discovered them after my cabbage seedlings seemed to be shrinking rather than growing. A night trip by flashlight showed the poor plants covered with these armadillolike bugs.
There are many strategies designed to stop these pests. Most haven't worked that well, resulting in lost time and wasted beer. Yes, I tried to get rid of the pillbugs by filling shallow dishes with beer. I used a nice Carolina Brewery IPA. The scent allegedly attracts the bugs, which then either drown or get drunk and then drown. Unfortunately I got only a few pickled pillbugs to show for it. What finally worked was removing the mulch around the seedlings. Because these crustaceans live in organic matter, this decreased the nibbling dramatically.
Some deer solutions that haven't worked for me include hot pepper spray repellent (it washes off after every rain), and bars of Irish Spring soap scattered around the garden (they eat right around it). Mostly I've been wrapping the plants in bird netting. This keeps the deer from eating but also tends to trap birds and even snakes.
This year I'm going high-tech. I purchased the Scarecrow, a motion-activated sprinkler that releases a burst of water when anything comes within its sensor range. The sudden movement and noise is supposed to scare deer away. I can't wait to try it. Gardener 1, Deer 0!
Daniel Heuser is a fourth-grade teacher in Chapel Hill and the faculty representative to his school's garden. He has been a landscape architect and has gardened as a hobby for 20 years.
