Everyone Has an Opinion on What to Do About Deer in the Garden
Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how to deal with them
The deer arrived this week. They demolished my parsley, my borage plants, most of my beets; they nibbled at some of my cucumbers and tomatoes; they ate a chile plant to the ground, and browsed on a couple of others.
The parsley will come back, perhaps to be eaten again, and I don’t care much about the borage. (Its flowers are pretty enough, and taste like canned tuna, which is not a flavor I want to add to many dishes; I can live without this plant.) I have plenty of tomatoes and cucumbers, though I am distraught about the chiles, some of which are cool varieties I’m pretty excited about, given to me by Jack Algiere, Stone Barns’ head farmer.
There are countless reasons the Irish, and the Andean people before them, became so reliant on the potato, but one of them is this: In most locations and years, it is steadily productive: It’s a high-nutrient plant that takes little work, yields many more pounds and calories per acre than most other crops, and is generally disease- and pest-resistant.
