So Sad

Maybe you've noticed that there haven't been as many pictures of our harvest this year. Between the squash bugs decimating our squash plants and the deer eating most of everything else, we haven't had such big harvests. While we eat pretty regularly out of the garden, we get little and there's nothing to spare. Earlier this summer I showed my sarcastic side in a post I wrote when I first discovered that deer had gotten over our "deer fence" and into our garden. Since then, it's only gotten worse. This year's garden is practically over, thanks to the deer. I have decided that there are three stages of grief when a deer enters your garden. The first is disbelief, the second is sarcasm, and the third is revenge. I'm onto stage three. Now when I hear the roar of the farmers' guns across the street, rather than think of some poor defenseless animal possibly losing its life, I'm more apt to think, "Frankly my deer, I don't give a damn."

The plant formerly known as swiss chard.

On these vines tomatoes once grew.

Our mowed down strawberry patch. (Weeds in the background = gardener's apathy in the face of an unbeatable deer problem.)

Brand new green bean plants. You can see the buds but all the leaves have been eaten. The deer ate the leaves of some of other bean plants in the garden a few weeks ago, and we still got beans. So I am still hoping we might get some beans from these plants.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Exhibit A, one of many telltale hoof prints (next to arugula, one of the only plants in our garden that the deer leave alone). And so the garden ends abruptly this year. But we will not be beaten. Brad has started the plans to put in a really tall fence around the garden (about twice as tall as the one that's there now). We may have lost the year's battle, but we plan to win this war.