Spring and All

Friends from Iowa stayed over last night on their way home from Philadelphia. They looked weary when they pulled in, but we refreshed them with Malaysian Noodle Soup (Cooking Light recipe, not my [their?] best), Angelfood Cake with fresh strawberries, and a pancake breakfast this morning. I'm not sure any of it helped their three kids--all of them seemed more than ready to be home again. Instead, they got another eight hours in the car, with six or eight more tomorrow.

After sending them off, we enjoyed a beautiful late spring day. Morning temps were on the cool side--upper 40s, low 50s--but they hovered in the mid-70s most of the afternoon, the direct sun somewhat offset by an almost coastal breeze. We stayed inside until about 11:00, Kim cleaning (the house was spotless yesterday afternoon, but five kids later it needed another scrubbing) and me ... well, me mostly grumbling about needing a nap.

Finally I got up off my duff and decided I'd finally build that lightweight gate I've been meaning to put together for a while now.

Let me step back for a minute. I've been struggling with the deer fence. Those of you who live in areas where deer aren't a problem are lucky. Blessed. You have a shining. And your garden goods are no doubt more plentiful.

We have deer. We have deer so much that, if you read Kim's entry from a couple days ago, you know they all but serve margaritas on our deck. Last fall I rose early as the fog burned off and spotted six or seven sleeping in our backyard. I haven't seen that many yet this year, but they're there, out back, in the woods. They know we keep a garden. They know we have lillies and roses and cabbbage and tomatoes. We have little pear, apple, and cherry trees just finding their legs. And we have the sweet smell of people who don't know what's about to hit them.

But we're fighting back. We're neophytes, but no buck's going to put a twelve-point antler in our plans. We have plantings--mint and marigolds, which deer supposedly hate--all over (though we're careful to contain the mint). We spray a few unprotected young with Liquid Fence, a tasty solution of "putrified egg" and garlic. The inventor, who is pictured on the back of the bottle, said after moving to the Pennsylvania Poconos, he worked for years on the perfect environmentally-responsible solution to his deer problem. Those must have been some good-smellin' years, because this stuff is noxious. Imagine buying a can of sardines, opening it and emptying the contents into a tupperware, cracking an egg on top, covering the whole bit with minced garlic, sealing the tupperware, and then leaving it to mellow for, oh, about 47 years. That's Liquid Fence. And like most serious gardners in our county, we have a traditional deer fence.

What is a deer fence, the uninitiated ask? Well, it's a webbing, or netting, that you string between posts around your garden. There are different kinds, and I can't speak to the effectiveness of one over the other. Our friends have thicker, stiffer webbing; ours is thin, tightly woven netting that's more or less transparent. We got it down the road at Agway, and the plastic packaging features a sketch of two deer looking quizzically through the fence. Their faces convey an expression like, "How did it come to this?" You almost feel sorry for them: They've been had.

OK, so I've driven in these metal "U-posts" that hold the fence up three or four different times, each time trying for usefulness and symmetry. The problem is, the dimensions of our garden keep changing as we add more beds and learn the hard way what the deer like and what they leave be. Initially, for example, I did not include Kim's "rose bush alley" in my deer fence. I figured deer, like humans, would most enjoy vegetables.



Wrong-O. They eat the buds of roses like Skittles. Hey, I said I was a newbie.

So I reconfigured. And again. And again. I'll admit, it took me a while to figure out that we needed a break in the fence to get in and out. And I really didn't figure that out; my friend John said, "You know, you'll need a break in the fence to get in and out." My insight was, Yeah!

Yesterday, I hammered 20 U-posts (maybe more) into the ground and carefully strung our deer fence from post to post. I'm guessing this is about a 3500 to 4000 square foot area. I'm not eager to do this again.

So, to convince myself and Kim and the world and the deer that now, finally, the fence is staying, I built a gate to swing between two posts. It had to be light, because the posts aren't well-fixed into the ground (by nature, they're meant to be moveable). And it had to be at least as high as the posts. And it had to hinge and it had to hook.

At approximately 11am this morning, I motivated myself to build this gate. I envisioned it. I made a mental list of what I would need:

--chicken wire
--cedar stakes
--staple gun
--staples
--hammer
--nails
--screwdriver
--screws
--hinges
--hooks and eyes
--handsaw

Pretty standard stuff, but I lacked a few things. Once again, Ace was the place for me. In about three hours, including a lunch break, I produced this:



Then I walked over this evening and saw my retired neighbor was building her own privacy fence. And I thought, we can do this. In this case, "we" is not "she and I" but "me, myself, and I." We can do it. We're an English professor, and we write poems, and we're sort of timid around power tools, but WE CAN.

And if WE do, I'll be sure to share.

We (all together now) had a lovely guest over this evening. Mary Jane is the aunt of our friend John. Here she is with two other charming ladies enjoying tea and ice cream.



Good night and good luck.