Oh Deer, the Carnage Has Begun!

It's official--I am now a full-time freelance editor! *gulp* Yesterday, the final day of my contract, was bittersweet, as I left behind some good coworkers and friends and some...not-so-great coworkers (I found a great piece of advice a few weeks ago: If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.), knowing that they'll be a little (well, a lot, for a while) worse off without me.

As I helped water the garden last night, I discovered that quite a bit of our corn has sprouted, and our tomato plants are getting bigger and healthier. As we did our walk-around last night, M and I were also extremely excited by the green strawberries he had found yesterday (that's his finger behind one of the berries, for scale, and his cell phone takes blurry pics) and the blossoming of nearly every fruit bush we have. Despite the unseasonably cool weather we've had the past couple of weeks, our plants seem to be doing exceptionally well. We may even have some salad greens sprouted from some planting we did 10 days ago.

Oh, and the deer have been nibbling the sugar maples and the Bartlett pear as they've walked through our yard. We got some blood meal today to put around the trees, and if we need more help, we might get some hair clippings from our hair dresser. I've read that the combination of blood meal and human hair is very effective.... Of course, I've also read that stopping deer from eating plants is difficult and requires a 3-pronged approach and that it varies from location to location, depending on the type of deer and the type of plant. So why should our deer "problem" be any different than our other issues? ;) We don't want to harm the deer, and we don't mind sharing--we just want to give the trees a chance to get large enough so that some nibbling doesn't do them too much harm. We'll keep you posted as we experiment.

* Stringham high: Full-time freelancing!
* Stringham low: Building raised beds and storage bins for our root crops is more expensive than we'd like.
* Stringham super-high: Corn growing much better than last year!