Deerproofing Your Florida Garden Using Your Kids Toys

I swore last year that I would not invest time and effort in a vegetable garden again until I had mastered the art of deerproofing. Nothing I tried seemed to be working.

• Old dogs who never come off the porch and can't see too well proved to be pretty ineffective.
  
  
• Sheer dumb luck seemed to work for awhile, but the deer always seemed to figure it out right before the veggies peaked.
  
  
• A weird jangle of ropes and palmetto fronds to give the illusion of a fence fit my budget (0$) for garden enhancement, but proved ineffective as the deer realized that it was just a weird jangle of ropes and palmetto fronds the night before I was going to pick my green beans.

It became pretty clear that I was actually going to need to spend money on fencing materials if I was ever going to get a return on my gardening efforts.
Ever efficient (cheap) I turned to an old treehousey thing I had built by recycling the kiddie timber swingy playgroundy thing after the kids outgrew it.

Are ya following that okay? See, I bought pressure treated lumber to build the playground thing about 18 years ago, then after the kids got bigger than the swings, I took it apart and recycled the lumber into a treehousey thing ... which they are now too big for obviously.
(Although some kids never outgrow kid stuff)

Now the pressure treated 4x4's that served the kids in 2 different structures, are serving as extra tall fence posts in my deer proofed garden.

If you factor out the arsenic the kids absorbed while playing on these structures, that's some pretty good recycling of wood ... all thanks to pressure treatment.



I bolted the tall 4x4's to the short existing hog pen fence posts and then strung 4 foot high fencing above the 3 foot high hog panels to create a 7 foot fence, which so far has kept the mammals of mass destruction out of the garden.

Those are newly transplanted datil pepper plants in the pots. Pots in Florida tend to get really hot and dry out in our powerful sunlight, so I like to bury them partially.
Some folks paint them white, but I'm pretty sure paint costs money so I dig holes for free.

The little holes with white beans in them are my intercropping experiment. I'm planting Gator Green bush beans around the peppers to maximize space and provide a cool shady ground cover.


You can go mad trying to arrange photos in sequence using Picasa's collage feature, so I stopped here.
Use your powerful 3.5 pound brain to imagine the damaged leaf at the upper left and the upper left caterpillar in the lower left.

Got it?

Okay, let's proceed ...

I was checking out the tomato progress yesterday when I noticed the chewed branch.
Aha!
He's here somewhere.

It took a little while because tomato hornworms have excellent cryptic coloration. They also have the clever behavioral adaptation of clinging to the underside of the stalk and holding perfectly still when they sense movement.

Alas, it was not enough to save him from this primate equipped with that powerful brain and the opposable thumb required to pick his green butt off the plant and deliver him to the two LOTR roosters as a snack.


My tomato varieties are Better Boy, Grape, Heatwave, and some miscellaneous bush cherries. The pepper in the picture is a Cowhorn pepper. I've never grown them before and they have a nice heat.

Any recipe ideas for that pepper?

Not pictured, but also in the garden are sweet potatoes, bell peppers, jabenero peppers, jalepeno peppers, cukes, and squash.

I plan to deer proof the second adjoining hog pen also, so I can expand the production.

Pretty sad that with 10 acres, my garden is limited to the size of a suburbanite's backyard garden.

You'd think that with 442,225 square feet of PFHQ natural habitat, the deer could leave my 256 square foot garden plot alone.

But noooooo ...

So I build my DEerFENCES and wait.

Meanwhile, deep in the shade of the PFHQ oak forest, the ungrateful ungulates watch and plot their next move.