Front Porch: Calling seasonal truce with plant-munching deer

We’re well into fall now, and I have once again begun observing my annual truce with the deer who spend the growing season endeavoring to decimate my flowers and other growing things.

This year there’s a new wrinkle in the armistice. I am formally giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

I live smack in the middle of an urban wildlife migratory trail, so all sorts of critters pass through my property on the way to Glenrose and Browne’s Mountain – mostly deer.

Every year, my most tender growing things (dahlias, tomatoes, et al.) go in pots on the deck at the back of my house, high above a downward sloping backyard, and safe from the deer. But I do like to have flowers out in the front yard. I try to stick with deer-resistant blooms, but even so, I apply any number of deer repellant solutions and formulas just to give the pretties a better chance for survival.

I employ a homemade brew plus commercial ones that smell of coyote urine, blood or other things that are either irritants to the nose or are intended to make deer think there is a predator about. There are always some incursions into the vegetation, but this year, in particular, has been disastrous.

The deer ate the marigolds, left the salvia as just sticks with a few blossoms atop, chewed through the geraniums and even ate the rhubarb leaves and stalks. The little dianthus never had a chance.

As I wrote in my early season whine, a wildlife biologist told me how deer become habituated and eventually immune to counter measures. You have to keep trying different ones. Often several generations of deer have been born and raised near a property, so it’s just part of their familiar backyard in their seasonal travels. Chez Pettit appears to be Dear Haven.

One particular mother deer and her twin fawns caught my attention this spring. She was especially brazen. In broad daylight, only yards from the driveway, where I happened to be standing, she stuck her nose into a cluster of flowers and munched away. She looked up at me, then, considering me irrelevant, kept eating.

I could have shooed her off that day, but I was fascinated by her boldness. Plus, I saw her limping a little and was concerned for her babies. Over the season, the limp went away – had she faked me out? – and the trio cruised through and ate what they could.

Every year I yield the battleground in late September. I’ve had my season of beauty, and it’s time to let the growing things help nourish wildlife as they prepare for winter.

Earlier this month, just before the first hard freeze, I picked green tomatoes – Sweet 100s and Better Bush – from plants on the deck and brought them inside to see what will ripen. I then cut down the plants (the cherry tomato being gigantic, over 8-feet tall) and tossed them in sections over the railing and down into the yard.

Later that day I brought the green garden waste bin down into the yard and loaded it up with the tomato plants. I found one medium-sized tomato among the branches, and put it in my pocket. Also, a number of the smaller cherry tomatoes that I hadn’t picked fell off the vines and onto the grass, and I left them there. I then hauled the bin down farther into the backyard, where I had left off raking up pine needles the week before, and finished filling it up.

As I turned to go back up to the house with the bin, I saw mama deer and one of her now-nearly-grown babies in the yard. The fawn was over by our neighbor’s arbor vitae, but mama was eating the little tomatoes below the deck.

I started moving the bin in her direction, as she was grazing right where I needed to pass. She looked up, then – typically – ignored me and returned to hunting for morsels. I got unusually close before stopping to look at her.

She looked a little rough. Hard to explain why exactly. She wasn’t skinny, by any means, but not as plump as she should be this time of year, and her coat was … well, not as smooth as I (very much a nonexpert) thought it should have been.

The second of her babies was not with her, and, while he might have still been around somewhere, I thought I might know why he wasn’t close. A few weeks before, my neighbor on the other side of the arbor vita told me he had found a dead deer in the shrubs at the back of his property.

This has been an especially dry and hot year, causing higher than normal wildlife mortality, and there have been reports of deer dying in the state due to viral diseases, as well.

So now I was worried about her. I reached into my pocket and tossed her the tomato. Normally, that should have spooked her. But she just took a step forward and started eating it. I reached into my other pocket and took out my cellphone to take her picture as she was chewing.

I put the bin away and went back inside. I promptly proceeded to cut up many of the bigger green tomatoes and picked up off the tray a few dozen of the green cherry tomatoes that I’d laid out. I then went out on the deck and tossed it all off into the backyard.

She was gone on her rounds, of course, but I knew she’d be back. I checked the next day. The tomatoes were still there. But on the following morning, they had all been eaten, and some deer scat left at the spot.

I felt so good that she had had a nice meal. And, truthfully, I’ve since cut up some apples from our tree (which bore little fruit this year), and dropped that off the back deck, too.

This deer is a royal pain in my side in the spring and summer, but come fall, things are different. It’s survival time, and she surely needs the tomatoes and apples more than I do.

Oddly and perversely, I hope to engage in front yard battle with her again come spring.

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Correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached at upwindsailor@comcast.net.