#2 Pest Picture Extravaganza

From SHF CSA

Deer are the #2 pest around here. Mice are probably my top pick with slugs following closely behind those two. I happen to have a few photos of the damage the deer have been doing lately so I thought I'd share. Above is a bed of chicories covered with floating row cover and showing clear evidence of a visit by the deer.

From SHF CSA

This is the kind of thing they love to do, eating all of the leaves of a sprouting broccoli. Fortunately they haven't eaten too many growing tips yet, so these will probably just be set back, as opposed to completely decimated (as long as we can keep the deer out from now on).

From SHF CSA

Here's the lightweight bird netting fence the deer went through. We knew they could push through but we were hoping they'd be bothered by the fencing enough to not bother. No such luck, even though it did work for friend of ours in another location.

From SHF CSA

Rye vetch seedlings, our winter cover crop, is one of the crops I'm actually most worried about. It's a little tough for us to cover every bed on the farm, and these tend to be lowest priority, therefore the most vulnerable. Last year we ended up with basically no cover crop due to grazing. This year our first seeding is germinating beautifully. It was put in on the New Moon when the weather was dry. That was followed by a nice soaking rain and now sunny drier weather which has been perfect for bringing the seeds up. According to some the increasing moonlight, and decreasing lunar gravity during this phase also encourages plant growth.