Destruction By Wildlife

My problems growing things on 86 mostly-unused acres in rural Mississippi (but only 40 minutes from the Capital) stem from one thing only: Naughty Wildlife.  

In past generations here, people hunted everything; if they didn't want to eat it, it was to keep it from eating their crops.  Everyone had farms and kitchen gardens, and also a dog and a shotgun to run off the critters.  But times have changed.  Now, deer may outnumber the people in rural areas; bands of coyotes will attack your field of watermelons, and bite into every single one.  The night before you were going to harvest your corn, raccoons brought the entire stand to the ground, stripping off all of the cobs and damaging all of them.  Small fruit trees, planted with guardian stakes, are broken in two by hungry deer who use their chests to bend the tree down to where they can eat the tender top leaves and branches.  Small blueberry shrubs are actually eaten by these overpopulated , hungry animals, and unless nursed along, do not regrow.  I decided to plant pink oyster mushrooms (they fruit at 80 - 90 degrees!) in the lawn last year;  we saw lovely salmon-pink rosettes come up and I decided the next day, we would harvest some - but in the night "something" - armadillo?  Possum?  Field Rats?  - dug up and ate every scrap of them; we put plastic crates and stakes and chicken wire all over the area and kept it damp, hoping for more; the same thing happened again.  I am saying this because I suspect this is happening in other places as well.

So for me, it has been not so much what to grow, but how to grow it so that we actually get some, ourselves.

Number one: know what you can grow outside without a fight.  We have many hostas all around the house; the deer do not do as much damage there. Nothing has ever eaten enough of my Dark Opal New Zealand Arrowroot/agricultural variety, canna edulis, to make much of a dent.  The Shasta Daisy seems pretty much immune as well, but we do have it near the house.  With mature fruit and nut trees, it is just a matter of vigilance and beating the squirrels to get your share.  But if you are putting in young fruit trees and shrubs in a rural area, you may wish to erect a deer barrier.  A wooden or canvas-covered fence is a good idea if you can't do chain-link.

Number two: devise alternative methods for the delectables. My poor oyster mushrooms now grow in the house.  I have an elderly Shishito pepper in a Kratky bucket; I just keep refilling the nutrient water.  Wicking beds in a primitive greenhouse (a shed that borders on an open field, replaced the tin roof and sides with clear corrugated stuff, wicking beds and a rain barrel near the roof, and a trough with huge goldfish in it (skeeter eaters) for the eatra rainwater, for watering.  Not perfect but it works for me/us, and so I thought I'd pass on these thoughts about keeping what you have.

My predators are a lot smaller than yours. We had rabbits and ground squirrels aplenty and the birds are a problem as well. Ground squirrels were digging up the roots, rabbits were stripping everything at ground level and birds were eating anything that had the nerve to fruit out of rabbit and ground squirrel reach.

I can actually kill all these things but boy do they know how to out breed and out smart me. So I feel your pain. Really big, fancy fences may be your only solution.

I'm not an expert, but I have dealt with some things. Here are a few things I've been able to do successfully.

1. Presence - be in and around your garden a lot, so that there is a lot of your smell around it. This can deter some wildlife, but is not the most effective. Animals will be more likely to destroy something planted in the "back 40" then a garden next to your house with people and cars coming and going.

2. A dog - If the dog can roam at night, or is tied on a run of some kind, the dog will deter most critters. If you have packs of coyotes coming through, and your dog is tied, it could be in danger, but if you are dealing with a single coyote or deer, woodchucks, racoons, rabbits, etc, then the dog will be great.

3. Electric fence - This is probably the most effective method I know of to keep all sorts of things out of certain areas... but you have to make sure it is kept very hot. Many animals will touch it once and never try again. Others are smarter and will keep checking it, and if it shorts out 1 time, or the charger is disconnected 1 time, you are sunk.

stem from one thing only: Naughty Wildlife

The wildlife is just doing what comes naturally to them.  They are wildlife doing what wildlife does.

Since they are going to do what they do, the alternative is to put up fences that will keep them out.

It is possible that planting deer-resistant plants might help until you find out that the deer and pigs like those too.

What I have done is plant lots of rosemary and other smelly plants that deer do not like.

Best wishes with you efforts.

I have sympathy here for you too! We ended up putting a fence round our main tree field to keep out the deer from eating our baby trees.
I do find that some fruit gets eaten by birds sooner than others, so I look upon them as sacrificial crops. It is a bit disheartening when the wildlife doesn't want to share! I think I may have 2 seedling fava beans survive vole damage from about 120 seeds....I need to come up with a plan to counter that!

I only have 3 1/2 acres, but it is in the country, surrounded by wildlife (deer, coyotes, raccoons, armadillos, bunnies galore). We have a 5' tall perimeter fence, and 2 dogs inside that fence. That actually keeps all the critters out except the bunnies and occasional armadillo. I actually spend much more effort (and additional fencing) protecting my garden and fruit trees from my own critters (dogs, goats, and chickens). And protecting the chickens from our own dogs. If I had large acreage I would probably let most of it be pretty wild, and fence and protect a small portion of that, probably a few acres or less, to grow food in.

I love having the freedom to grow whatever I want and know that deer are not going to demolish it. At the same time, I do love deer and if I had the acreage would love to have an area left to them. Thankfully they have a lot of good habitat around me, so we still get to see them. I love the bunnies too, and so far I have not seen them in my garden, just in the goat pen, where they do no harm.

I built an absolutely-coyote-proof nighttime shelter for my goats and one for my chickens and they are locked up at dark every night without fail. I think my dogs keep the coyotes away, but I still hear them within about 100 yards from our fence-line at times, so I am not taking any chances.

Funnily, I used to live in Hawaii, where there are very few animal pests (lots of bugs, but not a lot of larger animals). The neighbor had a free-ranging bunny that did more damage to my garden than the hordes of wild bunnies I see here. She was relentless.

Betsy Carraway wrote:My problems growing things on 86 mostly-unused acres in rural Mississippi (but only 40 minutes from the Capital) stem from one thing only: Naughty Wildlife.  

In past generations here, people hunted everything; if they didn't want to eat it, it was to keep it from eating their crops.  Everyone had farms and kitchen gardens, and also a dog and a shotgun to run off the critters.  But times have changed.  Now, deer may outnumber the people in rural areas; bands of coyotes will attack your field of watermelons, and bite into every single one.  The night before you were going to harvest your corn, raccoons brought the entire stand to the ground, stripping off all of the cobs and damaging all of them.  Small fruit trees, planted with guardian stakes, are broken in two by hungry deer who use their chests to bend the tree down to where they can eat the tender top leaves and branches.  Small blueberry shrubs are actually eaten by these overpopulated , hungry animals, and unless nursed along, do not regrow.  I decided to plant pink oyster mushrooms (they fruit at 80 - 90 degrees!) in the lawn last year;  we saw lovely salmon-pink rosettes come up and I decided the next day, we would harvest some - but in the night "something" - armadillo?  Possum?  Field Rats?  - dug up and ate every scrap of them; we put plastic crates and stakes and chicken wire all over the area and kept it damp, hoping for more; the same thing happened again.  I am saying this because I suspect this is happening in other places as well.

So for me, it has been not so much what to grow, but how to grow it so that we actually get some, ourselves.

Number one: know what you can grow outside without a fight.  We have many hostas all around the house; the deer do not do as much damage there. Nothing has ever eaten enough of my Dark Opal New Zealand Arrowroot/agricultural variety, canna edulis, to make much of a dent.  The Shasta Daisy seems pretty much immune as well, but we do have it near the house.  With mature fruit and nut trees, it is just a matter of vigilance and beating the squirrels to get your share.  But if you are putting in young fruit trees and shrubs in a rural area, you may wish to erect a deer barrier.  A wooden or canvas-covered fence is a good idea if you can't do chain-link.

Number two: devise alternative methods for the delectables. My poor oyster mushrooms now grow in the house.  I have an elderly Shishito pepper in a Kratky bucket; I just keep refilling the nutrient water.  Wicking beds in a primitive greenhouse (a shed that borders on an open field, replaced the tin roof and sides with clear corrugated stuff, wicking beds and a rain barrel near the roof, and a trough with huge goldfish in it (skeeter eaters) for the eatra rainwater, for watering.  Not perfect but it works for me/us, and so I thought I'd pass on these thoughts about keeping what you have.

Thank you for this post. Deep South Louisiana and we have had a armadillo plaguing my wine cap mushrooms and making a mess of things in the ground but last night something came and oh boy! It flipped logs and dug up a small gardenia, ate all my brassica seedlings, turnip seedlings, nearly uprooted a blue berry and scrapped the mulch completely to the ground at our fig. It is a wreck. I have always been able to keep the armadillo at bay by guarding crops with logs but whatever came last night is not deterred.  The holes it dug are not the pointy holes of an armadillo, they are more like kids digging in a sand pit.
Any thoughts?

Matt McSpadden wrote:I'm not an expert, but I have dealt with some things. Here are a few things I've been able to do successfully.

1. Presence - be in and around your garden a lot, so that there is a lot of your smell around it. This can deter some wildlife, but is not the most effective. Animals will be more likely to destroy something planted in the "back 40" then a garden next to your house with people and cars coming and going.

2. A dog - If the dog can roam at night, or is tied on a run of some kind, the dog will deter most critters. If you have packs of coyotes coming through, and your dog is tied, it could be in danger, but if you are dealing with a single coyote or deer, woodchucks, racoons, rabbits, etc, then the dog will be great.

3. Electric fence - This is probably the most effective method I know of to keep all sorts of things out of certain areas... but you have to make sure it is kept very hot. Many animals will touch it once and never try again. Others are smarter and will keep checking it, and if it shorts out 1 time, or the charger is disconnected 1 time, you are sunk.

Hey Matt, what about a dog in a little electric collar fence? My zone 1-3 are all super within reach, so to speak, because we only have 1/3 of an acre but are also rural. There have been two and three coyotes in our neighbors next door in the night, so I wouldn't want our dogs on a lead. Would the dogs need access all night or letting them be out until midnight then bringing them in, but would whatever is plaguing us just saunter back over once we bring the dogs in?

Hi Suzette,
If the wild animals are hungry enough they would come in again as soon as the dog leaves. I think those buried or GPS "fences" could be a great idea to keep the dog in the area. Again, some of it depends on what you are dealing with. Deer, raccoons, woodchucks, rabbits, and things like that, I would daresay most dogs would deter those sorts of animals. If you have a trio of coyotes... you are going to need one serious dog... or better yet a couple dogs. The livestock guardian dogs come to mind. I imagine most of them would be able to handle a couple coyotes if trained properly. Most "normal" breeds, I fear would become coyote supper.  

I have a suburban lot that backs up onto a wooded green space. Wildlife galore. When I moved in, the first thing I did is decide on the size of my "protected" garden space. I installed 2x4 wire fencing at 6 feet tall, with 2 feet of 1/2 inch hardware cloth buried 1 foot deep around the base. My 50 by 25 garden is maxed out after 3 years, and I often wish for more beds. This year I am expanding a garlic and onion bed to a space outside of the fenced garden. I had a load of wood chip sitting since late winter, and now that I have dispersed the chip, I have a nice area prepped for compost mulch and planting in the fall.

I stopped mowing the rest of the yard from the back of the fenced garden to the wood's edge, and the habitat that has evolved is phenomenal. I also seeded a bunch of local wildflowers and have reintroduced a variety of natives. I have learned which of them the deer and rabbits love to eat and which they leave alone. Of course, deer are fickle creatures and their appetites change with the years. This year I have so many tree seedlings all across the meadow. Oak and maple for the most part. Not on the menu this round. And then there was the maple sapling that I had protected with a fence ring until it was well over deer browse height. At least that is what I thought. Someone came along and bent the sapling at browse height and stripped the whole thing bare. One morning it was there and in the evening it was gone. It will come back next season. Maybe I will put up a ring and protect it until it is tall again. I have a cottonwood sapling that had a similar experience the year before, though that one was taller than deer browse height until someone decide to strip the bark and break the sapling. It came back and is taller this year than it was last year. I am going to try tree wrap to see if I can prevent the bark stripping and keep the tree going.

The thing that I have come to accept here with all the exposure to nature, is that if I do not put up protection of one form or another, I have to allow that the tree or plant is fair game. It is more work to protect trees and plants, yet I wouldn't give up the wonderful experience of walking out into the backyard and hanging out with the new fawns each season. Or seeing the families of rabbits that enjoy the clover and plantain growing all around. As long as I keep the gate closed on the garden, we are all enjoying sharing the space.