You can’t fight Mother Nature.
About three or four years ago, I stopped by Terry’s Body Shop in Purcellville, Virginia, to see if he’d weld the rusted and cracked frame of my 1997 Toyota pickup back together. At the reception desk, I noticed he was selling deer warning whistles to scare the highway rats away from moving cars and trucks.
“Do those work?” I asked. A couple of deer had bounced off my truck while slow driving on local gravel roads, and I was thinking about plopping down $10 for a pair. “I don’t know if they do or don’t,” Terry told me. “But we get a lot of deer-damaged cars in here that have those whistles on them.”
I was thinking of that as I sat at the edge of our big garden armed with a kid’s Red Ryder BB gun, looking to sting some rabbits and birds for eating our blueberries that have hit peak season.
As I fidgeted and tried to zero in on a bird, I was shocked silly when a sizable doe jumped out of our blueberry patch about 30 yards away. Don’t even ask how I missed that walking in, but it proved to me that you just can’t fight Mother Nature.
Of course, we try.
Every spring and summer, it’s war with the bugs, the birds, and the animals that infest our garden, the apple, pear, and peach trees, a big blackberry patch, and 55 blueberry bushes.
And every year, the results are the same: Critters, 1; Homeowners, 0.
We tried all the tricks to get rid of pests. Since we raise bees and don’t spray pesticides, we had to figure a certain percentage would be lost to the native insects.
Then some idiot brought in the brown marmorated stink bug from China, and it exploded in population along the East Coast, peaking about two years ago. It loves to mess with apples, peaches, and tomatoes, leaving nasty bruises.
This year, the enemies are our old friends: the birds and rabbits and, apparently, big deer.
When we first planted the garden, we figured the deer would hit us hard. Our neighbors have a tall deer fence around their garden. That’s expensive, so we haven’t gone that route.
We did put up a hip-high fence of chicken wire to keep our dogs out. They like to eat asparagus as soon as it sprouts. They munch on the strawberries and even the cherry tomatoes.
I’m not sure how the rabbits got in there. Every night, we lock the chicken wire fence tight, but they are in there in the morning, nibbling on the lettuce. They must make use of a den or tunnel.
We’ve tried lights with sensors, strings of tinsel, netting, owl molds, and nothing works. When animals are hungry, well, they seem to flock to our fruit and salad bar.
Our best trick has been to grow more than we can eat. That leaves enough for all.
Facing inevitable defeat for another year, my focus was on the screeching birds. Since I don’t want to kill them, I went with the low-power BB gun to scare them away with a little fanny smack.
One bird would land, I’d fire, and he’d fly in a circle and come right back. Mock, mock, mock.
Then he made a mistake. He went into the blueberry bushes and started to shake the branches to drop the juicy berries on the ground where he and his pals would pluck them up.
I noticed that our oldest Boston terrier, Gertie, who hates them more than I do, moved in.
Done shaking berries, the bird jumped down and right into Gertie’s mouth. With a few crunches, she accomplished what I couldn’t. The other dogs gathered around and seemed to give her a nod of approval, none making a move for the bird. Gertie looked up for a picture, feathers stuck to her nose and chin, a confident face that said, “Leave it to me.”
No, you can’t fight Mother Nature, but sometimes you can make her work for you.
Paul Bedard is a senior columnist and author of Washington Secrets.
