The bitter tomato harvest

I haven't even had the heart to write about my tomato plants.  It was already a tough year, and when we came back from the beach, there had been a deer attack.  Fortunately it wasn't severe.  Yet just a day or two after we got back the plants were ravaged.

It was life deer walked through them.  All but four or five tomatoes were gone.  All the blooms were eaten often the plants.  Some of the green tomatoes were on the ground with one bite taken out of them.  The bites were long and narrow, but obviously from an animal and not a worm or bug.

I was heartbroken. In fact I came very close to pulling the plants out, but my wife convinced me to at least try to harvest the few that were still on the plants.

It was during the next couple of days that we caught sight of the culprits sleeping at the foot of our bank under the watchful eye of their mother.

The fawns match the tracks in the tomato patch and the bites in the tomatoes.  As far as I'm concerned their guilty.

I guess if I'm going to have tomatoes again, and hosta or azaleas, we're going to have to start putting fences up and covering things with mesh.

After seventeen years here, the deer are starting to eat everything in sight.  I gave up hunting long ago, but this is almost enough to get me carrying a gun into the woods to help thin the herd.

I wouldn't mind if they would just stay in the deer pasture (ravine) behind the house, but I guess the things up in the yard offer some nice variety.

I guess an overabundance of deer is just going to be part of modern life when you live on a mountain with lots of wood around you.