English practice 21

The Deer Fence

A family emergency took us across the country for several weeks during the spring of year. We had left our first vegetable garden in the midst of early growing season, a time when emerging seeds is essential to ensure their vitality. Only a serious family matter would have such a departure.

We arrived home three weeks later an incredible transformation . Not only had the broccoli stalks and scarlet radishes come to bear fruit, but had decided to make a meal of our freshly sprouted crop. Deer do not use a freshly sharpened kitchen knife to remove delicious morsels from their stems. Rather, the animals gnaw at and shred the plants with their vegetarian teeth, leaving a mess of rejected foliage, hoof prints, and raw vegetable soup. 7

Our four-foot twig garden fence suddenly appeared comical and . There was obviously a lack of real needed to be remedied quickly. Even though we were now back home to stand guard, our absence had inadvertently established our kitchen garden as a food plot for the nearby wildlife. Deer are typically night eaters, and we weren't about to change our own sleeping patterns to accommodate them! Stopping the deer would

a tedious journey to the local hardware store, we assembled our army's ammunition: 350 feet of chicken wire; a box of four-inch screws; neon-orange plastic ribbon; and a heavy duty staple gun. Unrolling a 350-foot roll of chicken wire is no easy task. Constructing the bottom tier of the fence was ; one person unrolled the four-foot wide tube while another person followed behind, stapling the chicken wire to the existing fence posts. Tackling the second row was another story altogether. Since our original posts were a mere four feet high, each post needed a four-foot extension attached to it, followed by another round of chicken wire.

After hours of back-breaking work, we stood back to admire The big test would come when darkness fell. Deer can and will leap over an eight-foot barrier if necessary, but our saving grace would be the intimidation factor of our new fence, with its metallic outline glinting in the moonlight and neon-orange tags flapping in the wind.

It has been two months since the transformation of our little twig-fenced garden into a chicken-wired vegetable

prison. Each night we sit down delicious sweet corn, baked zucchini, tomato and cucumber salad, and snap beans. No broccoli or radishes this year, but we're already discussing the blueberry bushes and strawberry plants for next year. First, though, we will give some serious thought to the black bears that live in our woods.