In Search of Green Haven
by Kathleen Everett

Anyone who gardens in our area will be faced with the Deer Problem at some point. Twenty years ago, new to gardening and rural life, I naively planted 300 tulips in my front yard. Just as they were about to bloom the deer came through. It was a devastating betrayal.

I spent the years that followed educating myself on which plants the deer won't eat. Turns out there aren't any. I learned that if starving, they will consume almost anything. There is a hierarchy of preference, not unlike humans. If desperate enough, we will eat dirt, paper, or even okra. Which meant that only a fifteen-foot high fence would be guaranteed to solve my problem. Unfortunately I would have to sell my house in order to afford the fencing needed to surround it.

My intrepid companion graciously endured my annual deer repelling brainstorming session this spring. "How about buckshot, that's organic, isn't it?" I offer. "Uh, no", he replied, "it's little balls of lead fired out of a shotgun, escorted by sulfur, charcoal and saltpeter."

"I think I remember that stuff being on the Periodic Table. That makes it organic, no?"

"Plutonium is on the periodic table, too, but we're not about to spray it on the Swiss chard. Not to mention, it's illegal to shoot deer out of season and in the village". Men can be so unreasonable.

"What's the worst thing that could happen?" I ask, "I end up in a prison?" I thought of the prisons I've seen from the highway. The sight of the inmates in orange jumpsuits tending their rows of vegetables and flowers. And that's when the realization struck.

I'll bet fifty percent of the inmates in New York prisons are there because they just wanted to garden in peace. They never set out to break the law. They were looking to grow lettuce, Your Honor, not weed, but had to find a way to get inside that perfect fence. While I fully support Governor Patterson in his efforts to reform the Rockefeller drug laws, I also feel we must not ignore the possibility that desperate law abiding gardeners will now be driven to commit more violent crimes in order to cultivate peaceably inside that 15 foot high, razor wire topped, electrified deer-proof fencing.

I came home from work one evening last month and went outside in the final minutes of daylight to give my plutonium-free garden its weekly dousing of GitGone fishy-garlic deer repelling spray. Coming back inside, I realized that in fact I had mistakenly sprayed everything with Omnicide Poison Ivy Killer. I called the 800 number on the back of the bottle, hoping that I would get a satisfactory answer like, "Oh, not a problem, do you have any bourbon? Just apply a fine mist to the underside of all your leaves and they should be fine by morning."

Sadly that is not what transpired. Suffice it to say the plants were most definitely not fine by morning. On the bright side, there's been no sign of deer lately.

With the free time available since liberating myself from the shackles of a garden, I have decided to devote myself tirelessly to The Cause: collecting signatures in support of a proposition that urges Governor Patterson to open a Department of Corrections Garden Center with subsidies to cover the cost of fencing and installation for those of us law-abiding citizens who really do want to stay on the right side of that magnificent 15 foot electrified razor wire divide. Hey, you never know. If he's ever tried to grow tulips, he just might see the wisdom of it all.