The Deer are Eating My Potatoes!

As part of our off-grid and sustainable philosophy at the Estate, we've started to plant things that we can use. For example, the last 2 years I've planted potatoes, mostly because I like them. The sandy soil is great for growing them and they are pretty "hands off" after they are planted, which is good since we aren't there all the time. The first year, I only planted a few because I had some that had started to sprout in the pantry. I figured I would give it a go and see how they did. Well, they did great! I planted about 3-4 lbs. of potatoes and I harvested about 25 lbs. I didn't do anything to them after planting either. I didn't even bother to hill them, just let them go. To my surprise, the deer didn't bother them. Not even a little bit. I thought to myself, this is fantastic! I can grow lots of potatoes and not have to really worry about the deer. Boy was I wrong! The next year, I planted them again. I did plant more, but not a lot more. This time I put in about 6lbs of seed potatoes. I planted them in the same spot I had used previously, since it had worked so well before. To my surprise, the deer ate these plants to the ground. Each time they would start to grow, they would mow them down. It was a very dry summer and the potatoes were one of the only things still growing and green, so that could be part of it. My wife also speculated that the first year, they left them alone because there hadn't been anything to eat in that area before, so it wasn't somewhere the deer looked for food. After the first year, the deer had noticed that there was something there to eat and started to come back. With the dry summer, it was even more appetizing since food wasn't as plentiful as usual. In the end, I harvested no potatoes. The deer kept the plants working so hard just to stay alive that they never produced any tubers. I knew I had to do something different for this year.

When I decided to try again, I had a couple plans in mind. I needed to figure out how to limit the amount of damage the deer were doing to my plants without spending a ridiculous amount of money to do it. Even if I harvested 100 lbs. of spuds, I would only be saving myself about $20-$40 in the actual cost of buying potatoes. Spending hundreds of dollars to put up a fence, wasn't really in the cards.

My first plan was to overload them. If I planted a lot of potatoes, the deer couldn't possibly eat them all, could they? I bought and planted about 20 lbs. of seed potatoes. Enough that I thought it would be enough to spread out the damage so even if the deer ate some of the plants, they wouldn't eat the entire plant. When the plants started coming up, I didn't see a lot of deer damage. There were a few bites here and there, but they weren't eating them down to the ground as before.

The second plan was to make some "cages" for the plants. I couldn't spring for enough fencing and posts to build a full fence around the area, but I could justify enough to build some janky cages to go over the hills. This way, even if the deer ate to leaves that grew through the cages, they wouldn't be getting to the main part of the plant. Maybe it would work? Maybe the deer would just get tangled up in the cages and destroy everything. Who knows?

Luckily, we have had pretty good weather so far this spring for growing. It's been rainy and cool. There have only been a few bouts of hot weather, then it went back to rainy and cooler. This was perfect for the potatoes. They have grown very well and very quickly. So quickly, that I hadn't noticed just how hard they were getting hit. One day, when checking on them, I noticed that the first potatoes I had planted were really getting eaten badly. The more recent ones weren't as big, so they were not getting any attention yet. My plan to overload the deer wasn't going to plan. It was time to build the "cages".

I picked up some garden fencing from the tractor store - it was on sale too - and went to the Estate to try to save my potatoes! I spent the next few hours cutting and bending the fence into shape to lay over the plants. I didn't get enough to protect all of the plants, so I will need to go back or just let the ones that are not covered be sacrificed to the deer. I haven't really decided yet. I will wait and see how the cages hold up first.

Stay tuned for updates. I'm really hoping to get a lot of potatoes this year.

#potatofarmer #countryestate #potatoes #farming #wildlife #deerdeterrent #offgrid #sustainable