My neighbor George is a woodchuck. He lives under our shed, and he likes to sunbathe.
We have adjusted our lifestyle slightly because of George’s proximity, as one does in response to all neighbors. For example, we have accepted that our front steps slowly subside backwards against the foundation due to George’s tunnels. We haven’t considered resetting the steps because (a) renting a digger would be expensive and involve a learning curve and (b) the cats enjoy seeing George when he ventures out by the front door. I did re-level our tilting woodpile platform this spring. I swore some and filled that particular tunnel entrance with large granite rocks, but I don’t hold a grudge. George was doing what George does, and we have a mutual “live and let live” policy. Occasional self-defense is reasonable, but there’s no need for me to escalate things.
I feel less generous about George exploring my gardens. I’ve responded to his ruder habits by planting the least appealing (to George) plants in the garden nearest to his shed, and leaning hard into “deer resistant plants” across the board. He generally takes this hint and feasts on clover or other greenery near the edge of the woods. Occasionally I catch him ambling through the border beds and sampling the goods, but George’s benders aren’t frequent enough to justify an intervention.
The deer in our neighborhood are a different story. They are dumb, destructive, and inevitable. Packs of three or five sometimes move through our yard in broad daylight, placidly grazing on my shade garden or munching apple blossoms, and I’m instantly enraged. I bang on the window and shout at them; they either have no response at all, or simply raise their heads and watch me curiously, still chewing.
At least George has the decency to galumph off under the shed if he hears me coming—he acknowledges the give and take in our relationship. When I explode out onto the driveway clapping and stomping at the deer, the most they’ll do is retreat another ten yards into the woods, watching to see if I’ll get bored and go back inside. The deer are transient, and not neighborly. They’re impervious to relationship-building.
George was on my mind this spring. The fascistic tone of current news cycles had added a low hum of imminent threat and helplessness to daily life, and I was looking for constructive ways to combat it and feel grounded. One idea was to channel energy into a good, old-fashioned Victory Garden. However, our sunniest bit of land is smack-dab in George territory: a backyard, south-facing slope with a patch of sky that’s free from pine, maple, and lilac shadows for most of the day. It is, of course, where George sunbathes when he’s feeling the joy of the season, and where he often grazes on clover. It seemed to me that raised beds might offer a compromise. George and all of his offspring—who are also named George—are too pudgy and lazy to climb up over 24 inches of wooden barrier to investigate tempting greenery when the lawn is their oyster.
The deer are, as I mentioned, another story. In that ongoing battle I have tried the aforementioned clapping and stomping, spraying coyote urine around, and planting poisonous or prickly plants. Foxgloves? Success. Hollies? Chomped to nothing. I’ve found increasingly obscure locations for the kind of hardy New England staples that are supposed to flourish in our scrubby soil. To make it to the flowering stage, sadly, daylilies and hostas have to be so well hidden that the deer and I both forget they are there. (If nobody can see hostas’ blooms, do the petals really exist?) I knew that my new garden would have no chance once the deer realized that I’d set tasty young veggies out at a convenient, breakfast-table height. Any plan for raised beds would have to include a deer fence.
This meant that George would have to sacrifice a larger chunk of his yard than I’d originally intended. I ordered up pressure treated lumber, hardware cloth, and corner braces. I chose a dark wood stain to coordinate with George’s shed, and spent raw early spring weekends assembling a raised veggie patch, right outside his door. I screwed together two 3’ x 8’ boxes, bottoms lined with hardware cloth to discourage tunneling critters (George isn’t our only neighbor).
We filled the lower halves with logs and leaves and branches that will decompose over time, and topped them off with soil and manure. The smell was pungent after the first rain and I hoped it might have the same effect as the coyote urine.
When our boys surprised me with Mother’s Day flats of veggie and herb starters it was a delight. It also put urgency into the fencing phase of the project. Baby leaves of lettuce, broccoli, and strawberry exuded vulnerability every time I watered; I imagined them disappearing down an unrefined deer gullet. Thanks to my husband’s bemused and good natured assistance, the fence posts were all now footed in concrete, so I dug trenches between them, planning to bury the bottom inches of the fencing. A few days later my husband notified me that he’d chased deer out of the side yard, and the race was on. I finished poultry-stapling hardware cloth around all of the posts, infilled the trenches, then sandwiched more of the cloth between some 1” x 2” slats to make a door.
This morning I ceremonially screwed a drop-latch onto that door, and called the deer fence done. The fencing has ripples, the door isn’t perfectly square, and it’s not a thing of beauty, but it’s a real enclosure, and there are real plants growing in there. (Take that, low hum!)
The drawback is that I’ve really overstepped courtesy in my relationship with George. I have dibsed a significant amount of our shared real estate, in a way that most definitely tells him he’s not welcome there.
Nevertheless I saw George out and about last week (when the fence door was still fastened shut with some gardening ties). He was inspecting the area between the fence line and the wood line, and after he made his way back to his shed, I hustled out to check the perimeter. I couldn’t find any holes or obvious tunnels. George seems to be willing to take the new enclosure in stride. More than likely he is feeling the same sort of pursed-lip tolerance that I extend to him when he destabilizes our woodpile. “Neighbors!” he’s saying to himself with an eye roll. “Nothing to be done but coexist.”