How to Grow a Deer Salad: Backyard Gardening for Beginners
How to Grow a Deer Salad
There’s nothing more relaxing and satisfying than sitting on your favourite lawn chair, admiring those delicate blooms and succulent blossoms blowing lightly in the warm evening breeze, while being serenaded by yet another local song sparrow. That feeling of satisfaction — job well done — lulls you into a false sense of security, and you start to float down that river of warm liquid slumber.
Only to awaken to the horror of a family of deer feasting on your delectable, delicate blooms and supping on succulent blossoms, while side-stepping the incessant lupins.
You relax and wallow in their majestic beauty. After all, you planted their favourites — plenty of crisp, juicy hostas, surrounded by tall, mellow lilies and pale, creamy irises, all nestled in a bed of honey-scented bunchberries.
Perfect.
It all begins in bowls of winter and a sea of red plastic cups, three rows deep in a south-facing window. Actually, it all begins with seeds wrapped in soggy paper towel, stuffed into sandwich bags and hidden in the warm, dark oven — but that doesn’t sound nearly as poetic.
The truth is, it starts with mess and hope. Egg cartons, used yogurt cups, and that one chipped mug you never quite threw out — anything that’ll hold dirt and let water leak out the bottom. You squint into the soil like something magical might happen, whisper a few empty promises, then scroll through photos of perfect gardens you’ll never plant. But still, for some reason, every windowsill feels like a miracle waiting to happen.
Nevermind that your family is planning to sign you up for the next season of Hoarders.
After too many short days of weak sunlight on the windowsill and long nights under the over-the-range microwave light, the seedlings are finally ready to transplant. They are the tallest, scrawniest, saddest leggy seedlings you’ll ever see. And they are awesome.
Every single one of them — all six — is truly a thing of beauty.
Of course, in the interest of saving time later in the gardening process, I’ve opted for the “straight-to-final-planters” approach. This involves dragging heavy, soil-filled containers in and out of the garage every morning and night until the risk of frost has supposedly passed.
Even though the leggy seedlings are far too small for such spacious vessels, this method has proven successful in the past — with as many as two or three thriving.
The other option, slightly more rational but significantly more tedious, involves appropriately sized plastic pots lined up in a long-handled plastic tote for easy, monotonous transport to and from the bathtub. Every single morning. And night.
Now for the final stage of growing a deer salad: planting outside. This is the most critical phase. It takes careful planning — there are a lot of things to consider.
For instance, do I want a deer salad or a deer buffet?
While the buffet is contained and organised, it lacks the charm and chaos of the chewed-through, stampeded-over, tossed-and-savored salad garden.
Albeit, the deer buffet requires an orchestrated nightly assembly of obstacles — patio chairs, plastic bins, and storage trunks — carefully and strategically placed around the patio as barriers of discouragement to any and all of our majestic friends foraging for a midnight snack.
A deer salad, on the other hand, does not.
Final Thought
I like a little grated smoked gouda on my salad.
