Those Rueful Radishes

Well my radish experiment was a bust, I guess. I had an excellent stand of them and they looked so nice and green in my urban garden plot and then we had a week of very hot weather, in October, a time when we aren't supposed to see such weather. That really stressed them out and they began to wilt.

Around the same time, I saw my first deer in the patch and just shooed it off. I didn't see that deer for nearly a week. Looking back, he must have been running all over the county telling all his friends about the excellent salad bar he found growing behind this house near a pond. Soon, I would look out the window and see not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six but sometimes up to seven deer browsing hungrily on my radish tops. There was even an eight point buck among them and I rarely see the bucks out in the open. I chased them off but they kept coming back multiple times a day sometimes when I was not around or staring out the window. They made quick work of the patch.

I have a fence that I plan on putting up next spring to prevent this very thing from happening but right now the ground is just so hard, I think I would break the fiberglass poles trying to hammer them in. So I am pretty much resigned to letting the deer have their way for the time being.

Yesterday, my sawdust barrel was full and so I hauled it down to the garden and spread it over all the remains of the radishes to allow it to compost over winter and add organic matter to the soil. I plan to do the same with my fall leaves this year. Evidently the deer didn't appreciate the sawdust sprinkled over their salad bar because they were all there last night eating grass around the edge of the garden but weren't in the garden. 

On a positive note, I keep pulling up a radish now and then to check progress and the last one I pulled up, one whose leaves had been stripped by deer recently, had a taproot going down nearly six inches. The root itself though is probably only the same diameter of the lead in a pencil so it has room to grow, at least the few remaining with leaves do. On another positive note, there is a ton of deer shit in the garden. Evidently radish greens induce bowel movements in deer.