After a very cold week, the last 7 days have been extremely warm with May temperatures. Of course, I had to use this kind of weather to do some garden work left behind last year, and prepare the garden for a new season.

No early vegetables this year

Although I left a bunch of vegetables for this spring, there will be no harvests at all. All of the lettuce, celery, carrots, and brassicas have been eaten by roe deer.

I’ve been fighting roe deer for the past 5 years. Ever since Slovenia decided to make a wire fence around the border, which I’m just a couple of km away, the population of roe deer in this area is increasing drastically. At first, this wasn’t too big of an issue since my garden is almost completely fenced. There is a part of the yard without the fence, but I didn’t use it to grow anything, so there was no damage when roe deer came to eat grass here. But, lately, they started jumping over the fence.

I tried to fight them off with some branches. I used them to make the fence look taller and scarier. It worked for a couple of years, but this year they decided that no branch will stop them. They spent most of the winter in my garden, even sleeping under the quinces and walnuts. They ate everything edible and I had to do something about it.

Additional fence for the garden

Due to the situation in our country, a new taller fence is just not an option. Right now the fence is 1,3m(42.6ft) tall. To make it tall enough for the deer not to jump over we’d need at least 2m (6.56ft). This means we’d need hundreds of meters of new fence and around a hundred new fence poles. This is just not an option right now.

Luckily, last year when we bought anti-hail netting. We bought too much and had a bunch left, so we used this netting as an additional fence. The netting is light enough that we were able to install it with a bunch of wooden poles, and after tying it to an existing fence there shouldn’t be any more problems with roe deer. We used the lighter one on the part where they mostly jumped over the fence and the darker(less visible) one on the rest of the garden. This netting will also be great for fighting off little animals that used to crawl under the existing fence and gobble up our veggies.

Preparing the beds for next season

After discovering that all of my beds were empty, there was nothing left to do but to dig the rest of the garden. Luckily the weather has been dry the past 2 weeks, so the soil was great for digging. After digging these beds there is only one bed that still needs to be prepared for next season. This bed still has tulips on it, so I will dig it in May when the tulips stop flowering.

Now that the whole garden has been dug, it was time to start preparing the beds for the new season. I’ve spread some fertilizers on all of the beds and I started mulching the sun-exposed beds. Past summer has been very dry, so it is almost impossible to get any hay or straw. This is why I decided to use what I have around my home. This year I’m going with leaves and dry grass.

Having a forest garden means you have lots of leaves in the garden every spring. Usually, I’d just rake them and throw them into the forest, but this year I decided to collect and shred them, and cover my beds. After raking half of the orchard I managed to cover half of the vegetable beds. I will cover the other part with the rest of the leaves, and during the summer I will maintain the mulch level with freshly mowed grass. This should be enough to help my plants survive the heat and drought if we get any this year of the course.

Plans for next week

The next 7 days should be cooler again, so I will most likely spend them working on my house plants and seedlings. The house plants desperately need transplanting. They have been struggling to survive during the winter, so they will benefit from a little fresh soil and new pots. Also, I have to sow the late February batch of seeds and transplant some of my big seedlings. Right now, some are getting too big for joined containers and need separate ones, but this will be done once I’m sure there will be no more snow. The way this year has started I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a late winter now.