Growing things is a time-honored tradition around the world. From the dawn of agriculture, people have been tending the land to produce crops to feed themselves and their families and communities, and for as long as people have had the luxury of their own little plot of land to beautify, gardening for pleasure has been a prevalent and much-beloved pastime.
Having a well-tended garden blooming with a profusion of colorful flowers, shrubs, and herbs is no mean feat. It involves hard work, due diligence, and serious commitment to regularly taking care of your plants. That's why it hurts so much to wake up one morning and discover a herd of hungry deer has had a veritable feast in your backyard garden, leaving bare stalks or roots in their wake.
The garden is often a part of the home that gets left until the last minute to decorate. It’s usually a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and the poor garden often gets the brunt of this saying.
Your yard can be many things. It can be an aesthetically pleasing space on your property. It can entertain. But in times gone past, green spaces on the property had another function: they were there to relax and calm.
When the summer is in full swing and the harvest picks up, I often don’t know what to do with myself. I have a productive vegetable garden and a few fruit trees that I don’t want to see going to waste. This keeps my evenings full of processing - peeling, washing, pitting.
Gardening should be fun and relaxing. Being outside and tending to plants, flowers and the like shouldn’t be stressful. But when the garden pests turn up en masse, that’s when things get difficult.