On Thursday evening I walked the front walk with a mug of tea and counted thirty tulip buds, fat and closed, their tips just starting to show color. I planted the bulbs last October, a deep plum variety mixed with a pale apricot one, and this was the week they were finally going to open. By seven on Friday morning there were thirty bare stems.
Not one flower was left. Not one bud was lying on the ground, either. Whatever ate them ate them all, in one night, and didn't leave a crumb.
How I knew it was deer
It didn't take a detective. There were sharp, split hoof prints in the soft soil beside the walk and more across the lawn, heading toward the street. The stems weren't clipped at a neat angle the way rabbits leave them. They were torn, with ragged, stringy ends, which is what you get from an animal with no upper front teeth. A small pile of droppings at the edge of the lawn closed the case.
Deer cross our front yard most nights. I see their tracks in the snow all winter and in the mud all spring, and I'd watched them walk past the tulip leaves for weeks. I took that as a sign they weren't interested. What it actually meant was that they were waiting for the buds, which are apparently the best part.
I should be honest here: I knew. Everyone in northern Westchester knows tulips are deer candy. I planted them anyway, right along the front walk, with no repellent and no plan, because I wanted one spring of tulips by the porch steps. I got one evening of buds. Mateo looked at the stems on his way out the door Friday and said maybe the deer were just really hungry after the winter, which is a kinder reading than mine was at 7 a.m.
What I tried afterward
On Friday after school I stopped at the hardware store and bought a quart of Bobbex deer repellent for $25.99. It's a ready-to-use spray made with egg, fish and garlic, among other things, and it smells exactly like that. The smell fades for people within a day, but deer are supposed to keep noticing it, and the idea is that they learn to skip the plants that taste and smell bad.
I sprayed what was left of the tulips, which might sound pointless. It isn't entirely. The leaves still need a few weeks of sunshine to feed the bulbs for next year, and if the deer come back for the foliage, the bulbs go into summer weak. I also sprayed the border beside the porch, since whatever is coming up there is presumably next on the menu.
Here are the tradeoffs as I see them after one day:
- Cost. A quart doesn't stretch far, and it needs reapplying every few weeks and after heavy rain. That adds up over a season.
- The smell. For about a day, our front porch smelled like a fish market on a hot afternoon. Nate asked if something had died under the steps.
- Memory. Repellent only works if I remember to reapply it, and between report cards and spring concerts, that's not a given.
I also thought about netting over the walk, which looks terrible and can tangle animals, a motion-activated sprinkler, which would mostly soak the mail carrier, and a fence, which isn't going across the front of a farmhouse porch. None of those felt right for 30 tulips.
For the budget: the Bobbex puts the garden at about $227 of my $450 for the year. That's a lot of April for a yard that hasn't produced a single tomato yet.
What I'll plant instead
Daffodils. Deer and most rodents leave them alone, because every part of the plant is bitter and toxic, and in a lot of the yards around here they're the only spring bulbs that survive. This fall, I'll plant a few dozen along the front walk where the tulips are now. They won't be plum and apricot. They'll be yellow and white, which is fine. A yellow I get to keep beats a plum I get to look at for one evening.
If the tulip bulbs come back next spring, I'll enjoy the leaves and expect nothing more. Into the notebook, in capital letters: DEER EAT TULIPS. YOU KNEW THAT.
This morning the stems are still standing along the walk in two neat rows, thirty of them, green and bare, like birthday candles somebody blew out before anyone got to see them lit.
