When Moose Come Calling
Many of you probably saw a recent Facebook post of mine, in which I shared a photo of some beautiful delphiniums. The point of my post was to explain that delphiniums will rebloom if you deadhead the previous flower stalks as soon as they’ve finished blooming. Well, the next morning, I woke up to find that a moose had also admired them… and, may I add, very closely. Sigh.
While it’s true that deer (and apparently moose) like delphiniums, this particular blue delphinium is planted behind an ornamental grass and hasn’t been bothered in ages.
Several days ago, a neighbor down the hill mentioned how there were moose “bedded down in our yard after they ate some of our apples off the tree.” I recall thinking how they probably wouldn’t come up the hill to our yard because we haven’t seen moose for a few years, mainly due to local development. It turns out I was wrong because that very night, a mama moose and her twin calves decided to pay us a visit. And, after checking our game camera, I was able to watch one of the calves helping itself to the delphiniums while the other one walked past him. Busted!
But that wasn’t all. As we strolled through our front yard (the backyard is protected by a 7 1/2-foot-tall deer fence) looking for more damage, we noticed that mama moose hopped over our orchard gate (photo at left) and nibbled on one of the apple tree’s leaves. That’s the first time any critter has ever done that because there’s also a wooden crosspiece about 3′ above the gate. We always figured a deer or moose would worry about hitting their head on the crosspiece and that it would be a good deterrent. Apparently not!
While it’s not in our budge to fence off our entire front yard, I realized we had a couple of potential weak points in our orchard and vegetable garden protection.
The first was that gap above the orchard gate. Bill used a scrap of deer netting and anchored it down. That was a fairly straightforward fix. Since we tend not to see moose during the spring and summer, we should be able to remove the netting during the growing season. Although, if we do start seeing them more regularly, we could certainly leave it in place. Bill attached it to the area with some zip-ties and bungee cords to cinch it down, so it would be easy to temporarily remove it for mowing the orchard lawn, etc.
The other weak points happen to be the two arbor gates we have that go into the area that’s protected by a deer fence. But right above those gates is a large gap that I’ve found deer are willing to jump through during the fall and winter months — a time of year when they are more stressed and bolder about such things.
Fortunately, I have a fall/winter fix for this that I put in place each year: for each of the arbor gates, I have a piece of deer netting that fills the entire opening and is anchored to a metal pipe (electrical conduit) at the top and bottom of the piece. I put it in place and interlock the metal pipe within the structure of the arbor gate. This works great and should dissuade moose from going where they’re definitely not welcome!
When dealing with wildlife, sometimes you just have to get creative, right? Let’s hope we are good to go from here on out!