
If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know we have a lot of trouble with deer. They eat everything, and what they don’t eat they might strip the bark off of. Well, I’ve been needing a nursery area to propagate plants for the food forest I’m designing, and of course it needs to exclude the deer.
My niece, Emma, and I finally built the nursery last week, forty-eight feet long but only 4 feet wide. My hope is that the deer will see it as a double fence and too narrow a gap to fit into. We made sure the location was within one hundred feet (the length of my hose) of the nearest outside faucet and I installed a soaker hose.

Once built, and the Spring snow storm threat had abated, I quickly populated the nursery with plants. The clove currant (Ribes odoratum), acquired from a specialty nursery in Clinton OK, started blooming within a couple of hours of being watered. They really do smell like cloves. I can just imagine what it’s going to be like walking through the food forest in Spring, dotted with these lovely flowering shrubs, the air heady with the scent of cloves. I also added a couple of varieties of Elderberry and a Mexican Plum.

To this mix of fruit bearing plants, I added seedlings of native pecans and bur oaks, 25 of each. The other 50 I planted out on the property in locations where dead blackjack oaks had created gaps. The trees outside the nursery, may not survive the deer onslaught, or the brutal first summer, but at least I’ll have replacements in my little nursery that will get a couple of extra seasons of growth in safety.