I finally started a long delayed project to install deer netting around part of our property.

In Central New Jersey, the deer are very overpopulated.  There aren’t many natural predators left.  Their main enemies are cars and winter.

We have two dogs that roam in a smaller fenced section of the yard.  The problem is, the deer come in right up to the dogs’ fence.  They know the dogs can’t get out, so the deer stand there, eating the trees and shrubs and the dogs bark incessantly at them.

It’s not peaceful.  For any of us.

Worse, occasionally the dogs get out of their fenced yard, which is really alarming because we’re not far from a road with fast traffic and the dogs are not used to cars.  And we LOVE the dogs!

Aimee has been very patient with the seasons while I got around to it.  I set forth the strategy and the plan and got the materials last year, but the project ended up getting deferred again and again—for various valid and questionable reasons—until it became one of those delayed projects that looms larger in the mind than in reality…once you get to it.

The deer netting project should be complete next weekend.

I understand from my research about the netting that it’s important to mark it visually when you first put it up, so the deer don’t crash through it.  They don’t know it’s there, so they can’t recognize it. After 4-6 weeks the herds will be trained that there’s a barrier and I’ll remove the orange ribbons you can in the picture at that point.

In the end, the deer and I will have had the opposite problem:  I imagined a barrier when there wasn’t one—because I delayed—but the deer don’t see a barrier when there is one, because they don’t expect it.

How many of our barriers are only in the mind!

-Chris