Fingers Crossed, the Mitcheldean Garden 2021
Oh Deer!

This page is part of a series of garden blogs from 2021. Click here for the index.

And so life continued as the 'new normal'. The garden kept us busy and we regularly walked 'locally', eventually deciding we had to drive a (very) few miles first to get a change of scenery. It was time to look for help and I soon discovered a delightful small book produced by the local ramblers called 'Exploring Historic Dean' with descriptions of 14 walks in the Forest of Dean area which did just as the title suggested. By the time we had completed them we had a basic knowledge of that part which is administered by Forestry England (the former Forestry Commission). Throw in the local Ordnance Survey Explorer Map which we had bought on arrival (and its on line version courtesy of Bing Maps) and we were equipped to do for the FoD what we had done for the larger canvas that is Penang and that continued into 2021. 

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I woke up one morning in February and looked out of the window. There was a creature nibbling our rockery! It was the first muntjac I have seen in the Forest of Dean. They are quite a recent arrival, an introduced species which treats any garden it gets into in the way as a goat would, in other words they are an absolute menace. I don't know how this one got in or got out because it had vanished before I could get into the back garden. Two days later we had another visitor, a roe deer which I followed up the garden until it cleared a five foot fence at the top.

It was time to take action, it was not going to be easy. It was soon clear that I would have to do it myself if I wanted to protect the garden in a timely manner as looking around I could see signs of where our visitors had been grazing. A few days later a set of fence poles arrived together with 25 metres of wire fencing. I guessed that the roe deer at least would come in from the top. The central part has a beech hedge which should act as a good deterrent as they can't see over it. To each side I dug two holes, inserted a pair of poles and attached two sections of wire, making the fence about two metres high which is at the low end of the recommended protection but about as much as I could manage.

This shows the two sections in close up, the only practical way to do this was to use our neighbour's land and as she has always been, she was very sympathetic to my request. 

The side fence to the north was another matter. I've never met the owner and while the land has been rented out for grazing sheep off and on, for the last few years it has been abandoned and during the summer totally overgrown. Last autumn, rather foolishly as it turns out, I had reduced the height of this section of beech hedge so it would be easier to control. It will grow again no doubt, but I couldn't afford to wait. Fortunately, I had now stumbled on a 'post auger' which made the effort to prepare a hole much easier. It's basically a giant corkscrew, smaller versions are available but this was perfect for my posts. I just had to temper my enthusiasm and not try to remove too much soil each time it went in.

Everywhere in and around our garden there are large stones, even rocks which are desperately difficult to extract with a spade. The auger was not perfect but it did loosen the worst offenders. The medium and small sized ones were actually excellent for wedging the posts in place afterwards. As you can see I was producing holes around one metre deep. 

I had also bought a fence tensioning tool but the poles weren't rigid enough to use it. The second picture on the right shows how I have increased the height of the fence which the roe deer cleared, the land falls away about two foot on either side, I suspect there may have been a small wall here many moons ago. 

After the sycamores came down I had added a section of fencing to our boundary with #35 but now it looked woefully inadequate, especially as their top fence is much lower than ours. There's nothing in their garden or 37's for the deer to eat except grass so unilateral action was required. 

Finally in mid-April, we combined a May Hill walk, a garden centre session and a visit to the fencing people in Huntley and in almost no time, the job was complete. I have tried to leave a gap next to the bonfire area which while not an obvious entry point is likely to be an attractive exit point. The fencing posts have not been treated, that gives them a maximum life of about 10 years by which time I guess I'll have no choice but to pay someone to do it all again...