What a disappointment to wake up to. I feel your pain. I think most of us here on New England Gardening have experienced similar losses. And if it isn't the deer, it's the voles or chipmunks or rabbits or squirrels or the woodchucks. Very frustrating.

Hopefully your hostas will recover and you will be able to enjoy them in future years.

Hi Ray, so sorry about your plants! I have heard that deer are out of control in parts of the country.

I just recently learned that more people are killed by deer than any other animal in the US. More than bear, cougars, dogs, snakes, spiders, or all the other things we worry about. Motor vehicles colliding with deer kill people as well as cause up to 1 billion in property damage. Recently, someone told me that their insurance company was adding a $1 "deer damage" fee to everyone's auto insurance.

I think we need highly skilled bow hunters to go out there and cull the deer and use them for food for people and pets!

Fortunately the deer are not too bad here - they just wander through and nibble on their favorites here and there. They have already eaten down my Jewelweed, some of the Woodland phlox, and a few other things.

A few years ago they LOVED my Hosta Royal Standard and would target that Hosta and none of the others. I sprayed it with Deer Off after that and it worked.

I wonder if deer populations are thicker in urban areas, and if they cause more damage there than in rural areas. We have multiple hunting seasons on deer in my area: rifle, bow, muzzle-loader, yet still they eat our gardens too. Probably they are smart enough to know they are safe in the summer months and during the night.

I'm very sorry about your plants, Ray. What an unpleasant surprise.

My sympathies on the damage to your hostas.

When I was at my mom's last week in inner suburban Cleveland, a deer crossed the neighbor's front lawn, not 15 feet from the street, and came within about 20 feet of me, sitting on the front steps talking. My mom said that the deer had lost all fear of people. I knew that they were havoc on plants (a large hydrangea bush I had planted disappeared in a year) but having a deer that comfortable that close to a road and me was a bit disconcerting.

There was something about this post that set off bells for me. Besides the color of your mulch. You seem to have been around GardenWeb for a while, not this forum, but still enough to know the rules. You posted the exact same post on the Vegetable, Hosta and Mid-Atlantic forums which incidentally was a cut an paste from your blog. At least four posts for two hostas? Doesn't this seem a bit much? Are you posting to steer people to your blog? If so that is just not right.

Cloud_9
Apologies I did re-read the Garden Web instructions (rules) and discovered that you are not supposed to post to more than 2 forums.. Why i did.
Hostas: Its what they deer ate so far
MidAtlantic: Its where I live SE Penn less than a mile from Delaware
Vegetables Its my favorite site
New England Because I lived on LI for the first 49 years
of my life

I use a website to store my pictures - I dont like photobucket because I prefer to have control over the pictures. my pics

Again apologies, most people seemed to enjoy the pics.

Hmmm, interesting observation Cloud-9. I didn't notice the duplicate posts, but would have thought the same thing. I find it annoying when people post here just to promote their blogs and websites too.

RayinPenn, at the very least your post makes no sense whatsoever in the vegetables forum, and I agree that is what you're doing and if I had noticed that I wouldn't have bothered to even reply to this thread.

Doesnt anyone sleep anymore? I forgot to mention I am not selling anything or advertising anything period. I am just enjoying my hobby and sharing pictures. Not sure why anyone feels the need to imply an impropriety when none occurred...

I was just worked up about the damage. last year the deer ate everything!

I didn't take it that way, Ray, and I can understand why you were aggravated enough to post it in several venues. After all, different people populate different forums and can offer different takes on any given subjects. Personally I've had an interesting bird situation on my porch this summer and have posted the same information and photos on several forums here and elsewhere.

As far as linking to one's blog, I love that! I've bookmarked a number of blogs belonging to members of various garden groups on here, particularly the junk gardening forum. What's the harm? You're not selling anything, as you've said. It can be kind of a pain to post pics on here, so why post them on two different servers when you can just point folks to the one. I enjoyed your blog myself.

I didn't mean to jump all over you personally Ray, but 4 duplicate posts is a little much. As for sleeping, well I've got a touch of insomnia!

I don't mind people occasionally posting links to blogs or websites, but there are people who come here to post for that sole purpose. They aren't really interested in participating in this community - they are interested in directing traffic to their websites.

And I think that some bloggers DO have commercial purposes in mind (maybe not you ray). And if they are computer savvy enough to format a blog, they are savvy enough to post one little picture here.

For some, like myself, it is easy to compose several posts for different forums saying the same thing using different words. For others, it is a chore, and copying and pasting is a time saver, and a harmless one when the words being copied are one's own. I don't know, but if Ray copied and pasted the contents of his post, he probably copied and pasted the title/subject as well, making it easy to identify and ignore if you've read it already on another forum. After all, mean spiritedness is unbecoming to gardeners.

oh no! I definitely feel your pain!! i have (had!) a 100 foot beautiful row of Arborvitae. they're about 25 feet tall and this past winter the deer decided that they looked too delicious to pass up! at "deer level," about 4 feet up and all the way down to the ground, they chewed all the lower branches off all around the plants! now i have trees on sticks!! it's terrible. they are starting to grow back but they'll never be the same again!

Oh, so sorry EReiCT! :-(

Ray: I just moved two beautiful hostas into a bed containing other well-grown hostas, and I'm thinking about how I'd feel tomorrow morning if I found these hostas were eaten by deer. I'd be really, really upset and would write a blistering entry in my blog (if I had a blog, which I don't).

EReiCT: The stripped arborvitae makes me cringe; you can't replace them and you'll have to look at them every day. We don't have much deer damage here, but we do have utility tree butcher crews, the human equivalent.

My sympathies to both of you.

Claire

Oh dear, how awful for the Arborvitaes! Fortunately my Arborvitaes have never been scathed, this is proabably because my neighbors have a zillion Yews, which they like even more than Arborvitae. Bird netting works well in a situation like that, the deer can't eat the foliage through the netting.

"Utility tree butcher crews, the human equivalent" LOL.

I have neighbors who are tree butchers! Another human equivalent.