Gardening notes: Growing self-bagging melons, etc.

The deer have come into town again (they trade off between town living and farm and forest living off and on through the year), and are doing a fairly good imitation of goats as far as my flowers go. And something is chewing on my tomato plants as well. I keep holding off and holding off putting up fences and netting, like most people do in this town. I'd rather try to find something mule deer don't like to eat. (Cue music for "The Impossible Dream"...)

This is not to mention that I tried several types of flowers I'd never grown before this year. With not very good results. Make that rather bad results.

All in all, the garden in its present state is nothing to write home about, unless you count one volunteer hollyhock plant way off away from everything, nearly lost in a sea of weeds in the transition zone into the vacant lot. This plant is only about three feet high but is blooming its fool head off, in the prettiest single-bloom hollyhocks you could ever hope to see. Sometimes the deer eat every bloom on my fancier hollyhocks that I planted near the house from nursery stock last year, but leave one or two of three of the primitive blooms on this one way off in no man's land. Sigh. Sometimes it gets crazy with blooms before they get to it, though. We enjoy it as we can.

On the upside, the deer feel so much at home in my yard now that a few nights ago a doe brought her very young fawn by to browse out back. How can you hold a grudge against an animal that brings her baby by, all legs and wobbles and appetite, and lets you watch out a back window, not more than ten or fifteen or twenty feet away? OK, so the light was fading fast and we could barely see the baby, except for its silhouette, but that was a treat.

On the further upside, I only bought the "fancy" hybrid hollyhocks at the nursery because I gave up trying to find the old-fashioned kind that I like best. I was hoping that the hybrids would produce seed that might revert, sooner or later, to single blooms -- exactly like I have on the plant out in no man's land. If the deer leave me any blooms long enough to go to seed, I'm going to have a heyday with that seed. And perhaps I will go to fences of some sort, at least for whatever part of the yard I designate for a cottage garden, thick with hollyhocks. Not to mention whatever area I give over to trying to raise vegetables. I don't mind sharing a few flowers with gourmet-minded deer, but this being wiped out over and over is getting real old.

Speaking of edibles, I have to admit I get a kick out of this idea for self-bagging melons left in a comment at a post over at The Common Room.