Let’s talk about the most formidable enemy of the northern garden! Moose!
In an instant, moose can devastate your garden. They have a tremendous appetite and really do appreciate your hard work when it comes to you growing tasty veggies for them. There are some peculiar things about moose that are well worth knowing about as a northern grower.
For the most part, moose are creatures of habit. It has long been suspected by biologists that moose create a mental “food map” of their given territory, revisiting the same places for food around the same time each year. We’ve definitely been able to correlate this observation, since we always see a pair of moose clear out our raised beds in the middle of September.
This observation has been so uncanny that we can practically predict these visits down to a given week. For many years now, we have a momma and a baby moose visit our raised beds (and surrounding flower gardens) between September 15th and September 25th. It’s quite likely that the baby learns from the mom, then the mature adult visits with its offspring the following year. We’ve experienced this same thing for quite a few years now.
Now, this sucks if those moose tend to visit your garden in mid summer, before you’ve been able to harvest out the majority of your garden. Once you get on their “mental food map,” your only viable method of protection is physical protection such as electric fencing. Since we tend to get our visits in late fall, our general goal is to simply harvest our “important” stuff by mid September and leave root veggie tops for their taking.
We’ve also observed that moose tend to be quite picky about what they want to eat. They almost always go for our sweet pea flowers and the tops of many of our root veggies. But, they leave our carrot tops and quite a few other things. In some ways, we do wish they’d help us clean out some of the stuff from our garden! But, moose hardly take orders and pretty much will do as they please!
We used to take a lot more precautions from moose with our gardens, using “waving flags” and “flaggers tape” that will blow in the wind and generally deters them. As we’ve learned this behavior about moose, though, we haven’t seen as much of a need for such “alternative” prevention techniques. That would, of course, very quickly change if we start getting mid-summer visits.
Still, for many years now, we’ve considered ourselves pretty lucky. That we shouldn’t take this observed behavior for granted since it can so easily change in an instant. We might implement a small electric fence over the tops of our garden fences, it’s been on our mind for awhile now. If anything, as another deterrent. We often say that there isn’t much that can stand between your garden and a hungry moose! Anything you do is just a deterrent, not a solution!
