I am sitting out on my deck enjoying this beautiful spring day.  The trees are putting on new growth of leaves and some flowers are in bloom.  I live about the middle of 15 or 20 acres of woods.  I have a drive that splits, and one goes to the lower side of my home and the other forms the upper side.  There are two peach trees and one apricot on the lower drive. I have one fig tree on the upper drive that is too young to bear fruit.  There is a lot of muscadine vines all through the woods.

I prepared a place for strawberry plants and a mix of flower bulbs.  I also set out three miniature rose bushes.  I have several different kinds of flowers that is in the rooting stages.  I have them in containers as to where I can move them out to the deck to be in the sun.  I am going to do most of my gardening on my deck and in the fenced in yard.  I had about six or seven trees cut out of the area so there would be plenty of sun.

My front yard has a chain link fence starting at on corner of the house and circles up through the woods and back to the upper corner of the house. The fence is about 200 feet long.  I am telling about the fence because this is where I will have my tomato plants.  I will have two large containers sitting on the deck, which is inside of the fence.  I am hoping deer will not come over the fence.

A few years back, I planted two rows of sweet potatoes about twenty feet long at the foot of a large mound of topsoil.  On top of the mound, I set out several tomato plants and several pepper plants.  They were growing and looked good.  The pepper plants bloomed and had small pods of pepper and the tomatoes plants had small tomatoes when the deer found them.  They ate the tomatoes and part of the plant and also tried the pepper. They trampled down what plants they did not eat.  The rabbits ate the sweet potato plants when they had about eight or ten inches of runners on them.

I haven’t planted anything since then except some flowers now and then.  In 2018 I did set out two tomato plants in my side yard next to where I have the fig tree. They were full of tomatoes when the deer or some mischievous kids came along and either ate or pulled every tomato on the vines.  I pruned back the broken limbs and they put on a new crop of tomatoes.  When the tomatoes started turning red, the same thing happened again.  This time they destroyed the plants.  This is the reason that I will set out inside of the fence on the deck.