Saturday, April 14, 2012

Max the Deer

When someone said, "There's a deer over there," during our Swiss Chard bundling, I imagined looking up, gazing 100 yards across the field, and seeing a fleeing deer in the brush. Instead, there was a young deer 30 feet away, staring at me, and walking slowly towards me. After my initial WTF thought, I noticed that the deer had a collar on. It came right up to me, let me pet it, and sniffed around for a handout. Upon inspection of the collar, I found out our visitor was named "Max" and there was a phone number listed. To say the least, the idea of a friendly deer wandering through our field munching away on all our crops was a bit agitating to our farmer. At his urging, I grabbed the collar and hung on as he came over, intent on getting a hold of it and getting rid of it. As the farmer got closer, the deer began pulling back on his collar. The more he struggled, the more I was urged to hold on. Finally, the deer was bucking and leaping 3 feet off the ground pulling backwards with all his strength. Just as we were about to subdue Max, his collar broke and he pulled free. Of course, he was a little more leery about coming up to us after that, but still trusting. We got the collar back on and with a rotation in players, repeated the whole bucking scenario all over again. We called the number... which was disconnected, of course... so we had no choice but to chase him off and ensure that he would be too frightened to return. We tried to coax the lazy dogs to chase Max into the woods, which they halfheartedly did eventually. It was a very surreal way to start the day.
Moral of the story: Don't try to domesticate wild deer *and/or* keep your pet's contact number up to date. Good luck, Max.

On another note, this week I've seen 2 of these huge Green Tomato Worms (about as big as my index finger)







...and I have discovered my new nemesis, BULL F*CKING NETTLE! A member of the stinging nettle family, Bull Nettle first stabs you with million of tiny, hair-like spines all over the stems and leaves... sometimes THROUGH leather gloves. It graciously follows that with some sort of chemical transfer that makes the stung area feel similar to ant bites for the next 30 seconds to 1 minute. It may look all sweet with it's white flowers in this picture, but I assure you it is a complete and total plant a-hole.

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