Get to the end of this before you fire off that angry letter to me about feeding deer in urban environments …

The neighbor to the right of my house apparently redid his front landscaping at some point before we moved in. Long story short, the end result is that some landscaping company came in and finished the job. Now I don’t know who made the decision to use clover as the groundcover in his yard, but it covers about 40-50% of his yard. For those of you who know anything about growing forage, you can probably guess how this story ends. For the rest of you, keep reading.

For those not familiar with this area, grass is somewhat hard to grow. You need a tougher species to survive the climate swings, and it requires a lot of water and fertilizer. Clover, on the other hand, grows well and fixes its own nitrogen so it doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer or chemicals to thrive. Clover is an excellent forage because it is sweet, tender, and higher in protein. In fact, the deer love it so much that it is used for creating “food plots” to attract deer for hunting.

Enter my neighbor and his little patch of clover, which is the only one like it that I have seen around here—clover just isn’t that concentrated anywhere else in this area. Now that warmer weather is here, we have been seeing this several times a week:

While I’m not sure the other neighborhood residents love this kind of stuff, my daughter and I find it fantastic. They basically come down in groups of bucks or does, sit in the patch of clover and nibble for a while, and then take out some trees and shrubs on their way back up the hill through other yards.

Living in the hills on the outside of town, we see a lot of "urban wildlife" like deer, raccoons, birds, possums, frogs, snakes and squirrels. It’s these kinds of events that remind me to live in harmony with nature, not against it. I recently met someone up the hill from me that had an elaborate electric fence just to protect his roses from the deer. To me, your garden just isn’t enjoyable when you have to look at it through large DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE signs or through wire caging. If you are spending half your time gardening and half your time fighting wildlife or trying to keep the squirrels out of your bird feeder, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

My approach to wildlife is this: Decide what damage you can accept, come up with solutions to minimize loss in general, and use smart plantings.

• For Deer: I put all of my vegetable garden behind tall fences (7-8′) in the safety of my back yard. Everything in the front yard is either deer-resistant plants or things that I don’t mind losing to them. They pretty much ate every tulip that came up in the yard, but getting to see them during the day is more fun than a few tulips.
• For Racoons: Remove or block off all places for them to hide, like under decks and in the crawlspace under your house. If you don’t want them in your yard, don’t provide a food source like uncovered dog food or a pond full of goldfish.
• For Reptiles and Amphibians (and even spiders): I actually invite these to my yard because they are beneficial creatures. Anyone who doesn’t has to deal with all sorts of pesky flying insects and mice in other ways.
• For Squirrels and Jays (which no one seems to like for some reason): Give them their own feeders! Personally, I think watching a squirrel swing on a bird feeder to get at the seed is a great way to spend an hour, but if you want to make sure you are attracting a variety of creatures, just get other types of feeders. We now have a Chuck-A-Nut squirrel feeder, a double suet feeder, a nyjer sock feeder, a seed cake feeder, and a black oil sunflower feeder located in different parts of our yards. The squirrels are now too busy with their own feeder to bother with the effort it took them to get food from the bird feeders, and the bigger birds won’t scare away the smaller ones.