Back in the early days of the Internet and the early days of search engines one of the most irritating things you could experience was to search for something you needed to research, only to discover that your search results did not contain links to any of the information you were looking for, just a plethora of "websites" that had links to other websites that allegedly hosted the information you were looking for. Or not...
Of course, such "link farms" only existed for the sole purpose of getting people to visit the page for just long enough to discover there was nothing there... so the link Farmers could sell an overwhelming amount of advertising stacked up all around the actual pretense of content.
So today I was trying to find information on whether or not deer willingly eat the green tops of potato plants, and whether these being nightshades actually make them toxic to deer. We're not fond of deer around here, and typically refer to them as "rodents on stilts." They eat everything, including 95% of "deer proof" plants...
Anyway, what I found incredibly annoying was the fact that the first 8-10 websites I visited were little more than what I would call "spun content" generated specifically to contain the words deer, toxic, nightshade and potato plants but didn't actually have any content related to my question of whether potato greens are toxic to deer.
I'm going to steer around the inevitable "I told you so" with respect to a bunch of these so-called articles very likely having been generated by AI and just get to the point of it being incredibly annoying to encounter such a plethora of garbage content online.
Which - just for a moment - brings me back to our own Hive community and how we treat garbage content here. It doesn't matter where you are, or for what reason you're creating content... *garbage content is an annoying waste of time. End of story. No excuses. No exceptions. It's annoying!
Of course, it's not annoying to the person posting it because it likely never enters their mind that anybody other than themselves is trying to benefit from their words.
After a good bit of time wasting I finally did end up managing to find the answer that yes in fact deer will eat the tops of potato plants when most other food sources become scarce... but they really don't like to. So when deer are eating your potato greens, it's because most of their preferred food sources have dried up.
Will it make them sick? Well I don't think they're going to feel terribly good, but it won't harm them. But there was no real indication that it was actually toxic, either.
On a more positive note, the Master Gardener who whose website I finally found had some useful information and said not to worry and that the best way to keep the deer and the bunnies from eating the potato greens was to invest in a 16 oz container of cayenne pepper and to go out and sprinkle it liberally on the greenery!
The deer would get a nasty surprise when they started eating that and would definitely not be likely to return to the plants, if they even got so far as eating the plant since a deer's sense of smell is something on the order of 100 times better than a human's and far better than a dog's.
Well, we had no shortage of cayenne pepper in the house so I was quite happy to take one of our containers and go out and put it on the potatoes.
Now I just wonder if we'll be digging up extra spicy potatoes in a month or so!
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
What do YOU think? Are you a gardener with deer problems? How do you manage them? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
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Created at 2023-08-05 00:43 PDT
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If I ever get the rest of my posts up, you will see our deer problem. But they've only ever gotten into the Big garden once. There are herds of them around here. They find the pastures far more enticing. So the answer is providing food they prefer elsewhere. But in a suburban setting, that's probably not possible.
This happens a lot of times and it gets me annoyed and that was why I concluded that Google or all the websites in the world cannot answer all our questions.
I may search for something and I will not get the answer to my question but Google will show me words relating to the word I searched for and it may not be helpful
So much empty filler online...
The local master gardeners tend to specify deer resistant rather than deer-proof because those Bambi bastards seem to relish being destructively contrarian.
Have you ever used Google Scholar? It's a mixed bag, but if you look for a link to the far right of the screen, most of the time there is something with pdf access.
This is why people often add 'reddit' to their search terms. Not that Reddit is always the best source, but at least you'll find actual answers from human beings. In this case including the spicy tip you found, and some disgusting ones.
Reddit failed to profit from this habit, because their own search feature sucks.