Field guide

The garden detour

Somewhere between the couch and the compost heap, Fooey! picked up a second job. The same grapefruit-skin bitters that end a puppy's romance with the sofa read exactly the same to a deer working through your hostas at 3 a.m.

The label names the usual suspects: deer, rabbits, woodchucks and other vermin treating the flower bed as a salad bar. A thorough misting over leaves and stems turns the first mouthful into the last one, and unlike predator-scent repellents, there is nothing for you to smell either.

Coverage is the reason the 16 oz bottle exists. A border of tulips or a vegetable row drinks spray fast, and the garden asks for reapplication more often than the living room — after rain, after watering, and on new growth, which sprouts unprotected.

Spring is the season that sells the second bottle: bulbs and seedlings are at their most tempting exactly when the winter-hungry buffet crowd is boldest.

Two honest boundaries: Fooey! deters taste-testers, not insects — it is a deterrent, not a pesticide — and while the formula is non-toxic, it is bitter enough that you should keep it off the parts of the crop you plan to eat yourself. The tomatoes will not mind. You would.